Custom website or template? Here is how to choose.

You are comparing two prices that are not comparable, and almost everyone answering this question sells one of them.

We sell both. So here is the version with the numbers in it.

The short version

1. A finished template is US$249 to US$899 here, one site licence. The build already exists. The only work left is yours.
2. A bespoke build starts at A$1,500 and moves with scope. The stock answer everywhere else is "custom starts around $5,000 and takes 6 to 12 weeks". Go looking for where that number came from and you will not find it. It is repeated, not sourced, and it describes a process rather than a law of physics.
3. Most small businesses should start with a template and pay for bespoke work later, on the two or three pages that actually bring in money. Almost nobody writes this down, because almost nobody sells both.

Both prices are on the pricing page and neither one moves after you read this.

First, the thing nobody says out loud

This looks like a budget decision. It is not.

It is a decision about whether your business is allowed to look like itself. That is why people agonise over it at 11pm and why a spreadsheet never settles it. Keep that in mind while you read the arithmetic below, because the arithmetic points at the template far more often than the internet admits, and there is a narrow set of cases where you should override it. Both of those get named further down.

What each one actually is

A template is a finished website somebody already drew, built and tested. You buy the licence, put your name, your words and your photographs into it, and it goes live. You are buying the decisions, not the pixels. Every question about spacing, type, colour and what happens on a phone has already been answered by someone who does this all day.

A bespoke build starts at your business instead of at a layout. Someone looks at what you sell, who else sells it within ten kilometres of you, and what a stranger has to be able to do in the first ten seconds. Then the site gets drawn around that.

The difference is not quality. A good template is built better than a lot of custom work. The difference is fit.

The four routes, side by side

Hosting sits under every one of those columns and it is an ongoing cost wherever you buy. Anyone implying otherwise is selling you the first year and going quiet about the second.

Stop arguing about price. Argue about time.

Price is the wrong axis and it is the only one the internet argues on.

Take the category at its word for a second. If custom really does take 6 to 12 weeks, then a template buys back most of a quarter, and a bespoke build spends that quarter to get a site drawn around your business rather than around a category. That is the actual trade. Not dollars. Quarters.

The catch is that a template that goes live on Tuesday can still cost you a month, in the form of a photographer you have not booked, product descriptions nobody has written, and a phone number that goes to a voicemail box nobody empties. The template is not the bottleneck. It never was.

That is also why the "6 to 12 weeks" figure deserves a harder look. Unpack a typical custom timeline and most of it is not drawing or building. It is a kickoff call, then waiting on your logo files, then a revision round that sits in somebody's inbox, then a handoff to a developer, then QA. The work in there is real. Most of the calendar is queueing.

Our own work is AI-built and human-directed, which compresses the drawing and building parts hard. It does not compress the part where you have to decide what your business is. We do not print a delivery date on this page, and you should be suspicious of anyone who prints one before they have read your brief.

Templates do not hurt your SEO. This one is just wrong.

You will read that templates carry an SEO penalty because thousands of sites share the same code. Half the articles in this category say it. It is 2015 thinking and Google has been correcting it publicly since 2008.

From Google's own Search Central blog, in Demystifying the "duplicate content penalty":

There's no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

Duplicate content means substantive blocks of the same words, not a shared layout. Every WordPress site on earth shares markup with every other WordPress site and they rank fine.

What does move is measurable and has nothing to do with whether the design is unique. Google publishes three thresholds and reports them in Search Console: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, all judged at the 75th percentile of real page loads.

Those numbers are worth money. Deloitte and Google studied mobile site data across retail, travel, luxury and lead generation brands and found that a 0.1 second improvement in mobile speed lifted retail conversions by 8.4% and average order value by 9.2% (Milliseconds Make Millions).

A slow bespoke site loses to a fast template every time. Uniqueness is not a ranking factor. Speed is a revenue factor.

How to tell whether a template is any good before you pay

This is the best objection in the category and nobody answers it. Here is the answer. All of it is free and none of it needs permission.

1. Run the live demo through PageSpeed Insights. You are looking at the three numbers above, on mobile, not desktop. If a seller has no live demo, that is the answer.
2. Open the demo on your actual phone. Not the responsive preview in a browser. A real phone, one-handed, on mobile data. Tap every button. Anything that needs two taps or a pinch is a defect you will inherit.
3. Ask what is in the download. Source files or a hosted account you cannot leave? These are wildly different purchases at the same price.
4. Ask what happens when you need a page the template does not have. Every business hits this in month four.
5. Read the licence before you read the reviews. One site or many? Here, one licence covers one live site, and the template licence says so in plain words.

If a seller will not answer 3, 4 and 5 in writing, the template is not cheap. It is just cheap now.

The route most people should take, which nobody recommends

Buy the template. Put it live with your own photographs. Run it for ninety days. Then pay someone to rebuild only the two pages that turned out to matter.

You will know which two, because you will have data instead of opinions. It is almost always the page for your highest-margin service and whatever page the phone calls come from. Everything else can stay exactly as bought, forever.

This route is cheaper than a bespoke build, faster than a bespoke build, and better than a template, and it is the fourth-shortest section in every competing article because it is nobody's product. It happens to be ours, which is a reason to check the arithmetic rather than a reason to dismiss it.

The security dimension, which four out of four competitors skip

Neither route is inherently safer. What matters is a number nobody asks about: how many pieces of somebody else's code does your site run, and who updates them?

Patchstack tracks this. In 2025 there were 11,334 new vulnerabilities found in the WordPress ecosystem, up 42% year on year. 91% of them were in plugins, 9% in themes, and 6 in WordPress core itself. 46% had no fix available from the developer at the point they were publicly disclosed (State of WordPress Security in 2026).

Read that again. Core is not the problem. The stack of plugins bolted on top is the problem, and templates sold on a plugin-heavy platform tend to require eight or nine of them to look like the demo.

So the question to ask any seller, of either route, is: what does this site run that has to be patched, and who is doing the patching in eighteen months? If the answer is "you are", price that in as an ongoing job, not a one-off purchase.

The arithmetic, on two real situations

A two-van plumbing business with no site and a Facebook page. The five pages a plumber needs are the same five pages every plumber needs. Home, services, service area, reviews, contact. There is no bespoke thinking to buy. Take a US$249 to US$499 template and spend the difference on a photographer for half a day, shooting your vans, your team and three finished jobs. That is the only part of a website a template cannot supply and it is the entire reason cheap sites look cheap. Stock photography is what makes a template look like a template. Your own photographs make the same template look like a company.

A clinic that wants online booking. Do not pay us or anyone else to build a booking system. Fresha and Square already do it, they do it better than a custom build will, and they cost a fraction of what building it costs. Buy or commission a site around the booking tool you already use. Anyone quoting you four figures to rebuild a calendar is quoting for their own convenience.

Bespoke earns its money in a narrower band than the internet suggests: when your service genuinely is not the same as the other ten results, when the site has to do something rather than say something, or when you already have traffic and a percentage point of conversion is worth more than the whole build fee.

Five questions that settle it

1. Do you have photographs of your own work? If no, buy a template and book a photographer with the change. A bespoke build wrapped around stock images looks like a template anyway, at four times the price.
2. Does your site need to say something, or do something? Saying means template. Doing, as in bookings, quoting, logins, stock, configurators, means bespoke, or a platform that already solved it.
3. Is anything about your business actually different from the competitor ranking above you? If yes, that difference is what you are paying a designer to find and frame. If not, you are paying for a layout, and layouts are US$249.
4. Who edits this in six months? If it is you, weekly, ask exactly what the editing surface is before you pay anyone. If it is nobody, either route is fine.
5. Are you testing this business or running it? Testing means one page and a phone number. Buy nothing yet.

When not to buy from us

Straight answers, because we have an obvious interest here.

• If you need to edit your site every week yourself, and you will not touch a file or send a brief, we are not the right fit today. The builder that solves this is coming and is not open, and we would rather say so than sell you around it.
• If your booking, ordering or scheduling already runs on a platform, keep it there. Pay for a site, not for a rebuild of a solved problem.
• If you are testing whether the business works at all, buy nothing. One page and a phone number.
• If you are an agency putting one template on five client sites, read the licence first. One licence covers one live site, here and almost everywhere else.

What you actually own, and what leaving costs

Buy a template here and you get the code and a licence that spells out what you may do with it. That part is yours.

The hosting under it is a separate, ongoing arrangement, and that is true of every website ever built, at every price, from anyone. The honest question is not "do I own it" but "what does it cost me to leave, and can I take the site with me". Ask that of everyone you talk to, including us, and get the answer in writing.

Still stuck?

Answer the brief. It takes a few minutes, and the price comes back before you pay anything. If the honest answer to your brief is "buy a template instead", that is what you will hear.

Start a brief →

FAQ

Is a template bad for SEO? No. Google has said publicly since 2008 that there is no duplicate content penalty, and shared layout code is not duplicate content. What moves your ranking is speed, structure and whether the page answers the question. A fast template beats a slow custom build.

Can I customise a template? Yes, and the limit is economic rather than technical. Past a certain amount of custom work you have paid bespoke prices for a build that started life as somebody else's decisions. The line is roughly the point where you are changing the layout rather than the contents.

How much does a custom website cost? Here, from A$1,500, quoted off your brief before you pay. The figure you will see repeated elsewhere is "from about $5,000", and none of the pages repeating it say where it came from. Anyone giving you a price before seeing your brief is giving you a starting bid.

How long does a bespoke site take? It depends on you more than on the builder. The calendar is set by how fast decisions get made, whether your photographs exist, and how many rounds of revisions you want. We do not print a delivery date before reading a brief, and neither should anyone else.

What if I outgrow the template? Then you have a real business and a real budget, which is a much better position than owning a bespoke site you outgrew in the opposite direction. Rebuild the pages that earn. Keep the rest.

Should I just wait for the AI builder? If you need a site this quarter, no. It is coming soon and it is not open, and a business without a website today loses work today.