Template, custom or headless: choosing without the jargon
A template is fastest and cheapest but caps what you can change. A custom build costs more upfront and fits your content exactly. Headless separates content from presentation and pays off on large or multi-channel sites. Most businesses under fifty pages are choosing between the first two, and the deciding factor is who will edit the site.
Three products are sold under the word “website”. They cost different amounts, take different time, and fail in different ways.
Template
You buy a theme, replace the content, adjust the colors.
Good for getting online quickly, businesses where the site is a business card rather than a sales channel, and budgets under a few thousand.
Costs you later in two ways. The first is speed: themes carry code for features you will never use, and that shows up on mobile. The second is the ceiling. The first time you need something the theme was not designed for, you are choosing between a plugin that half works and a rebuild.
Custom
The structure comes from what you sell and to whom. The copy is written. The design is built around both.
Good for any site expected to generate enquiries, anyone in a competitive category, and anyone whose brand is part of what they sell.
Costs you two to five times a template, and four to eight weeks instead of one. What you get is a site with no ceiling, and one that loads fast because nothing is in it that does not need to be.
Headless
Content lives in one system. The website is a separate application that reads from it. So can an app, a kiosk, or a partner’s feed.
Good for large sites, multi-language operations, and businesses publishing the same content to several places.
Overkill for most single marketing sites. It adds a second system to maintain and a developer dependency for changes that would otherwise be trivial. Agencies recommend it more often than businesses need it.
The question that actually decides
Not budget. Not traffic. Who edits the site after launch?
If the answer is someone non-technical who will update text monthly, you need a straightforward editing interface and a build that does not break when they paste from Word. That points toward a template or a custom build on a familiar platform.
If the answer is “nobody, we change it twice a year”, a hand-built static site is faster, cheaper to host and impossible to break. The trade is a developer for changes.
If the answer is “a content team, across three channels”, that is the case for headless.
The comparison
| Template | Custom | Headless | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical cost | $ | $$$ | $$$$ |
| Time to launch | 1–2 weeks | 4–8 weeks | 8–16 weeks |
| Speed | moderate | fast | fast |
| Ceiling | low | none | none |
| Who can edit | anyone | anyone | content team |
| Ongoing maintenance | plugin updates | minimal | two systems |
What we build
Mostly the middle column, hand-written rather than assembled in a page builder, which is why our sites load in under a second rather than four.
We say no to headless more often than we propose it. When a single marketing site arrives with a headless requirement attached, the requirement usually came from an agency rather than from the business.
Common questions
Is a template site unprofessional?
No. It is a commercial decision about where your money is best spent. A well-chosen template with good photography and clear copy beats a custom build with neither. The limitation appears later, when you need something the template was not designed to do.
What does headless actually mean?
The content lives in one system and the website is a separate application that reads from it. It is useful when the same content feeds a site, an app and a partner feed. For a single marketing site it usually adds cost and complexity without a return.
Which is fastest to load?
A hand-built static site, by a wide margin, because there is no database query and no plugin stack between the visitor and the page. A template site can be made fast but is fighting its own architecture to get there.
