Template Website - A Bad Idea for Your Business

The variety of tools and technologies available for launching an online store, a company’s corporate website, or a web application is both impressive and intimidating.

When you reach out to dozens of web studios with your project, you may notice a disparity in prices and timelines, not just by 2-3 times but by 10 or 20 times.

Of course, development using free template-based CMS is the most cost-effective and attractive option compared to others. But should you trust such solutions?

The main advantages of template-based CMS are short launch times and low cost of work.

Now let's get to the most important part - let’s list the disadvantages of such systems:

• Adapting the business to fit the website's operations, rather than the other way around (for example, working only with specific formats for product exports or connecting only specific payment systems that need to be adapted due to the limitations of the CMS or its modules, even if it's not the most convenient or profitable for the company).
• Difficulty making changes (often on such websites, even the simplest changes, like adding a new form or new contact details in the website header, are complicated).
• SEO difficulties (almost every such website suffers from incorrect indexation, pagination, filtering settings, and issues with adding meta-tags and descriptions, as many page types may not support these settings due to the template).
• Challenges with analytics and advertising (the technical side of launching ad campaigns always suffers: incorrect/incomplete data, lack of markup, inability to set up e-commerce, etc.).
• Support and development issues (almost any modifications are done by installing ready-made modules developed by completely different developers, and each CMS or module update causes other modules to break).
• Security risks (the most common template-based systems cannot guarantee resistance to hacking; they are often the target of mass attacks, which pose significant risks for the website owner).
• Low qualification of developers (often students use such CMS during the early stages of their careers because template-based CMS have a low entry barrier, while experienced developers work with professional and complex systems).

So, if the task is to develop a business online for the long term, standard CMS systems will continuously limit these possibilities.

It will require constant investment of significant time, effort, and money to find specialists who will take on the work with such a website.

Even though websites created with template-based CMS may look fresh and modern in the first year after launch, the difficulties in working with them will accumulate over time, and conversion rates will continuously decline, inevitably leading to a loss of profit for the business.

Therefore, it’s very important not to be swayed by the attractive appearance of ready-made templates, but to make a real assessment of the prospects and costs for ongoing website maintenance.