We’re back with another blog series: Supercharge Your Site. In this series, we’ll be giving you an insight into the world of Website Development and Design!
When talking to clients about websites, we often get asked why investing in a bespoke design and build is better than buying a WordPress theme, or setting up a budget ‘DIY’ type site on Wix, Yell.com or Squarespace. Surely the outcomes are the same, right?
Whilst at a glance the differences may not be obvious, there are many reasons why, in fact, a bespoke website and an off-the-shelf one are worlds apart.
Building a bespoke site makes it very easy to change and evolve the website over time. The possibilities are literally endless. With a bespoke site we know exactly how it’s built, and which piece of code is serving which purpose, meaning we’re able to make changes very quickly and very easily.
Off-the-shelf themes and ‘DIY’ type builders are really hard to change (if not impossible) due to the way they’re built. You can only customise them within the options that are available within that specific theme or platform.
We also often find that it’s very difficult to set up a stock WordPress theme to look as good as the demo which is used to sell the theme in the first place – in the time it takes us to do this we may have been able to build a custom solution which performs better and solves the brief better.
From experience, it’s very difficult to add anything custom to a stock website theme, outside of the confines of the editor tools that come with it. Even just trying to add a bespoke call-to-action module to an area of a homepage can be a nightmare.
Building a site from scratch means that every piece of code is there for a reason.
Stock themes and builder tools need to accommodate a lot of different uses by their very nature, meaning that there is usually a lot of redundant code which is never even used. This negatively and unnecessarily effects the page load speed. Keeping the codebase streamlined means the site can be easily maintained and can perform better than a bloated competitor site.
The more data your browser has to download before displaying a page, the slower the experience is for the user.
We can control the size of code files, all assets on the page, all images and graphics, which you cannot do with a purchased theme or using a builder tool.
Up at server level, we can also perform extra little tricks like gzipping the site, applying content caching rules, and maintaining strict application firewalling to block malicious traffic instantly, minimising any resources being drained unnecessarily, which allows our sites to perform as well as they should, 365 days a year.