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    6 reasons why you should go bespoke with your website build

    Guide
    by Kishan Kotecha Partnership Manager

    When there are so many existing templates and themes available, thousands in-fact, it can be challenging to see why you might want to go bespoke when it takes longer and usually costs more.

    We at Gooey know that bespoke is better, so here are a few of the benefits

    You can build exactly what you want

    Every business is different, so you can’t expect a cookie-cutter template to fit each one’s needs like a glove. WordPress is beautifully versatile, and by choosing to go bespoke, you can build a website that fulfils your precise business needs. Many templates will weigh your site down with a bunch of features that you don’t necessarily need. Creating a bespoke template enables you to produce a streamlined site with all the features and elements that you desire and none that you don’t.

    You’ll stand out from competition

    While it is great that there are so many templates available, there are definitely ones that are more popular than others and a lot that are very similar. By choosing to use an existing template you risk appearing the same as everyone else and you will struggle to stand out from your competition; the only way to guarantee a unique site is to build a custom theme. Building a custom site allows you to truly reflect your brand and communicate your identity across the entire design.

    You won’t need as many plugins

    Because existing templates rarely cater to all of your needs, you will often find yourself installing a lot of plugins to add the additional functionalities. Using a lot of plugins can slow down your site, which can frustrate visitors enough to leave it. Going bespoke will minimise the need for these plugins as you can build your site with all of the functionalities that you require. There are a few we still recommend that you use – check out 5 of the best WordPress plugins here.

    You’ll achieve better SEO

    By building your website from scratch you can build with SEO in mind and ensure that every step that you take optimises your site for search.

    You can ensure that it is fully responsive

    You can design and build your site so that it is fully responsive and looks impeccable on all devices. While pre-built templates do tend to be responsive, they tend to use emulated responsive design, which automatically changes the menu style and resizes images to adapt to the screen size. This is – of course – better than not being responsive at all, but with bespoke design you can achieve a ‘true responsive’ website which tailors the display to the user’s device to ensure that they have the best user experience possible.

    Are most of your visitors mobile? Consider designing mobile-first instead – you can check out the difference between mobile-first and responsive design here.

    You can expand and improve over time

    Making changes and adding features to existing templates usually will require plugins. Many plugins will be incompatible with one another and clash, they can also pose security risks, and having too many can cause your site to be slow. Custom websites have far more longevity in them because you can allow yourself room to adapt and change over time. Using a pre-built template somewhat limits this ability, meaning that any future changes can be overly-complicated if they can be achieved at all.

    So now you know why you should go bespoke, what are you waiting for? At Gooey we never use existing templates, and our team of freelance developers are on hand to bring your designs to life. Get in touch to discuss your project.