Is a template website a bad idea?
No, and I say that as somebody who builds custom sites for a living. A template is a perfectly reasonable answer to a real problem, which is that you need to exist online this month and you don't have five figures sitting there. If the actual choice in front of you is a Squarespace site this week or a custom build you can't afford, take the template and get on with running your business.
The mistake isn't choosing a template. The mistake isn't knowing what you traded away when you did, and then being blindsided two years later when the thing you suddenly need is the one thing the template won't do.
What are you actually trading away?
Control of the sentence order, basically. A template is a set of decisions somebody else already made about what a page is, so hero, then three columns of features, then a testimonial band, then a call to action. If your business sells something that doesn't fit that shape, and plenty don't, you end up describing your business in the shape the template allows rather than the shape it actually is.
You also trade the ceiling. Templates are built to look good with placeholder content and a handful of pages, which is exactly the moment you're evaluating them. The moment you need forty location pages, or a service that behaves differently from your other services, or a booking flow that matches how you genuinely take bookings, you're fighting the system rather than using it.
Does a template hurt your search performance?
Not inherently, and anyone telling you templates can't rank is overselling. Plenty of template sites rank perfectly well. What templates do is make it harder to hit the performance targets, because you're shipping a general-purpose page builder's worth of code just to render your particular page.
The measurable version of that is Core Web Vitals, and the thresholds are public so nobody has to argue about it. Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, which is how long the main thing on the page takes to appear. Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, which is how quickly it answers a tap. Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, which is how much the page jumps around while it loads. All judged at the 75th percentile of real visits. Core Web Vitals Google is clear that page experience is part of how a page gets evaluated. Core Web Vitals and Search A template can absolutely pass. It just has to carry more weight to get there.
When is custom actually worth it?
When the site has a job beyond simply existing. If it's a brochure that needs to look credible while your work keeps coming from referrals, a template is honest value and I will tell you so. But if the site is meant to generate enquiries, rank for specific things, and hand those enquiries to a system that follows them up, then the page structure, the speed and the plumbing all matter, and those are exactly the parts a template abstracts away from you. Above a certain job value, a bad site can do more harm than none, which is where what a website has to do before they ring starts.
The other trigger is the amount of content. Ten pages of anything is fine by hand. Sixty pages where each one is a variation on a theme really wants a content model behind it, so a new location page is a row of data rather than a copy-paste that quietly drifts out of sync with the forty that came before it.
What do we build on?
Next.js, rendered to static HTML at build time and served from a CDN, a content delivery network that keeps copies of the pages close to whoever is asking for them. What a CDN is Components are typed and reusable rather than dragged around in a page builder. Next.js App Router The practical difference is that a page gets assembled from parts that have already been approved, so a new campaign page takes an afternoon and still looks like the rest of the site, and a design change happens once instead of forty times.
That isn't me claiming custom is always the right answer. It's a claim about which specific problems it solves. If none of those problems are yours right now, don't pay for it, and I would rather tell you that on the first call than six months in.
Can I start on a template and move later?
Yes, and plenty of businesses should. Just keep your content somewhere you own, use your own domain from day one, and expect to redo the URLs when you move, which means planning the redirects rather than discovering them.
Do templates rank worse?
Not by rule. They tend to carry more code to render the same page, which makes the performance thresholds harder to hit, but a well-run template site beats a neglected custom one every time.
What if I already have a template site that works?
Then leave it. Rebuilding a site that's doing its job because the technology is unfashionable is a bad trade, and we will say so.
