What are the advantages of having a custom-built website over a pre-built website theme?
As it happens, there are advantages to using both methods but custom-built sides have more far-reaching positives for your business in the future. With a custom-built site, you have far greater control and that is so important as you will read.
No business wants to find out in the future that their website no longer works or additional services cannot be added or that you can only optimize certain parts of the site. That affects your search results and the bottom line of your business. Here, from our experience, are the 5 main reasons that custom-built sites are best.
Feature overload
Sure, it is great to get lots of features on a pre-built theme but sometimes you can get too much of a good thing. Unfortunately, that can happen with a lot of themes. You get a lot of features that you don’t use or need and all those features use code. All that extra code can potentially slow down the functionality and speed of your site whereas with a custom-themed website you will get only the code you require for functionality.
Restrictive design
The off-the-shelf theme can be quite restrictive in how much change can be made to the look of a website with the knock-on effect being that your website might not stand out because there are many similar to it.
A custom theme can be designed and changed according to a business’ needs. In turn that can help it to stand out from the pack. The fact that it can be changed is probably more important because trends and tastes can change so quickly.
Updates and functionality
Updates to themed can affect current functionality which may require extra plugins; some free, some not. That can be an added cost to any business. It has happened in the past where themes are no longer updated and that can cause a business real heartache. With the custom version, the developer can ensure there are no issues when a site has been updated. And you can add functionality to improve user experience without an issue.
SEO limitations
You are depending on the developer of the pre-built themes to have covered all bases and ensure that every area of the site is optimized. That can be done with most pre-built themes but whatever has been optimized is generally all that can be optimized. That doesn’t allow any scope for further optimisation.
It is in the developer’s interest to make sure that every section of the site is optimized to ensure the clients’ sites move up the rankings.
Support
Some of the makers of pre-built themes have good support while others are put through a support ticket system which can be slow. Support also tends to be required more on pre-built sites due to hosting differences etc. There will be somebody at the end of an email or phone line for custom developers and because the custom work has been tested far more, there is less likelihood of needing support anyway.
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PRE-BUILT THEME |
CUSTOM THEME |
| 1. Too many features – burdening the site with too much code and affecting functionality | Developer will only use code and features that are needed |
| 2. Restrictive design – can only use certain templates | No restriction on design can be changed according to business’ needs |
| 3. Updates can affect functionality of current site | Web designer has written the code so can make any adjustments required |
| 4. Some SEO limitations – you are depending on the designer to have optimized every section | Develop will ensure every section is optimized |
| 5. Support – can be poor especially if the theme is a bit older | Support is an email or phone call away. |