Bespoke WordPress website or third party theme?.

But before you take the plunge, there are a few things that we think are worth considering. As WordPress specialists, we’ve worked with hundreds of businesses on their WordPress websites. This means we’ve seen a wide range of different scenarios and business needs and there’s not much we haven’t tried and tested.

Firstly, let’s quickly summarise exactly what we’re talking about here.

Third party theme

This is an off-the-shelf, ready-made, WordPress theme which you can buy as a package. It’s essentially a template that has set styling and layouts.

Bespoke website

This is where someone (such as Insight) builds a website for you from the ground up using the WordPress platform. It is completely tailored to your business’s requirements and can be anything from a full e-commerce shop, to an event website, a portfolio or a blog.

When you see the price of a WordPress theme you might understandably think it’s a no-brainer, but to exercise a word of caution, like everything, you get what you pay for.

Here are some of the drawbacks we often see impacting small business owners when trying to get to grips with their third party theme website.

Maintenance and updates

Because it’s an off-the-shelf solution, a third party theme website is completely dependent upon the creators of the theme to apply WordPress updates to the theme after first releasing it. The same goes for providing ongoing licences to any plugins which have been bundled into your package, as well as fixing bugs and providing maintenance support. In our experience, the upgrades and support are rarely provided, and when they are, it’s days, weeks, or even months, later than when it was needed.

‘Bloat’

What we mean by this is that your website will likely include plugins, gimmicks and features you don’t need. Themes are often designed to create a ‘one size fits all’ solution to serve a wide variety of businesses. In our experience, you may only need as little as 5% of the features and plugins. The rest of the bloat will just slow down the overall speed and performance of your website.

Growth and development

Because the website isn’t built for you, the chances are it still won’t do everything you need because every organisation has unique and varied requirements, so we find businesses end up just compromising for the sake of the cost. But if you later decide you want to add a shop, or change the layout for example, it’s likely that you won’t be able to (and if you can, you’re probably hacking it together).

Here are some of the reasons we think a bespoke website is a worthwhile investment for your small business.

Control

When a website is bespoke, you have complete and ultimate control over it. This means you won’t get stuck with a broken site, or one which can’t be updated, in the event of a developer neglecting their theme. Because you’re not relying on page builders or a complex infrastructure which can easily break with a major update, a bespoke website will last much longer. Overall this will prevent costly downtime and represents better value for money.

Only pay for what you need

While a third party theme might seem the cheaper option, a bespoke site can also be affordable when you have an experienced agency on your side. You can start with just the core elements that will add value to your business now, with the freedom to expand later, giving you a fit for purpose website that isn’t filled with useless features taking up valuable file space.

Scalable

On a similar note, you have the freedom to easily add new content, features or elements to your custom website, scaling up as your business grows, or even scaling down if you need to. You wouldn’t believe the amount of businesses we’ve worked with whose websites no longer reflect what they do because they’ve expanded into new markets or added new services. With a bespoke website, you can easily make sure it’s kept right up to date.

Plus, you never know if a particular feature is going to be valued by your audience until you’ve tried and tested it, so it makes sense to have the flexibility to try one thing at a time.

Get creative

The real beauty (and one of our favourite parts) is that you can get creative by designing a site that is totally unique to your brand and mission. Even when you adapt a theme, it still has the feel of a template and will never truly reflect your unique identity. To really stand out from the competition, why not design a completely original website that you can be proud of?

While our preference might be clear, that’s not to say you should never choose a third party theme. We appreciate there might be occasions when a cheap and cheerful website meets your needs. Perhaps if you’re setting up a tiny website for a one-off event, or you’re a sole trader just starting out and you need to test the waters. It could be you’re experimenting with a side hustle and don’t want to commit too much cash.

In these scenarios you could always go for a bespoke site later.

Or, how about getting the best of both worlds?

WordPress specialists for businesses

At Insight, we’re proud to build all our websites on WordPress as the leading open source Content Management System. ‘Open source’ means you’re not tied to us and you retain full control over your website and its content – but you do benefit from our skills and expertise in giving you the website you deserve.

We have a website solution for small businesses that gives you the best of both worlds. A large chunk of the cost of a bespoke website comes from coding everything from scratch and would be out of budget for many small businesses. That’s why we have built a dedicated component library that allows us to speed up that design and development time significantly.

You choose ready-made components, but the website is still designed for your business. This provides an affordable website solution for small businesses that lets you get online with a fantastic functioning website you can be proud of.

Interested? Get in touch to see how we can help.