How to Select Between Custom Web Design vs Website Templates for Magento eCommerce Website

Looking forward to bringing your business online? You need to build a web presence. Every business needs a website that enables businesses to be found online by their potential customers searching for products and services online.

If you are looking for an ecommerce platform that delivers results, Magento is known to be promising and highly functional. Magento has all the advanced features that a modern-age ecommerce website should have.

When you are aware of what your business is all about, the ecommerce platform you choose to build your website needs to empower your website to meet customer demands and generate the desired revenue.

Magento is one of the best ecommerce platforms when you are considering building an ecommerce business. When you have identified the best platform to create your ecommerce store, the next big question is to go with any Magento ecommerce development agency to create a custom theme or select a premade template that is easily available in the market.

This is an important question for every business because there are Magento developers and programmers in the market who charge $5000+ to build a custom design and theme integration for your Magento ecommerce website and on the other end 100s of premade templates are available to choose from within the price range of about $50 to $300.

You might be wondering why the price range is so broad, right? Well, both options come with several pros and cons.

To make it easy for you to choose custom web design vs website templates, we have pulled up a list of advantages and disadvantages to decide which one is suitable for your ecommerce business type.

Picking a Readymade Magento Template

Over the resources available online, there are several website templates easily available that can be quickly worked with. Developers code such themes and put them on sale for people to use. Some are freely available too.

Here are the pros:

Affordable Price: Due to its wide availability online as a resource, this reduces the cost when you hire remote developers to build a custom design. One can easily use such templates especially if theirs is a start-up business without the need for any custom features.

Quick setup: setting up a new website using a template is fast since all the design work is already done. You can buy a template and easily install it using their guides. Update logo, images, and your product content and you should be in pretty good condition. If you are in hurry to launch your website, this can be a good option.

Flexible Support: When you pick a readymade theme that has been developed by Magento programmers, you can always seek support if you face setup issues. You can also hire dedicated Magento developers who will keep your website updated as per the current web trends. If you alone choose to fix problems, there are several helpful resources available online to help you through.

Here are the cons:

Lack of Customization: Yes, this is a big limitation when you are looking at doing something beyond your readymade template. It will take lots of time and effort to customize it to serve your specific business needs.

Mismatch with your brand: You might find it difficult to match the template look and feel with your brand. You really don’t have much choice to select visuals and elements as per your choice and your website may look the same as any other competitors who are using the same template as yours.

Achieving a Responsive website: It is a tricky task with a readymade template when you are looking to customize it to achieve desired look and feel. Since the template developers might have used different coding methodologies, your developers may find it difficult to make all the sections 100% mobile responsive while adding any custom functionality.

Going ahead with building a Custom Magento Theme

When you choose a custom Magento theme, everything starts from scratch. From designing the framework to how it visually appears to the end-user. All web page elements are brought together in order to create a theme just as per your unique business needs.

Benefits of custom web design

More functional and unique: Custom-made templates will always ensure all needs of your business, as well as customers, are matched in a perfect manner. Because every element on the custom theme is picked as per your specifications, you will have a great-looking and unique design that none of your competitors will have. Sounds interesting, right?

SEO Friendly and More Control: With strict Google algorithms, it is very important to optimize your website for the best SEO. A custom-coded Magento theme with all the SEO standards will ensure your website ranks on top of the search engines against your competitors. You can always control the way your website functions, the way it looks, little tweaks here and there, etc.

While in the case of premade template you will never know if it has been coded well with all the Google standards for best SEO or not. And if not, You would need to hire Magento SEO services to make all required changes to your template to make it SEO friendly.

Here are the cons:

Spick and Span maintenance: Since there are lots of custom elements on your custom website, you can’t make changes yourself and you need to hire ecommerce web developers to maintain it well and keep it updated.

Definitely more expensive: Building a custom Magento theme is always more expensive than using a readymade template. So ideally it is best to work with the best Best Magento 2 development company that collaborates with you to understand your business goals and deliver the best ecommerce website that generates sales.

Conclusion:

The selection of custom vs template websites depends on the nature of your business and long-term business goals. So what’s the end goal, Building a website that outranks your competition, attracts more customers, and generates a sale?

Being a leading eCommerce development agency, we would suggest building a unique website customized as per your needs to create a wow feeling amongst your customers.