It depends on where your business is — and how much work you need your website to do.

Template platforms like Squarespace and Wix exist for a reason. For a business in its earliest stage, with limited budget and a primary need to simply have something live, a well-chosen template is a perfectly reasonable starting point. It’s not a long-term solution, but it doesn’t need to be. Get something up, learn what your audience responds to, and revisit when the business has more clarity and more at stake.

The problem is that many businesses stay on templates long past the point where they should have moved on. Growth happens, the quality of the work improves, the calibre of client being pursued changes — and the website quietly lags behind, still telling the story of a younger, smaller, less confident version of the business. That gap between where a business actually is and how it presents online has a cost, even if it’s rarely measured directly.

There’s another dimension to this that rarely gets discussed. When you build on a template platform, you’re not just borrowing a framework — you’re inheriting an aesthetic. The layouts, the spacing, the interaction patterns, the underlying visual logic — they belong to Squarespace, or Wix, or whoever built the theme. Which means your website, however carefully customised, is ultimately an expression of someone else’s brand language. The platform’s fingerprints are all over it. For a business serious about differentiation, that’s a fundamental contradiction.

A custom-designed website is built around who you are now, who you’re trying to reach, and what you need those people to think and feel when they encounter you. Every decision serves your brand — not the platform’s.

The question worth asking isn’t “can I afford a custom website?” It’s “what is the template costing me in opportunities I’m not seeing?”