If you’ve been sitting with this question for a while, template vs custom website design, you just found your way to the right place. That’s one of the most common things people ask me.
And, honestly? It comes up at every stage. Whether you’re launching your first website, rebranding after years in business, or somewhere in between, the question feels overwhelming because there’s so much information out there and very few sources that actually help you form a clear conclusion.
The internet will tell you many things, and not all will make sense. Some articles make it sound like templates are only for beginners who are on a tight budget. And that it comes with a tradeoff on quality. Others make custom design feel like an unnecessary luxury that only big corporations need. Neither of those takes is particularly helpful when you’re the one trying to figure out what actually makes sense for your situation right now.
So let’s talk about this thoroughly and with the most essential information in mind.
Here’s what I want you to know first. I’ve spent years handcrafting custom websites and designing templates for photographers, bloggers, and creative entrepreneurs. If you haven’t been following my story, I’ve been doing that since 2015 here at the Flying Muse.
And, what have I learned? That there’s no universally right answer. There’s only the right answer for where you actually are, what you really need, and where you aim to arrive next. That’s exactly why I wrote this guide: to help you figure this all out.
Table of Contents
- First, Let’s Get On the Same Page About What Each One Actually Is
- The Case for Templates (And Why They’re More Powerful Than People Give Them Credit For)
- The Case for Custom Design (And When It’s Worth the Investment)
- The Honest Truth About Cost
- What About the “Templates All Look the Same” Argument?
- A Practical Way to Think Through Your Decision
- One More Thing Worth Mentioning: Platform Matters Too
- A Quick Side-by-Side to Help You Decide
- So, Template vs Custom Website Design – What Do You Actually Need?
First, Let’s Get On the Same Page About What Each One Actually Is
Before we get into which is better for you, it helps to understand what you’re actually comparing. There’s a lot of confusion around this, and the definitions have evolved quite a bit over the years.
Website Templates
A website template is a pre-designed layout that you customize with your own content, photos, brand assets, typography, logos, and colors.
Templates are built on platforms like WordPress, Showit, Squarespace, or Elementor. They give you a professional-looking starting point without having to design every single element from scratch.
And here’s something worth knowing: not all templates are created equal. There’s a big difference between a free theme you grabbed from a directory and a thoughtfully designed, professionally built template created specifically for a photographer, blogger, or another creative business.
Good templates come with considered page layouts, intentional typography pairings, and design choices that have been made with a real audience in mind.
They’re designed to be customized, not just filled in.
Custom Website Design
A custom website is designed from the ground up specifically for you and is tailored to your audience. Your designer starts with a blank canvas and handcrafts each page, every layout, and all design elements around your brand, your audience, and your specific goals.
A great designer always invests time in understanding your audience and how they form an emotional connection. And, then, handcrafts an exceptional emotional user experience that bridges the gap from a simple first-time visitor to a long-term fan of what you do.
Nothing is borrowed from somewhere else. Everything is made specifically for you and your audience.
Custom design requires more time, more investment, and a close working relationship with your designer. In return, you get something completely unique that no one else has – a website that’s been handcrafted to work specifically for the way your business operates, with your ultimate goal front and center.
The Case for Templates (And Why They’re More Powerful Than People Give Them Credit For)
Templates have a bit of an unfair reputation.
Somewhere along the way, the idea took hold that using a template means settling for less. That it’s just what you actually need to do when you can’t afford the real thing. I want to push back on that, because it’s simply not true anymore.
A well-designed template, in the hands of someone who knows how to customize it, can produce a website that looks polished, professional, and completely on-brand.
The key word there is well-designed.
If you start with a quality template designed with real design principles and user experience behind it, your finished site will reflect that.
If you grab the first free template you find and wonder why it looks amateurish, or just feel off as if something is missing, that’s a starting point problem, not a template problem.
Templates make sense when…
- You’re just starting out and want to get online without a huge upfront investment. Getting a website up quickly so you can start attracting clients, building an audience, or testing your offer is far more valuable than waiting months to afford something custom.
- Your business is still evolving. If you’re not completely sure who your ideal client is yet, or your services are still shifting, a template gives you a beautiful, functional website while you figure things out. It’s much easier to swap out later than a full custom site.
- You have a limited budget and need that budget working elsewhere in your business right now. There’s no shame in that, it’s just smart resource management.
- You want to be hands-on with your website. Most quality templates are built to be customizable by the person using them. If you love tweaking and updating your own site, a good template gives you that freedom.
- You need something up fast. Custom design projects typically take weeks to months. A template can get you a beautiful, complete website in a matter of days.
I design and sell Elementor templates specifically for photographers and creative entrepreneurs, and I put a lot of thought into every single one. The goal is always to give you a starting point that already has a strong foundation. So, when you customize it with your own photos and brand, the result feels genuinely yours, not like a cookie cutter website that just came off a shelf.
The Case for Custom Design (And When It’s Worth the Investment)
Custom design is a real investment: in time, money, and energy. And for the right person at the right stage, it’s absolutely worth it. The real question is whether you’re at that stage.
When you work with a designer on a fully custom website, you’re not just buying a pretty layout. You’re investing in strategy, expertise, and a website that’s been handcrafted specifically to work for your business goals and get you from your most important A to Z.
A good designer will ask you deep questions about your audience, your process, your conversion goals, and your brand before a single design decision gets made. The result is a website that feels completely cohesive and intentional in a way that’s hard to replicate starting from a template.
Custom design makes sense when…
- You have an established brand and audience. If you know exactly who you serve, you’ve been in business long enough to understand what your clients need from your website, and your brand identity is solid – custom design can take all of that and translate it into something really powerful. If this is you, and you still feel lost, you might want to consider a brand and website audit before deciding to invest in custom design. Feel free to reach out to find out more about our brand and website audits.
- Your website is a primary sales tool. If most of your revenue flows through your website, the ROI on custom design becomes a lot easier to justify. A strategically designed website that converts better directly affects your bottom line.
- You have specific functionality needs. Sometimes a business has requirements that templates simply can’t accommodate: complex booking systems, specific integrations, or a user experience that needs to flow in a very particular way. Custom design handles these without compromise.
- Standing out is genuinely important to your business model. In all industries and niches, having a website that looks and feels completely different from everyone else, and especially from your direct competitors, is a real competitive advantage. Custom design gives you that.
- You’ve outgrown your current template. If you started with a template, grew your business, and now feel like your website no longer reflects where you are, that’s often the natural signal that custom design is the right next step.
The Honest Truth About Cost
Because both templates and custom websites require investment, it’s inevitable to talk numbers. This is usually the part of the conversation people dance around and I’d rather just be straightforward about it.
A quality website template typically costs anywhere from $50 to a few hundred dollars, depending on the designer and platform. You’ll also need to factor in platform fees, hosting, and potentially a little time (or help) with setup and customization. All in, you can have a genuinely beautiful website up and running for a few hundred dollars or less.
Custom website design is a different category of investment. Depending on the scope of the project and the experience level of the designer, custom design typically ranges from a few thousand dollars on the lower end to significantly more for complex, high-end projects. That’s not a small decision for most people, and it shouldn’t be.
The real question worth asking isn’t “which is cheaper” – it’s “what does my website need to do for my business, and what’s a reasonable investment to make that happen?”
A $200 template that gets you online and booking clients is an incredible return. A $5,000 custom site that transforms your conversion rate and reflects exactly where your brand has grown might be just as incredible, at a completely different stage.
What I’d caution against is investing in custom design before you’re actually ready for it. If your brand is still finding its footing, or your audience isn’t fully defined yet, a custom site is a big investment in something that might need to change significantly in a year or two. From my own experience working on both templates and custom websites, it’s the third year when you’ll inevitably feel you’re ready for more.
A template buys you time to get clear on all of that before committing. And something to always keep in mind, a custom design always requires more patience, effort and time. So, you need to be absolutely sure you are actually ready for that aspect. And, that you can build your time schedule to accommodate any custom website design project needs.
What About the “Templates All Look the Same” Argument?
This one comes up a lot, and I want to address it directly, because there’s some truth to it and a lot of myth around it, too.
Yes, if ten different people use the same template and none of them really customize it, just swap in their own photography, adjust the fonts and colors to match their brand, rework the copy – those websites will look similar.
That’s a customization problem, not a template problem.
When you take a well-designed template and do the work of making it yours by bringing in your brand colors, your own photography, your voice in the copy, your logo, your specific layout preferences, the end result looks like you, not like the template.
I’ve seen the same template look completely different across different websites, because the person behind it invested the time to make it their own.
That said, there are certain types of customization that templates have limits on. If your brand requires a very specific layout that no template can replicate, or you need something that functions in a very particular way, that’s a genuine limitation worth factoring in.
However, for most photographers, bloggers, and creative entrepreneurs, a quality template with thoughtful customization gets you remarkably close to a custom result.
A Practical Way to Think Through Your Decision
Rather than giving you a definitive answer, I want to give you a set of questions to sit with. Your honest answers will point you in the right direction far better than any blanket recommendation.
Ask yourself these:
- Where am I in my business right now? Am I just starting out and still figuring things out, or do I have a clear, established brand and a defined audience I know well?
- What’s my website’s primary job? Is it to establish a basic online presence, showcase my portfolio, generate leads, or drive a significant portion of my revenue? The higher the stakes, the more a custom investment starts to make sense.
- How much am I realistically able to invest right now? Be honest with yourself here. Stretching your budget too thin for a custom design when you’re early-stage could put pressure on other parts of your business that need that money more.
- How soon do I need to be online? If time is a factor, a template is going to serve you much better. Custom design takes time to do properly.
- Am I comfortable customizing a template myself, or would I need help? This is worth thinking about practically. Some people love digging into their website and tweaking things. Others find it stressful. Know which one you are.
- Have I outgrown my current website? If you already have a website and you’re reading this, ask yourself what’s actually missing. Sometimes a refresh or a new template gets you where you need to go. Other times, the answer really is custom.
The “Templates First, Custom Later” Path (And Why It Works Really Well)
One thing I want to highlight, because I think it’s genuinely underrated: starting with a template doesn’t mean staying with a template forever. For a lot of people, it’s actually the smartest path.
You launch with a quality template, get online quickly, start attracting clients and building your brand presence, and use that time to get really clear on who you are, who you serve, and what you want your website to do for you.
When you eventually invest in custom design, you come to that process with so much more to offer your designer: a real brand, real experience, real clarity, real story.
The custom site you get at that stage is infinitely better than what you’d have gotten if you’d done it before you were ready.
I’ve watched this play out so many times, and it consistently produces better results than rushing into custom design too early. There’s no rule that says you have to do everything at once.
One More Thing Worth Mentioning: Platform Matters Too
Whether you go template or custom, the platform your website is built on matters more than most people realize at the start.
Different platforms have different strengths, different limitations, and very different levels of flexibility for customization down the road.
For example, a WordPress site built with Elementor gives you a tremendous amount of flexibility, whether you’re working with a template or going custom.
The platform itself is highly adaptable, SEO-friendly, and scales really well as your needs grow. That flexibility is one of the reasons I work with Elementor for both my template designs and custom client projects.
Platforms like Squarespace or Wix are easier to get started with, but have more ceiling limitations if you need something very specific or highly customized later on. That’s not necessarily a dealbreaker; it depends entirely on what you need, although it’s worth knowing before you commit to a platform that may or may not grow with you.
If you’re not sure which platform is right for your situation, that’s a whole conversation on its own, one I’m happy to have if you want to reach out!
A Quick Side-by-Side to Help You Decide
Go with a template if:
- You’re launching for the first time or restarting from scratch
- Your brand is still evolving, and you’re not fully locked in yet
- Budget is a real consideration right now
- You need to be online quickly
- You want flexibility to update your site yourself
- You want to test the waters before a bigger investment
Go with a custom design if:
- You have an established brand with a clear identity and audience
- Your website is a core part of how you generate revenue
- You have specific functionality or design needs that a template can’t meet
- You’ve outgrown your current site and know exactly what you want next
- You’re ready to invest in something built specifically for you
- Standing out in a crowded market is a genuine business priority
So, Template vs Custom Website Design – What Do You Actually Need?
Here’s what I want you to take away from all of this: both templates and custom design are genuinely good options.
The one that’s right for you depends entirely on where you are right now, not on some hierarchy of what’s better or more legitimate.
A beautiful, well-customized template can absolutely carry your business through its early stages, and sometimes well beyond that. And when the time comes that you’ve grown into something bigger, that’s when custom design gets to really shine.
If you’re leaning toward a template and want something designed specifically for photographers and creative entrepreneurs, I’d love for you to take a look at what we have in the shop. Every template is designed from scratch with real user experience design conversion intention behind it, so you’re not starting from generic – you’re starting from something made for someone like you.
And if you’re at the stage where custom design feels like the right move, I’d love to hear about your project. Feel free to reach out, and we can figure out together whether it’s the right fit and the right time.
Either way, I’m rooting for you and your website, whatever form it takes! Can’t wait to see what you will be creating next!
~ Sandra
