What’s Wrong With Using Design Templates?
When designing a website, everyone looks for the most convenient options. As a result, a lot of you have probably considered free website design templates available online. In theory, they’re beneficial as you just pick a template and your website design is basically completed.
However, they’re actually a lot worse than you initially think. There are many drawbacks to website design templates that should make you think twice before using them.
Not Unique
Website design templates are not unique at all. You could have the same template as hundreds of other websites online. As such, it makes your site look worse because there’s no originality there. Plus, it’s harder to accurately reflect your brand when you use a free stock template.
Easily Accessible By Hackers
The coding in website design templates is so easy for hackers to access. This is because there are too many templates available – most of which come with zero added security to them. So, you potentially put your site at risk by using a generic template.
Negatively Impact Your SEO
Sure, some templates are designed to appeal to search engines. However, a lot of them will have a negative impact on your search ranking. For starters, they’re slow to load. Slow page speed will account for a poor search ranking. Secondly, they tend to prevent you from updating your website with new content. As a consequence, your SEO ranking will fall again. Lastly, some templates make it hard for you to use things like meta titles and heading tags. Again, this impacts your SEO!
Very Hard To Customize
When you have a custom-built website, you can literally customize it whenever and however you want. Any element of the design can be altered. With free website templates, it’s often impossible to customize them. You’re stuck within the confines of the template. So, your only option is to pick a new template!
No Technical Support
What happens if there’s an issue with your template? Effectively, you have to solve it yourself. Once you download the template, you get very little technical support – if any. If you don’t know how to deal with a technical issue, then more than likely you are out of luck. This leads to constant problems with the website that will ruin the user experience and make you lose out on traffic and leads.
Not Built For Your Website
Of course, website templates aren’t created specifically for your site. Therefore, you’ll rarely find one that suits your content requirements. More often than not, these templates are overly structured and don’t have enough room for the average amount of website content. In turn, this leads to a cluttered design as you try and cram as much in as possible.
It may not seem like it but the negatives outweigh the positives. Yes, website design templates are readily available and can be installed within minutes. But, by taking the easy route, you will run into lots of obstacles after the installation. The old saying, “You get what you pay for” is definitely a factor in this case. Instead, it makes more sense to get a custom-designed or just a professionally built website based off of other websites that you may really like and have your website built from scratch. Here, you get all the support you need, full customization, SEO-friendly design, and much more. It sometimes may take a little longer, and you might have to reach into your pocket, but at that point you know you are getting a reliable product fit to your business’s needs. Again, it’s all about the user experience and engaging people on your site.