The advantage of a theme is that can be installed with ease and will cost no more than £100. The down side is that a lot of the themes are very similar, so this means the website is often unlikely to look original, or unique. If a theme isn’t exactly what is desired it will need to be customised anyway, therefore defeating the object of buying a pre-built theme.

The advantage with a custom built websites is that it can be designed exactly to fit a specific criteria, or someone’s personal taste. The designer does not need to fit the required information into pre-built boxes, instead they can start with a blank canvas to produce a truly original bespoke design.

It won’t match your business’s visual identity

If someone is customising your theme for you, they will probably add your company logo and change the colours, apart from these small changes to the pre-built template there isn’t anything else they can customise without altering the code. The problem with this is company’s that use pre-built themes won’t know how to change the coding of the template.

This leaves you with a design, which is pretty much the same as anyone else’s design! It completely takes away any unique qualities. You want people to instantly recognise that they’re visiting your website. If a customer comes across another website that looks just like yours, but with a different logo, it gives off completely the wrong idea about your company and it’s just embarrassing!

Large themes affect site speed

A lot of pre-made themes and templates, especially the ones you have to pay for online, have extra features that in reality you won’t ever need to use. This means they are unnecessary and can  increase the loading time for your website. Lots of businesses will tend to get complaints about their website if it takes a long time to load or refresh.

Site speed is an important factor for Google rankings, it really impacts users experience of your website. If a site visitor has to wait more than a few seconds on your site, they may decide its not worth the wait and consequently head to your competing rivals. In conclusion a pre-made theme can cost you valuable customers, and cause a lower rank on Google’s search results pages.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

There are lots of SEO plugins for WordPress. If you choose the right ones you can achieve some sort of level of optimisation for your website. However you can never get a good result compared to what you get with a custom website, therefore full search engine optimisation is not possible using a pre-made theme. You can see a distinct pattern trending here with the disadvantages of using pre-built WordPress themes!

Compatibility

Errors in websites tend to be common, usually the website will look different on a laptop compared to how it looks on a mobile phone. Often you have to zoom in and pinch the screen on a mobile phone to use some websites. Well this is just a normality with websites as company’s are usually unaware of the fact their website is not mobile friendly, however it tends to be more common in websites created using software such as WordPress.

Conclusion

WordPress is a piece of software that allows people with minimal knowledge of web design set up a web site quickly. However, for business use you have to question whether it is a good choice to use software that is regularly hacked, offers slow performance and requires technical attention often. Your business is unique and your website should reflect that, hence why you should avoid pre-built website themes and templates at all costs.

Unless the budget is exceptionally tight, it is often better to get a website developed properly at the start.

If you wish to make any enquiries about how much we charge for bespoke website design please email us on info@hootmedia.co.uk or call us! 01803 670 069