Custom-built Websites Vs WordPress Themes

Sep 10, 2019 02:10 PM

Custom-Built Website

Custom-built websites are created from scratch.   The workflow, design, and development literally start from zero.  These sites are typically a blank canvas and are designed in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe XD.  People typically hire a software company or a freelancer with full-stack development skills to construct for them.

Pros:

• Custom websites are one of kind.  They are unique to the identity of the company.  This is essential for many businesses and a lot of users recognize this trait, which builds increased confidence in the businesses brand
• Custom websites are highly customizable and scalable.  You can build them to perfectly fit the needs of your business, design, and function.
• Custom websites are hyper SEO-friendly.  SEO is more than a title and keywords.  Search engines have agents known as “crawlers” that read through each page of your site to determine how it’s made, what technologies are used, and even more important today “mobile-first” which it evaluates the experience users will have on your site.  Custom sites allow you to have full control of this experience and easily make the adjustments to comply with standards of the search engines like Google and Bing.
• Custom websites are extremely scalable.  Custom websites can grow with your business and adapt with changes needed to align with the values and audience needs.  This is typically is a small investment in the future.

Cons:

• Custom-built websites can be more expensive.  There takes a lot more time and care necessary to create a unique experience.  Making custom websites cost higher than affordable templated or themed based sites such as WordPress.
• Custom websites can take longer to build depending on the complexity of the site.   If not planned properly like any site your project could inflate the timeline and incur more cost.

WordPress Themes

The WordPress framework is most famous for blogs, news outlets, music sites, and celebrities.   WordPress makes up over 30% of websites on the web to this date.   WordPress is an excellent solution that doesn’t fall far behind custom-built websites.  Also, there is a lot of way of customizing themes to fit your brand to satisfy your needs.

Pros

• WordPress themes are initially affordable.  There a thousand of free themes you can use the build or choose from a premium theme to build your next website.  A lot of these themes come with plugins to extend the website to provide money savings.
• WordPress development time is typically much shorter.  If you are operating under a tight schedule to get a site up and running, WordPress themes can save you weeks or months of development.  The code is already in place and you are focusing on the content and design of your site.
• WordPress themes do not require any special knowledge or skill.  Almost anyone with a base level computer literacy can run a WordPress website using a pre-built theme.

Cons:

• Wordpress themes are less flexible in nature.  You can customize the theme you select, but only within the parameters of in which the theme allows you.  You can’t add a custom technology or simply add-on any custom feature sets due to the limitations of the theme.
• WordPress web themes typically come with less support and documentation.  If you are are not building the site yourself, you will have to rely on the software company or freelancer to take care of all of the aspects of getting certain features of the theme to work.  This would include troubleshooting issues with themes, debugging, and also sometimes fixing bugs within the theme you have selected which can be very costly.  A variety of themes come with 24/7 support, but this can be far and few between.  Many of the themes will require to sign up for a premium subscription to elect to receive update and fixes to theme you are purchasing.  Remember when choosing a theme you are buying someone else's software/website.
• WordPress themes are not automatically SEO-friendly out of the box.  Some may include plug-ins to assist their solution such as “Yoast SEO” to help extend the SEO-friendly structure of the pages you create.  You will be responsible for handling any extensive customizations to comply with search engine standards or look at chaining several different plugins-in to achieve simple efforts from a custom website.
• Wordpress themes can be a maintenance nightmare.  If you are using a Managed WordPress solution you will be responsible for all the security updates, plugin updates, hosting compatibilities and so forth for your site.  Maintenance can cost you 10x more time and money than initially building your site.  Anytime WordPress has an update you have to verify that the update will not break any of your existing plug-ins you are depending on for your website.  Resulting in hours or days of finding fixes or just scraping and finding a new plugin to achieve the features of the supported version of WordPress.

Conclusion

Like anything within the online universe, both custom-built websites and Wordpress themes there are advantages and disadvantages.  Users and business that require advanced needs and feature sets, highly customizable and scalable websites to grow with their business, and looking to invest money initially to do it right for their business the first time will benefit from going with a custom-built website.  On the other side of the fence, businesses are looking for a quick, and easy solution to get something up fast as a starter website should opt-in for WordPress and choose a theme that matches their needs.  Keep in mind quick and fast is not always cheaper, you could possibly end up spending more money in the long run.

Know all facts, pros, and cons should help you decide which is the best solution for you.  Choose carefully, consider your needs, available resources and decide which is the best choice for you.

If you are ready to build your next custom-built website and looking for a done for you provider that can take care of the detail.  Check out ViviScape Software they provide a full A-Z solution including design, content creation, and development for your new custom-built website.

Learn More about ViviScape Software