Many website owners nowadays use templates to develop their website for many reasons, with the biggest ones being the ease of building in less time than building a website from scratch.
Although there is not an exact number of template use, the popularity of template platforms remains.
There has been a trend by various website optimization blogs portraying website templates as the next best thing that will replace custom web design. Some questions that come into mind are: Can website templates be optimized to their fullest potential? Does personalization and originality have value these days?
Some digital marketers imply that is perfectly fine to use a template as a basis for building your website, even if there is chance of someone else adopting the same template as yours. This might scare some website owners but essentially, most reputable online marketers agreed that even in this case, there is a certain level of personalization. For example, the colors, the images, the content, your menus, can be personalized according to your needs and make the end result appear different than the rest.
Ultimately, using templates is a good option if:
- You or your team don’t have any prior designing experience
- You don’t have much time
- You don’t want to invest large amounts of money to build a website from scratch
- You have a plan for optimizing your website after the initial launch
Some online marketers also support that using templates can also give a sense of familiarity to website visitors. Website visitors are familiar with certain patterns noticed in the vast majority of website nowadays—they expect to see the logo on the upper left part of the page, the contact forms on the upper right, the privacy policies and terms on the bottom of the page, etc. If a website doesn’t have any of these patterns, the user might feel confused, disappointed, or simply surprised. Therefore, playing it safe with the use of familiar layouts is sometimes necessary.
The only pitfall of website templates is not necessarily originality, according to online marketers. The main issue is that many website owners that use template fall into the trap of leaving them as they are, without making improvements to maximize their efficiency. Website templates can be a good base for building your website, but if you fail to optimize them according to user data, your website’s success will suffer. They can be used as a shortcut, but they are not exempt of any additional twitches and optimization strategies. Therefore, you should choose a website template that suits you and allows you to make any changes you see fit easily to make the whole website more efficient.