It’s one of the first questions we get asked on almost every discovery call: “why does custom cost so much more than a template?” It’s a fair question. But it’s also the wrong question, because it assumes the sticker price is the whole story. It rarely is.
Let’s start with numbers, because vague answers don’t help anyone budgeting for a website.
A basic template site — the kind you’d get from a generic builder like Wix or GoDaddy — typically runs anywhere from £200 to £1,000, depending on how much customisation you pay for. It’s fast, it’s cheap, and for a business with no money and no website, that’s a genuinely useful starting point.
Then there’s the middle ground. At Say Web Design, our semi-custom option — where we design a proper, bespoke home page and then build the rest of your site out from that design — sits around £1,250. You get something that looks and feels like your brand without paying for every single page to be designed from scratch.
Fully bespoke sits higher again, generally £3,000 to £10,000+, depending on complexity. This is where every page is designed individually, usually for businesses that already have brand guidelines and need the site to work harder — more functionality, more integrations, more moving parts.
So on paper, templates win. Cheaper, faster, done in a week. Custom takes four to six weeks and costs several times more. Case closed?
Not quite.
Here’s the pattern we see constantly. A business comes to us wanting the cheapest, fastest option to get live. Totally reasonable — sometimes you just need to exist online. Twelve months later, that same business is back, looking at its growth and saying, “actually, we need something more professional now.”
That’s not a failure on their part. It’s normal evolution. But it does mean they’ve now paid for two websites instead of one — the cheap starter site, and the site they actually needed once the business grew into itself. If you know you’re heading toward “professional and scalable” eventually, it’s worth asking whether it makes more financial sense to get there in one move rather than two.
The sticker price on a template is only ever part of the bill. We regularly see businesses come to us from template builders asking why their site won’t rank, and a huge amount of the time it comes down to page speed. Template platforms typically put you on a shared server with thousands of other sites, running a theme you can’t meaningfully optimise. That slowness has a real cost — in search rankings, in bounce rate, in customers who just leave.
Add in plugin fees, the eventual need to bring in a developer to work around the template’s limits, and the redesign you’ll pay for once it’s outgrown — and that £200-£1,000 starting price stops looking like the full picture.
We’re not on the “templates are awful” bandwagon that a lot of agencies seem to ride. Used well, they’re a legitimate tool.
Startups and one-person businesses with no capital yet are the obvious case — get live fast, prove the business works, invest in something bespoke later once there’s revenue to justify it.
Ecommerce is the other one, and it’s less obvious. People trust a checkout flow that looks familiar. Messing too much with cart and checkout conventions can actually hurt conversion rather than help it. So for a lot of ecommerce builds, we’ll deliberately use a proven, template-based checkout structure and layer bespoke branding around it — a halfway house, not a compromise.
This is really the point we try to make with every client before quoting anything: your objectives should decide the build, not the other way round.
Our semi-custom package exists because we noticed the gap between “cheap template” and “fully bespoke” was too wide for a lot of growing businesses. We design your home page properly, bespoke, then carry that design through your other pages. You’re not getting every page individually designed — but you are getting a site built on a real, unique design foundation, not a recycled theme. Crucially, it’s built so that any page can be redesigned later without breaking the rest of the site. Most template platforms can’t offer you that; they’re built in a way that locks you in.
Genuinely — it depends on where you are in your journey, and we’ll always ask before quoting anything. If you’re a true startup with no budget, a template gets you live and that’s fine. Build your bespoke site in the background as the business proves itself.
But if you’re already a medium-sized business with brand guidelines and an established identity, a template rarely makes financial sense. It won’t look or feel like your business, and you’ll likely be back in twelve months paying to redo it properly — which means you’ve paid for two websites to get the result one custom build would have given you.
That’s really the honest answer to “which costs more”: templates cost less upfront and more over time for any business that’s actually growing. Custom costs more upfront and, if built to scale, is the only website you’ll need to pay for.
That’s exactly what a quick conversation is for. Have a look at our website packages to see where your business fits — from fast, semi-custom builds through to fully bespoke, scalable sites — or get in touch and we’ll point you in the right direction rather than the most expensive one.
