Custom themes and premium themes both have several advantages based on your requirements, budget and long term targets. In this article, I will focus mainly on the advantages of custom built themes.
If you are looking for the website as a business owner, you must have come through the concept of the themes. There are several free themes, premium themes or custom themes with so much gap on the price ranges. And you must be wondering what options to go to.
It is confusing to know what to choose and how much to spend on with so many options available. In this article I will provide some ideas on why a custom theme is the one I suggest. One thing I would like to advise is to stay away from the free themes until you have done significant research on the theme.
If you ask me as a WordPress developer, I am an advocate for custom themes and it will provide the best ROI for the long term investment. I can back that with my years of experience as a web designer and developer.
So if you have decided to spend on custom themes, here are some of the main reasons why you have made the right decision.
Website security
Custom themes are built with custom coding. This makes custom themes more secured as they are built within WordPress APIs, and coding best practices. This had to be done by an experienced WordPress developer who knows the latest best practices around WordPress APIs.
One of the main reasons why Wordpress website gets compromised is the poorly written code and excluding basics like data sanitization and escaping. Ironically, I have seen these types of issues with the bigger companies and agencies where they have mainly outsourcing their work.
Due to reasons like these, I opted to stick with in house custom WordPress development without outsourcing. This does bring good value to my brand as well as peace of mind with any project I undertake.
Here are some of the security precaution I take at minimum:
- Write code within WordPress core
- Sanitize and escape data
- Use only tested and reputed plugins
- Implement 2FA, minimum login attempts etc to protect WordPress admin
- Select the reputed hosting services
UI/UX experience
UI/UX of the website leads to a forever lasting impression of your brand, and focuses on ease of use around the website and its content.
UI/UX at bare minimum include:
- Website is easy to use
- Finding needed information is easy to find
- Site loads at good decent speed
- Information presented are easy to read and navigate
Boost On Page SEO
I had been an On Page SEO advocate for years now. Well written HTML markup is key to success to SEO strategy and provides a lot of advantages over the competitor.
I take pride in saying that I have helped so many of my customers rank in SEO, even though I don’t call myself a full time SEO.
Here are some of the SEO best practices I implement:
- Break code into semantics as suggested by Google SEO best practices
- Implement schema markup for better visibility
- Develop and implement strategies around internal linkings
- Implement SILO with website architecture
Loading speed and Page Insights
Custom built themes are written in a minimalist approach. Code runs at minimum usage of server resources and themes are lightweight too. This helps in website loading faster and using less resources.
Several case studies have shown that website loading slower than 3 seconds decreases conversions. This leads to visitors of your website either leaving and then looking at your competitors for an option. So making your website load at decent speed is quite important to convert your visitors to your customers. This had to be done for both desktop and mobile devices.
Here are some of the SEO best practices I implement:
- Write my own custom HTML and CSS
- Image resizing best practices
- Code minifications and combination
- Defer parsing and loading scripts
Hassle free maintenance
Another advantage of using custom solutions is hassle free maintenance.
When custom built or within WordPress core, updates go smooth and without issues. This, on other hand, can go very wrong with themes selected without research.
When the site goes down for a longer time during maintenance, it can cause a decrease in revenue and in the worst case, it can cause loss in brand reputation too.
Easy to extend
Extending the functionalities is another major advantage of custom build.
Custom build solutions are easy to extend for the main reason being they can be accommodated to add extra plugins without much effort. This can be really helpful for businesses that are looking to grow in future or add new features on the site on the go.