Anika Mercier November 9, 2020 
One of the best investments any business can make is in their company website. As a business, your website not only expands but also represents your company’s brand. Additionally, it also opens opportunities for new clients/customers to discover your business.
Knowing the importance of your website, it stands to reason that your next question might be which type of website theme (custom or template) is best to invest in. We’ll dive into the advantages and disadvantages of both custom themes or template themes below.
Template Themes
Ironistic regularly builds websites leveraging existing WordPress templates for our clients. Template themes are an excellent solution for companies that do not require any custom code, designs, or integrations.
Advantages
- Bypass Development: Because themes come with pre-made templates, if your content is ready, you can stand up a template website very quickly and easily without any programming or development.
- Modern and Up-to-date: Most templates come with clean and compliant code as well as modern designs that are on par with some of the top sites on the Internet. In addition, template companies tend to keep their code and themes up to date on a regular basis.
- Updating is Easy: If you have no custom code on your site the theme can be updated with a push of a button.
- Price: Templates are more economical and typically cost between $ 30-$ 300. [Note: click here for more on the full cost of building a website]
- Support: If you do not add custom code to the template, support is typically strong with the larger, more reputable template companies.
Disadvantages
- Inflexible: Since these are all prefabricated templates and layouts, without customizing the code you are restricted to the designs and configurations offered by the themes.
- Code: Because templates must appeal to a wide variety of businesses using their theme, oftentimes the code is bloated with options and plugins that will likely never be used on your site. This can slow down the speed and performance of your site.
- Security: WordPress regularly releases security fixes as do the themes and plugins that run on WordPress. Popular templates are constantly scanned for vulnerabilities by hackers because they know that many websites leverage these themes.
- Support: If you build any customizations into the theme, the template company typically will not assist with troubleshooting. The good news, however, is that it’s WordPress, so any competent WordPress developer, like Ironistic, can assist.
Custom Themes
Ironistic has an excellent team of developers and designers who are able to make your dreams and needs for a new site into a reality. If you have specific requirements or look and feel you want then custom themes are the way to go.
Advantages
- Flexibility: A custom theme allows you to build a site that looks and functions exactly as YOU need it to and is not restricted by pre-configured settings.
- Design: New design templates can be created and implemented at any time without disrupting overarching theme requirements.
- Code: Because the theme is created specifically for your needs, there is no extra code weighing down the website. In addition, custom code can be implemented without breaking theme-wide restrictions.
- Integrations and Custom Plugins: Custom features can be added quickly as needed.
- Uniqueness: While templates offer a wide variety of layout options, you risk looking like everyone else. Custom themes allow you to stand out among the crowd.
Disadvantages
- Cost: A custom theme requires designers and developers to implement. Even with in-house designers, you will require a developer to implement custom designs on WordPress.
- Time: Building anything custom involves rounds of review and beta testing and therefore takes longer.
- Support and Updates: On custom themes, testing is required before performing any upgrades or updates. The good news, however, is that Ironistic excels at this.
In conclusion, both templates and custom themes offer their own advantages so it comes down to what requirements you need from your new website.
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