Are you looking for a website for your brand, but still not sure about how to go about it? In this article, we’ll dissect the advantages of having a bespoke website built for your company instead of an off-the-shelf variety. You probably have looked into it and figured it would be cheaper to just get a theme for your WordPress website and edit just a few bits. However, even though that’s a cheaper option, it might become obsolete quite fast, making you spend more in the long run just to keep it up to date with your company’s evolution and growth. Below you’ll find a few reasons why.
Customisation
When you have an off-the-shelf website, there’s only so much you can customise. You can change the pages and the logo, but in the end, it’s going to be similar to many other websites which use the same theme. With a bespoke website, you’ll never have that issue. You get the pages you need, with the design you want, for the content that best suits your brand’s digital strategy. At Silva Web Designs, we use mostly WordPress to build bespoke websites – which means that no matter how much detail goes into it, you’ll always have an easy back office to work with if you eventually need to change some content on your own.
Website speed
This is a really important factor if you want your website to have a good ranking in terms of SEO. With an off-the-shelf solution, a lot of times your website will be full of plugins and code that you don’t really need. This will slow down your website, not only making it difficult to navigate but also ruining your SEO efforts. To increase your website speed, we recommend a bespoke website solution. This way, you get only the code you need to make your website work, making it faster and more efficient. This is one huge advantage you’ll have over an off-the-shelf solution when it comes to ranking higher on Google results. Google cares a lot about website speed – in fact, don’t we all? Users don’t have any sympathy for slow websites, and usually what isn’t user-friendly isn’t SEO friendly either. A bespoke website will be optimised to your advantage, making it easier to trump your competition – which we’ll discuss in the next point.
Competitive advantage
Even though you might think a bespoke website is too expensive for your company, the costs of having an off-the-shelf solution will become quite prominent over time. An off-the-shelf solution usually incorporates a lot of plugins which aren’t probably necessary for what you want to do with your website, and those plugins need constant updating. If the plugins stop getting updates, it’s likely some functions of your website are not going to work. In web development, being able to update easily is essential to make your website withstand the test of time. Other than that, if your customers are looking for your services, you’ll want to stand out using UX/UI features, a great looking web design, and the right code that will make all of it come together in a neat package. Your customers are searching the web to make their life easier – if your website loads fast, is well-designed to make your CTAs accessible, and uses responsive code, you’re already ahead of your competition. A bespoke website is much more likely to work perfectly on mobile, which is also something you should consider. Most users look for services or products on their mobile phones, which is the main reason why your website should adapt to every device out there. Besides, a good website will increase your sales, which will pay for whatever you invest in web development in the beginning.
Security
When you use an off-the-shelf solution, the extra code you don’t need can be a reason for failure. All those plugins accessing your data can be a major security risk – whereas, with a bespoke option, you know exactly who’s working on web development, so any security issues can be handled swiftly.
At Silva Web Designs, we design bespoke websites through WordPress which are tailored to your needs and business goals. Need an online shop for your website as well? We also work with Magento, which makes it easy to buy your product or service directly through your website, reducing your sales cost. Think you’re ready to dive in into a bespoke website for your company? Contact us today for more info!