How to Use Website Templates: 10 Things You Need to Notice
April 25, 2025
There is no doubt that website templates dominate the web design world today. It’s not hard to find a huge influx of companies offering “personalized” website templates. This sounds like a fantastic opportunity to grow your business at a low cost. Yes, if you have a tight budget, it may be exactly what you need. But how can you use website templates effectively to enhance your online presence and get the best business outcomes? Let’s find it out with us in today’s article!
The 10 Things You Need to Notice When Using Website Templates
Website templates are pre-designed layouts for websites that have color themes, fonts, and other visual elements. With website templates, your company don’t need to design a website from scratch (like wireframing or prototyping ideas) and can increase time to market. However, among a multitude of websites out there, how should your business use website templates to stay competitive and retain a target audience? To answer this question, let’s discover ten key things to consider to use website templates effectively.
1. Define Your Needs First
Even when you use a website template instead of creating a custom one, identifying your company’s website needs is a must to pick the best template. As website templates are designed for public use, they sometimes don’t meet your specific requirements. But fortunately, various theme providers and website builders now offer a wide range of templates and themes for different uses. Therefore, it’s much easier to find a suitable one than before.
Before searching for website templates, try to answer the question: What does your company expect to build from a website template? Is it a fashion store with shopping carts and simple checkout or an e-learning hub with course listing? Defining clear goals helps you outline what types of website templates you’re aiming at, which features you prefer, and how a template can reflect your brand identity.
2. Evaluate Compatibility
You see so many beautiful clothes in the store and want one of them. But does it fit you? The same question also applies to website templates. You can find various providers out there with a variety of site templates, but consider which one suits your brand identity and can be integrated with your chosen platform (e.g., HubSpot, WooCommerce, Wix, or WordPress). Beyond that, the website template you select must support other of your crucial tools.
If you want to evaluate the compatibility of chosen website templates, test them and their necessary add-ons on a separate, non-live “test website” before adopting them on your actual site. You can build a test site by creating a subdomain (“test.yourdomain.com”) or a subdirectory (“yourdomain.com/test/”) in your current hosting account. Otherwise, if you use services from website builders like HubSpot or WordPress, you can clone your website with temporary URLs in their staging environments.
Recommended reading: Why Web Design is Important for Business?
3. Consider Responsive Design
It’s 2025 now and we can see people are using different devices to access websites, from desktops and personal computers to tablets and mobile phones with various sizes. Therefore, to approach a broad audience, your business needs to consider responsive design.
However, although almost all website templates are now responsive, it doesn’t mean your chosen template can work seamlessly on any devices and platforms. Therefore, to bring the best user experience, test your UI/UX design on different physical devices or through online tools like Responsive Website Design Tester or BrowserStack.
4. Factor in Customization
Website templates are cost-effective and ensure faster time to market. But one of their visible drawbacks is that they’re not unique for your brand. It means, once you upload a template to your website, you may have to make a few changes before publishing it. These changes ensure the template will mirror your brand identity and make your website not too similar to others.
Today, website builders come with customization tools that enable your company to personalize a template with ease. Accordingly, you can use a visual editor to drag and drop elements right on the interface of your website without extensive code knowledge. Otherwise, you can leverage a CSS code editor to add your own code for customization.
Regardless of your choice, ask the following questions to use website templates more effectively: Does your chosen template offer customization tools? If yes, what options does it have (code-free or custom CSS editors)?
5. Design for Your Brand
Although we often say website templates are too generic, you still can customize it to make your brand different from others. Accordingly, you can replace company name, logo, tagline, and other elements as well as add text written in your company’s voice in a placeholder.
Don’t forget to change a template’s default color scheme to new colors that align with your brand. The same also applies to icons, animations, stock images, and other visual elements. Instead of using the template’s default elements, leverage unique ones that reflect your brand by working with professional designers, using AI tools (Adobe Express Logo Maker or Designs AI), or using available website icons.
Next, use fonts wisely. You can use the template’s default fonts as long as they showcase your brand voice. Don’t add hard-to-read fonts or too many fonts to your website. Only two or three fonts that have sufficient color contrast and are readable across devices and platforms will help retain your visitors.
6. Ensure Consistency & Scalability
Website templates often come with available functions like homepage, landing pages, and blog posts. These functions vary across types of templates (e.g., e-learning or eCommerce sites).
Normally, homepage, landing pages, and blog posts have different layouts to emphasize the messages they want to convey. However, other design factors like backgrounds, typefaces, color schemes, or your brand voice should be consistent. This allows visitors to easily remember your branding and find what they want in your site.
Additionally, when using website templates, consider their scalability. In other words, the chosen template has to meet your company’s growing demands and the increasing number of site visitors.
7. Read Customer Reviews
Among a variety of website templates, how can you know which one is good? Read customer reviews left in marketplaces which sell pre-made site templates. These reviews give you a comprehensive overview of how the templates benefit users and which limitations they still present. When looking at a long list of website templates in marketplaces, you should use filters to choose five-star ones with design elements and functionalities that fit your business.
Recommended reading: The Importance of Custom Web Design for Your Business
8. Ponder Performance & Load Times
Page loading speed and performance are extremely crucial for a website. So, before finalizing your decision, evaluate how the shortlisted templates perform through their load times, navigation, and more by loading the templates to your website and collecting user feedback for their performance.
9. Ensure a Developer’s Ongoing Support
There are various website templates whose developer authors no longer support. Using these templates makes your company face potential problems like security vulnerabilities or compatibility, especially if you use these templates for the CMS (Customer Management System) like WordPress. It’s because when the CMS is updated yet the template is no longer supported, your website may experience performance errors or even stop working. Therefore, ensure your chosen template still has the developer support, in terms of code updates and customer service.
10. Monitor & Update
No matter whether you use website templates or customize a site from scratch, monitoring and updating it regularly is no longer a good idea; instead, it’s a must. This not only keeps your site competitive with the latest technologies and design trends but also handles errors and bugs to avoid cyberattacks.
To update your website template, perform A/B tests and ask for customer feedback to understand how your site performs. Besides, you can conduct further research on which strategies your competitors are adopting to attract and retain customers. All these things, coupled with your company’s evolving needs, help you update the site more effectively.
Conclusion
Deciding whether or not you use a template for your business may be based on your time, budget, and value. However, remember our key considerations to use website templates more effectively.
In case you still want someone trusted to design a custom, cost-effective website for your company, Designveloper is a good option. We have over a decade of experience in creating scalable, responsive design for clients across industries like healthcare, finance, or eCommerce. Following Agile approaches, we’re committed to delivering a fully functional yet visually appealing website that increases conversion and drives sales. Contact us now to discuss your idea further!
Also published on
Share post on
Read more topics
