Whether you are planning on starting your website or fixing the existing one, you will definitely face the dilemma of whether to go with a custom design or a pre-developed theme.
A pre-developed site theme comes with a finished look, which you can install over any popular CMS, such as WordPress. The purpose of the theme is to give you the design for web pages, checkout, navigation and other such attributes, all with one-click installation.
But with the custom design approach, you will be getting a unique website with stand-out appeal in the crowd of competitors. Upon choosing the custom design, a developer will work on crafting the design and functionality of your website features precisely, ensuring everything aligns with your brand expectations.
So, whether you go with WordPress or Magento 2 development services, you have the liberty to avail yourself of pre-development themes or custom design. But, how to choose what’s better for your brand website?
For you to be able to make a final call, this article will help you compare custom design and theme-based site development. Based on the comparative conclusions, you will finally be able to decide whether to stick with theme-based or custom-design solutions.
What is the General Approach of Most Businesses?
Whether you seek WordPress or Magento eCommerce development services, your general approach will be with the pre-developed themes on the platform. You might find it easy to customize the pre-made theme after it is installed on your website. A pre-made theme can save a lot of time, money, and effort.
But, you must also take note of the fact too many customizations to the themes can slow it down and make your site development journey too expensive. If you are in need of ample customization for your website, it is better to go with custom design services. Designing the customizations from scratch is a smart and cost-effective move.
What is a Custom Built Website?
If you seek custom WordPress development services, your website will be built from scratch, allowing you to integrate almost all must-have features. You won’t have any pre-set design to start your development process. Upon hiring the right experts, you will be able to design the website with just your business idea.
Some of the things that make custom design a better option over theme-based development are:
- All the custom websites turn out to be unique, ensuring that no other website around the globe looks similar to what you have. As you know, uniqueness is one of the most crucial factors that help most businesses gain good traffic and sales.
- Custom-designed websites are also highly adaptable, allowing you to fit the business needs strategically.
- Hire dedicated WordPress developers or dedicated Magento developers to adopt SEO guidelines while designing the website from scratch. As SEO is much more than just adding keywords to the site content, custom site developers do look after the technical aspects of it as well.
- As far as scalability is concerned, custom-designed websites are ready to sustain growth. Professionals will be able to use the right technologies to handle your increased traffic flow and higher functionality requirements.
What are Pre-Developed Themes?
Whether you choose WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce or any other platform, you will definitely get free & paid themes to choose from. These themes are undoubtedly appealing and functional to compete well with custom designed websites.
Even though custom websites are better than theme-based websites in many ways, some options can definitely meet your brand needs. Some of the things that might convince you to choose themes over custom design are:
- Themes are budget-friendly, even if you go with the paid ones! Not only that, but themes from platforms like WordPress or Magento also allow you to integrate certain add-on modules or plugins for free or at a minimal additional cost.
- Websites using themes to craft the UI will have a shorter development time. So, if you have a short timeframe for launching a new brand website, going with a theme-based approach can save you weeks or months.
- There is no need for any professional knowledge while implementing themes for creating a store. Anyone with a little understanding of using computers and the internet can create a basic WordPress website.
In What Ways Are Custom Design and Theme-Based Website Development Different?
When it is about building a site, choosing between pre-developed themes and custom design becomes a challenge. Now that you are aware of how both of these approaches are proficient in their dedicated scenarios, it is time to make that final call between the two.
Therefore, here are some of the differences between custom design and theme-based development for you to count on:
1. Design Flexibility
The pre-developed themes do offer a flexible and convenient way to create your website. You get pre-defined styling and layout options to choose from! However, the design options and flexibility are undoubtedly limited with the pre-developed themes.
The customizations you get with the pre-developed themes do not provide you complete control over all the design elements. Moreover, the pre-built templates will also be limiting your ability to craft a unique website using themes.
It is true that themes do offer user-friendliness in setting up the store, but the scalability quotient will eventually drop. Therefore, if you prioritize the simplicity of your website over enhanced functionalities, you can go with the available themes.
On the other hand, the custom design approach allows you to implement the latest development trends. As you will be building your website from scratch, the experts will be crafting a completely tailored website design with an engaging and unique online experience.
With this, you will acquire complete control over all the design elements. From color schemes and fonts to the content block arrangement, you can customize almost everything. You can make sure every tiny element aligns with your brand presence.
Not just that, but custom design will also be providing a unique brand representation by giving you a unique website to run your business on. Finally, the custom designs are immensely scalable, as they can be improved to withstand higher traffic and enhance the functionalities.
2. SEO Optimization
SEO optimization is one such aspect that can define how different these both development approaches are! SEO with pre-developed themes is executed through the dedicated practices or features embedded in them.
There is no doubt that the pre-developed themes have the right attributes to scale your online visibility. You get to customize the headers, URL structures, meta tags, schema markup and other such content elements over the theme to make it rank higher.
Not only that but most of the pre-developed themes are now mobile-optimized, which is again a factor that web crawlers consider when ranking websites on SERPs. Moreover, the code of pre-developed themes is often kept clean to scale SEO performance.
On the other hand, custom design supports in-depth integration of the SEO strategies, starting from the initial development stage to final deployment. It ensures that all UI elements and architecture attributes of the website are optimized for improved search engine ranking.
Custom site design experts prefer implementing a tailored keyword strategy and making the site responsive for all devices. These added efforts can further improve the site rankings on Google and other search engines.
The best thing about custom design and SEO is you will be able to use structured data markup more effectively. It includes schema-org markup for providing search engines with more insights about your website and its content. Thus, more rich snippets will be made visible in the SERPs.
3. Maintenance & Updates
With the continued functionality & security of the dedicated website building platforms, the pre-developed themes undergo regular maintenance and get frequent updates. It is important to address any cybersecurity loophole or enhance the existing features.
The maintenance and update frequency is high for the themes, as maintaining compatibility with the growing web environment is an important task. The theme developers continue to introduce updates in order to provide bug fixes, improvements and security patches.
On the other hand, custom design experts also recommend continual site performance and health checks. There is no routine maintenance for custom-designed websites, as a personalized approach is recommended for addressing specific issues or flaws.
With the help of experts, you will be able to implement tailored maintenance techniques, which will help address the potential issues that you are facing while running your site. Not just that, but the experts will also be proactively monitoring the performance of your website and will easily detect any resolution or functional issues.
The custom design approach also allows you to implement robust cybersecurity measures to keep the site protected from emerging threats. Refining UX, optimizing site code, and improving features are a few of the other post-development assistance that professionals tend to offer.
Parting Words
These are the three major differences that you will encounter upon choosing theme-based or custom website development. It doesn’t matter whether you choose WordPress or Magento 2 development services; deciding whether to go with pre-set themes or a custom approach is a must!
This decision will directly impact the level of uniqueness and functionalities you can add to your brand website. By considering the differences specified above, you will be able to choose better. Talk to the experts and get their opinions on what would work best for your website.
