Why I Still Build Custom Websites (and Probably Always Will)

Most people don’t care what’s under the hood—until something breaks.

In a world full of themes, templates, and drag-and-drop builders, it’s fair to ask: why still build custom? Why not just grab something off the shelf, tweak a few colours, and ship?

The answer’s simple—because the site you launch isn’t the site you’ll need six months from now. Because speed, flexibility, and trust don’t come baked into a theme. And because if you’re building something that matters, you need to own the foundations.

I’ve spent years building custom sites for businesses who outgrew the quick fix. What they needed wasn’t just a better-looking homepage. They needed control. Performance. Longevity.

That’s what custom gives you—and why I still build this way.

Are Website Templates Really Enough for Growing Businesses?

Templates are everywhere for a reason—they’re fast, cheap, and get you online with minimal effort. For early-stage businesses or personal projects, that can be fine. But more often than not, those quick wins come with long-term compromises.

You start with a theme that looks slick out of the box. But then you try to tweak the layout, add something slightly custom, or improve load times—and suddenly you’re knee-deep in bloated CSS, plugin conflicts, or a page builder UI that’s working against you.

I’ve seen it too many times: the business grows, but the site can’t keep up. It slows down, breaks more often, and becomes harder to update. What felt like a shortcut ends up costing more in lost leads, dev time, and technical debt.

Templates often feel like a shortcut—but they come with hidden costs: slowdowns, limitations, and what some researchers call UX debt. These are the subtle frictions that build up when the design doesn’t truly fit the user’s needs—something that’s hard to avoid when you’re working around someone else’s system.

Templates have a place. But they’re not built for performance, flexibility, or long-term scale. If you actually care about those things, you’re going to hit a wall.

“If you’re building something that matters, you need to own the foundations.”

How Does Custom Web Development Improve Performance?

When people talk about website performance, they usually mean speed—and speed matters. But performance is more than just a load time score. It’s about how quickly users can find what they need, interact with the site, and trust that it’s working properly—especially on mobile and slower connections.

That experience is shaped at the code level, which is exactly where custom web development gives you an advantage.

1. Less Bloat, More Speed

Most templates and page builders are packed with features you’ll never use—animations, sliders, shortcodes, legacy styles, font libraries, you name it. All of it gets loaded whether you need it or not. That extra weight slows things down, especially on mobile.

A custom build gives you lean, efficient code tailored to your actual content and features. No drag-and-drop fluff, no surprise plugins in the background—just exactly what’s needed, nothing more.

2. Better Core Web Vitals (And Real SEO Impact)

Google uses Core Web Vitals to measure real-world performance: things like how fast the page becomes interactive, how visually stable it is, and how smooth it feels. Sites built from scratch consistently outperform bloated themes because:

• Assets are smaller and fewer
• Layouts are stable from the first render
• Scripts are optimized for the user journey

These aren’t just technical wins—they directly impact rankings, bounce rates, and conversions.

3. Full Control Over Load Order and Priorities

With a custom site, you decide exactly what loads, when it loads, and how. You can defer unnecessary scripts, lazy-load images, and prioritise above-the-fold content—techniques that are often hard or impossible to implement with pre-built themes or rigid CMS plugins.

The result: faster time to first paint, quicker interaction, and a smoother overall experience.

4. Performance That Scales With You

As your site grows—more pages, more traffic, more complex user flows—a custom build gives you the foundation to handle it. You’re not stuck patching over performance problems with more caching or yet another optimisation plugin. The site is fast because of how it’s built, not in spite of it.

Why Do Templates Usually Deliver a Poor User Experience?

At first glance, most website templates look modern and polished. But user experience (UX) isn’t about appearances—it’s about how well the site works for your audience. And that’s where templates often fall short.

Here’s why.

1. Templates Are Designed for Everyone, Which Means No One in Particular

A template has to work for thousands of different users, businesses, and industries. That means its layout, content blocks, and interactions are made to be as flexible as possible.

Sounds useful—but flexibility isn’t the same as clarity.

You end up designing around a structure that wasn’t made for your goals. Calls to action get buried. User journeys become cluttered. Important features are forced into generic modules. The result? A site that looks nice, but feels vague and performs flat.

Custom UX is about intent. When you build a site around your actual users and what they need to do, you can remove distractions, highlight the right actions, and guide people clearly through the journey.

2. Templates Force You to Compromise on Flow and Layout

Want to move that CTA higher up? Or combine two sections into one seamless scroll? Or show/hide content based on user behaviour?

With templates, you’re often limited by what the builder or theme allows. And customising it usually leads to fragile workarounds—custom CSS overrides, broken mobile views, or even new bugs introduced with theme updates.

With a custom build, layout is fluid and intentional. You can structure your site to match how people actually read, scroll, and interact—not how a theme developer imagined a generic business site might behave.

3. Accessibility and Usability Often Get Ignored

Templates rarely prioritise accessibility. ARIA labels, focus states, semantic HTML, keyboard navigation—these are often missing or broken. That means users with disabilities, older devices, or slower connections get a second-rate experience.

With custom development, you control the markup. You can follow WCAG guidelines, test real interaction flows, and make sure your site works for everyone—not just people using the latest iPhone on a fibre connection.

4. Small UX Improvements Add Up—If You Can Make Them

Things like:

• Making form fields easier to tap on mobile
• Adding inline validation and feedback
• Reducing clicks to key content
• Matching your tone and microcopy to your brand voice

These small details make a big difference. But in a template, you’re boxed in. With custom, you can make those tweaks quickly, intentionally, and without worrying about breaking someone else’s code.

Templates focus on how it looks. Custom UX focuses on how it works. If you want your site to feel effortless, intuitive, and genuinely helpful to your users, it needs to be built with those people in mind—from the ground up.

What Do You Actually Own With a Custom Website?

When you use a template, a page builder, or a platform like Wix or Squarespace, you’re not just getting a website—you’re renting a solution. And that has real consequences for how much control you actually have over your site.

Here’s what changes when you go custom.

1. You Own the Code—and That Means You Own the Future

With a custom build, your site is yours. It runs on your server, with your codebase, on your terms. You’re not tied to a platform’s roadmap or plugin ecosystem. You’re not waiting for the next update to fix a bug that’s breaking your layout.

You can add features when you need them. Switch providers if you want to. Integrate with the tools your business actually uses. That kind of control gives you freedom—and protects your investment.

2. No Surprise Lock-Ins or Paywalls

With many templates and site builders, features that look free at first glance often come with strings attached:

• Want to remove branding? Upgrade.
• Need faster hosting? Premium tier.
• Want access to the code? Sorry, not included.

Custom web development removes those artificial walls. You’re paying for what’s actually built, not what’s been gated behind a pricing plan.

3. Your CMS Works for You—Not the Other Way Around

One of the biggest pain points I see with off-the-shelf themes is a bloated, messy backend. Dozens of content blocks, complex menus, and settings panels that confuse more than they help. Even simple updates become a chore.

Custom sites are different. The CMS is built around the way you work. You get clean fields, logical structure, and just the tools you need—nothing more, nothing less.

That means less training, fewer mistakes, and faster updates. And if your team changes or grows, the site stays easy to use.

4. Long-Term Cost Control

Template sites often look cheaper upfront—but they come with hidden costs: extra plugins, paid support, rebuilds when things break, or full migrations when the platform no longer fits.

A well-built custom site isn’t just a one-off investment. It’s a scalable asset. You’re not rebuilding every two years. You’re evolving what you already own.

Ownership Is Peace of Mind

A custom site gives you confidence. You know what it’s built on. You know how it works. And when you need to change something, you can—without crossing your fingers and hoping the plugin doesn’t crash your homepage.

That’s real ownership. And it matters more than most people realise—until they no longer have it.

Does Custom Web Development Take Longer or Cost More?

It’s a fair question—and one of the biggest reasons businesses shy away from custom builds. The assumption is: custom means complicated, expensive, and slow. But in reality, that depends entirely on how it’s done—and who’s building it.

Let’s break it down.

1. Not All “Custom” Is the Same

There’s a big difference between reinventing the wheel and building with intent. When people hear “custom,” they imagine someone starting from a blank file, writing every function by hand. That’s not how smart custom development works.

I use battle-tested foundations: things like the Roots stack (Sage, Bedrock, Composer), modular Tailwind components, and Laravel architectures that are designed to scale cleanly. These give me speed without sacrificing flexibility—and give you a system that works now and later.

You’re not paying for experimentation. You’re paying for experience and a solid delivery process.

2. Faster to Build, Easier to Maintain

Ironically, custom builds can often ship faster than theme-based ones—because you’re not wrestling with someone else’s logic. No editing around rigid layouts. No reverse-engineering bloated code. No plugin dependency chains.

And when something needs updating down the line? You’re not left digging through shortcodes or builder modules—you’ve got clean, documented code built for maintainability.

3. Cost Isn’t Just the Invoice

Sure, a custom build may have a higher upfront cost than a £49 theme. But what’s the cost of…

• A slow site that loses conversions?
• A CMS no one on your team wants to use?
• A design that can’t evolve without a full rebuild?

Custom development is about total value—not just the day-one invoice. You get a faster site, a better UX, and fewer rebuilds. That’s money saved in support, dev hours, and missed opportunities.

4. You Don’t Need Everything—You Need What Works

One of the strengths of going custom is that you don’t have to build a monolith from day one. You can start with exactly what you need—and design it to grow with your business.

A lean, well-designed site focused on performance and conversions will always outperform a bloated one packed with unused features. And it’ll be easier (and cheaper) to scale when the time comes.

Custom web development isn’t about doing more—it’s about doing what matters, properly. When done right, it’s faster to use, easier to manage, and delivers better long-term value than any off-the-shelf solution.

Why I’ll Keep Building Custom—No Matter What the Trends Say

Trends come and go. We’ve seen the rise of no-code platforms, the flood of off-the-shelf themes, and the promise that AI will design and build sites in a few clicks.

But here’s the truth: none of that changes what a website actually needs to do.

It still needs to load fast.
It still needs to be clear, trustworthy, and easy to use.
It still needs to work for your team behind the scenes, not just your visitors.
And it still needs to grow with your business—not hold it back.

That’s what custom web development is built for.

It’s not about doing things the hard way. It’s about doing them the right way—so your site performs better, lasts longer, and helps you move forward without rebuilding from scratch every time your needs evolve.

That’s why I still build custom. And probably always will.

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