Custom Website Vs Theme Website: Which one is better for you?

In today’s modern age and technology, any business heavily relies on its website for its growth. A website not only drives business, but also acts as a delegate of a business. It lets your customers know who you are as a brand and what kind of services you provide in the market, contact us for custom website and theme website development and design.
You never get to make an impression twice. So it is crucial to design an impactful website that is as unique as a brand.

There are two alternatives to produce a suitable website for your company or business. The first is a theme-based website and the second is a customized website. Most businesses struggle to decide whether they want to paste a theme on their website or customize it from scratch.
Here’s our take on customized vs theme-based website bout that will help you understand the pros and cons of both methods you can make a wiser decision for your company or business.

Let’s Understand First

Building an ideal website for a company or a business takes a lot of effort. From designing a website layout, styling elements, coding the backend and frontend interface, content, and more. It requires enough time and brains to create a website that is an ideal representative of your brand.

Before we discuss the pros and cons of both methods, it is essential to understand both approaches to create and design a website.

What is a Theme based website?

A theme-based website is a pre-design template for a website. One does not have to be tech-savvy to create this kind of website. don’t need a developer’s brain on your shoulders. Someone with good computer knowledge and creative headspace can easily set up this website. This website template is an overall look and feel of your website’s front-end interface. It includes various industry-specific color schemes, styling elements, designing layouts. You need to upload your content and edit images as per requirement and bam! Your company’s website is ready to launch. There are many themes available: free and paid on the internet with which you can create amazing websites for your company. Theme based website is ideal for bloggers and companies having small product listings.

What is a Customized Website?

Customizing websites is a serious business. It is a unique and exclusive kind of website. It is like painting a white canvas. You have to start from scratch. From choosing the color palettes, style elements, designing layouts, logos, and more. In short, you are in the driver’s seat. You get to decide what your website will look like. You will need a skilled and experienced web developer who dedicatedly works towards meeting your website goals. A customized website gives an edge to your company’s website. It helps you stand out as a unique brand in the market. This is an ideal kind of website for almost every business. A custom website is majorly used by companies in e-commerce, creative agencies, finance, and consulting fields.

Theme Based: Do It Like a PRO

Now that you know what is a theme-based website. Let us discuss the advantages and benefits of using a template to create a website.
Time: A theme-based website is a ready-made template of a website which means no PHP, CSS, HTML, and other technical terminology. This also means a shorter development cycle. With a few DIYs, your website is ready to represent you.

Cost-Effective:

There are various themes available on the internet to make sure your website has it all. You can also add different types of plugins to add different features to your theme-based website at a much lower cost than a full-fledged custom website. Plugins also help in the seamless functioning of your website like a pro!

Easy Content Management:

Theme based websites have smart in-built coding so that one can easily upload and update content without coding anything in the backend. This quality also makes it easy to use for various users irrespective of their technical knowledge of website designing and development.

Theme Based: Pro has Cons

“All the good comes with the bad”. Theme based website templates have some disadvantages and cons that one should consider before using them.

Bugs and Compatibility:

A website should be tested before it goes live. This is to ensure that your website is cross-compatible across all browsers and devices. Using plugins to add more features to your theme website can hamper functionality and overall look of the website across different browsers and devices. This takes a toll on the loading speed and user experience of a website. Some pre-design templates may develop bugs in the long run which requires coding. This may also impact your website scalability and ranking on different search engines like Google, Yahoo, and more.

Lack of UI UX experience:

For any business to grow, it is essential to understand its audience. An interactive and user-friendly website plays a crucial part in spiking your business. Theme-based websites offer limited or no UI-UX for a website. This hampers engagement and traffic on your website which indirectly or directly affects your business growth and profits.

Originality:

One of the biggest issues with the ready to use websites is that, that it loses its uniqueness and brand value. There are high chances where your competitor might be using the same theme as you. A website must be built in such a way that it reciprocates with its brand’s uniqueness and original ideas.

Customized Website: Let the Pro Do it

A fully custom website has its perks when it comes to how your website looks and feels across different browsers and mobile devices. Here are advantages that prove the fact that a fully customized website is worth the efforts and time.

Brand Value:

Building a website from scratch is like painting a white canvas. There is no restriction or limitation. You are in complete authority of how you want to represent your brand in the market. From tiny details to big ones, you decide everything! A custom website fits in all your business needs. A custom website represents your company’s essence, highlights the unique selling proposition, and ideology in front of targeted audiences and potential clients. This creates an authentic brand value in the market and sets you apart from your competitors.

Performance:

Due to its clean backend coding, custom website performance surpasses a theme website by a huge margin. A customized website goes through many phases of testing, compatibility, and responsiveness to make sure your website is running seamlessly across browsers and mobile devices regardless of its features or elements. Meaning a faster loading time, easy navigation, and more user-friendly.

SEO friendly:

SEO plays an important part to grow your website’s reach. A custom website is more SEO friendly as developers can easily make major/minor changes in your website as per the changing times. When your website is SEO friendly, it is likely to appear on the first page of Google. Meaning more traffic and engagement on your website. Meaning business!

Customized Website: The Pro comes at a cost

A Custom website has its downsides to it. There are not many but a couple that one should consider before going for custom websites.

Time:

Building a website involves a lot of effort, teamwork, and brains. It starts with understanding and planning your business, needs, and audiences. Once you know these details, you have to get a domain name for the website. Then your developer will create a wireframe or an initial structure for site mapping. Website designing is the third part, where visuals like images, color schemes, spacing elements come into play. Content is the fourth part that describes your company’s USPs, services, and general information of who you are as a brand. The fifth part of creating a website is converting your static website into a dynamic website through coding. The last part is testing where website’s responsiveness, loading speed, compatibility is checked before it goes live on the server. All these processes might take an estimated time 3-4 months or more depending on how many pages/sections your website has.

Expensive: A

custom website needs a proper investment to make sure you get better and higher ROIs. Your website will grow with your business. Spending a hefty amount on can prove to be expensive for a small business or a startup. You have to be patient. It is like sowing a seed. You will gradually see it growing more and more every day. And then one fine day you will get the fruit your wait for.

Bottom Line

Websites are essential for any business or company. It helps businesses to evaluate and analyze their growth. A company’s website must reflect the company’s ideology, reciprocate with its audiences, and provide better and newer solutions. Whether you go for a theme website or a fully custom website, you must consider your budget and time you want to spend behind your website. It also depends on the kind of industry you’re serving. If you are a blogger or a small business then you can go for a theme website. And if you are someone from e-commerce, finance, consulting background you must go for a custom website.

We hope that this article helped to understand the difference between a theme website and a custom website, its benefits, and disadvantages.