These days, a lot of design and SEO agencies use templates in order to get their client sites up and running faster. Whilst this does save time and money, as well as having a faster turn around time, it ultimately benefits an agency a lot more than a client.
This is due to a number of different factors including:
Most agencies get their templates from all the same sources, which results in heaps of websites that likely look exactly like yours. In fact, taking it one step further, how many websites will have an identical stock image as their main website image too?
Most templates these days are mega templates, which means they are one template that has 5 to 10 different mini templates inside of it. This means that when a mini template is selected to be modified, all the other template pages are removed or replaced. However, we have seen this time and time again that agencies will typically leave the original styling and functionality of the other templates in place, which results in excessive bloated code. This then results in delays in the loading of a site – but more on this later!
Website templates are exactly that – a template. They are not designed to cover your business specifically, but instead to be a a base to work off for a designer or agency. It is due to this that some agencies that often charge very little to get a site up and running will not even optimise the site at all – they just use the bare minimum template and add a few colours and a stock picture.
As a result of having excessive code and being unoptimised, most template sites will fail speed tests conducted by Think with Google and Pagespeed Insights. Both of these are built by Google specifically for checking both a websites speed on mobile as well as desktop. Since July 2018, Google has been slowly implementing website load speed into their ranking algorithm*. This means that websites that load slower will essentially rank lower on the Google search.
Therefore, getting your site custom designed by a company such as WebPress to focus on both your company and your brand is and always will be far more beneficial to your sites growth. This is due to many different reasons such as:
When we build sites for our clients, only the code needed for that page to load is actually loaded. This allows us to keep our pages code light and fast.
We believe that a website is the face of a business – essentially a first impression. When someone is looking for your service or product they will typically end up at your website first. Our job as an agency is to ensure that we convey your brand properly to your clientele, which can be done in a range of ways using colouring, shapes and custom images.
When your site is custom designed specifically for your brand and with SEO in mind, we also think about how your visitors will interact with your navigation and create it accordingly. This allows your visitors to get to the pages that they need to as easily as possible, which in turn leads to a lower bounce rate and higher conversion rate.
As discussed above, because we build our sites to only load the code and images needed, this will not only get your sites ranking faster but also increase your conversion rate whilst lowering your bounce rate*.
Although having a website it great, not having any visitors to your page isn’t ideal. And, because we are a web marketing company first and foremost, the goal of WebPress is always to get your website both traffic and quality leads. It is due to this that we recommend using a company that will create a custom website for your business and will not take shortcuts on the most important aspect of your business.