At Ankit Designs, we offer two different kinds of websites to our clients: WordPress template websites, and custom WordPress websites. Both website types come with a laundry list of advantages and disadvantages, as well as very different price points. So we’re often asked two questions when talking with new clients:
- What’s the difference between them?
- Which one is best for me?
Different companies have different goals, and very different needs. Today, we’re aiming to answer both those questions to help you decide what sort of website is best for you and your business, now and in the future.
So What’s The Difference?
In a previous blog post, How does WordPress Make Our Sites Better? we examined the three key parts that make up a WordPress website: content, themes, and plugins. Today, we’re mostly concerned with contender number two: themes. Themes are the ‘skin’ of your website, controlling things like colours, fonts, navigation, and more. It also controls whether your website will display nicely on mobile or force your visitors to pinch and zoom in desperation to read your witty one-liners.
Side note: If your website looks like the inside of a trash compactor on mobile, visitors won’t pinch or zoom. They’ll just leave — like you should if a developer tells you they don’t build mobile-friendly websites.
When you get a generic theme from someone else with the intent of customizing it to your business, that’s a WordPress template. You can find free WordPress templates hanging around, but like all things in life, you get what you pay for. So for the purposes of this post, we’ll be looking at premium templates purchased from reputable marketplaces like Envato’s Themeforest. There are over 47,000 templates available on Themeforest, with the vast majority of them available for under $100.