How to choose a website template: a first-timer’s checklist

The quickest way to choose a website template is to decide what the site is for and how it should feel, shortlist three templates whose demos already look close, then test each one with your own photos, your longest page and your phone. Before you commit, add up what it costs in the second year and find out whether the platform lets you switch later. Words like “responsive” and “SEO-friendly” hardly come into it: nearly every template promises both, so they don’t tell one from another.

Start with what the site is for

Finish the sentence “From the homepage, a visitor should be able to…”. A café’s might be “see the menu and the hours, and book a table”; a photographer’s, “see the work and get in touch”; a shop’s, “find a product and buy it”.

That sentence decides which pages the site needs and which button sits at the top, and it rules templates out fast. A shop template puts a cart in the header and a product grid on the homepage; a portfolio template gives most of the page to pictures. Start from one built for a different job and you spend an afternoon taking things out.

A template made for your kind of business is a head start, not a requirement: a restaurant template with one big photo, a menu page and a booking button can become a florist’s with new photos and words. If you run a restaurant, café or bakery, five restaurant templates and what each costs a year sets the options side by side.

Choose the feel before the features

The feel is the part of the site you’ll live with longest. Most templates fall into one of four:

• Calm and minimal: plenty of white space, a few large photos, quiet type.
• Warm and friendly: softer colors, photos of people, rounded shapes.
• Bold and modern: big type, strong color, tight blocks of content.
• Classic and elegant: serif headings, restrained color, generous margins.

Take the feel from how the business already looks: the sign, the menu card, the room. Then browse only templates in that feel; you’ll see a fraction of the gallery and decide faster. Theme Match asks what the site is for and how it should feel before anything else, then returns three templates across WordPress, Squarespace, Wix and Shopify with what each costs every year.

Picture the demo with your own photos and words

A demo is built with professional photographs and short, tidy text. Yours will have your photos and your words, and that gap is where most templates disappoint. Test each one on your shortlist:

1. Gather the five photos you’ll really use: the homepage photo, two of your work or your place, a portrait, and a product or a dish.
2. Compare their shape with the demo’s. If its top photo is wide and yours are tall phone shots, the template will crop them, sometimes through someone’s head.
3. Compare their light. A template built around bright, airy pictures looks gloomy with dim interior shots.
4. Write the headline you’d actually use. If the demo’s has four words and yours has fifteen, picture how it wraps.
5. Find your longest page, often the services list or the menu, and the demo page that would hold it. A layout made for three short paragraphs turns long text into a wall.

Where you can, try it for real. WordPress’s Live Preview shows a theme with your own posts and pages before you activate it, and Shopify lets you try a theme in your store with your own products. Squarespace starts every site with a 14-day free trial and Wix has a free plan, so you can start a site from the template and drop your photos in.

Tip: demos come with star ratings, testimonials, “As featured in” logos and sample figures you don’t have yet. Delete them or replace them with real ones before launch, because visitors will take them as yours.

Count the pages and sections you’ll actually use

A template with forty page layouts is no better than one with six if you need five. List the pages your site needs on day one (for most small businesses: home, about, what you offer, contact, perhaps a blog or a shop) and match each one to a page in the demo.

• Pages the demo lacks are the ones you’ll design yourself. One is fine; three means the template was made for a different kind of site.
• Sections you can’t fill, such as a team grid, testimonials or pricing tables, get deleted, and the page left behind can look lopsided.
• Features you need, such as booking, a shop or a newsletter sign-up: check whether the demo has them working or only shows a button. On many templates “Book now” is a button you connect to a booking service yourself, and that service may send its own bill.

Open the demo on your phone

Plenty of visitors will meet the site on a phone, so judge the template there. Send yourself the demo link and check:

• the menu: easy to find, opens cleanly, every page in it;
• the top of the homepage: the photo still works cropped narrow, and the headline reads without zooming;
• the button that matters (book, buy, call): visible without much scrolling;
• the body text: comfortable at arm’s length;
• a long page: the sections stack in a sensible order.

Wix’s template pages have a mobile view button, but your own phone in your hand is the honest test.

Make sure you can change the fonts and colors

All four big platforms let you change colors and fonts without code: Site styles on Squarespace, the Site Design panel on Wix, Theme settings in Shopify’s theme editor, and on WordPress the Styles panel in the Site Editor for a block theme or the Customizer for a classic one. What differs is how far a template lets you go. Check that colors are set once for the whole site, that you can choose fonts freely, and that the demo still looks right in your colors: some templates are built around one strong color and fall flat without it.

If you’re planning to change the fonts, the colors and the layout, you’ve picked the wrong template. Start from one that’s already close.

Add up what it costs in year two

The template is often free. The bill is the plan or the hosting, the domain and sometimes the theme, and much of it rises in year two, when the free domain year and the introductory hosting prices end. Six common starting points, counted the way Theme Match counts them (US dollars on yearly billing, rounded to the nearest $10):

Starting point	Year one	Every year after	What changes in year two
Squarespace template, Basic plan	about $230	about $250	The domain, free in year one, renews
Wix template, Light plan	about $200	about $220	The domain, free in year one, renews
Shopify free theme, Basic plan	about $370	about $370	Nothing, unless you add paid apps
Shopify paid theme at $400 once, Basic plan	about $770	about $370	The theme was paid for once
WordPress, free theme, shared hosting	about $50	about $150	Hosting renews at its regular price
WordPress, Divi at $89 a year, shared hosting	about $140	about $240	Hosting renews, and Divi every year

A template with bookings or a store built in can raise the bill further: taking payments on Wix needs Core, about $145 a year more than Light, and on Squarespace’s Basic plan a 2% fee comes off each product sale. Card fees, email at your own domain and paid apps aren’t in these figures at all; what a website costs per year adds up the whole bill, line by line.

Find out whether you can switch later

This is the check most people skip, and the hardest to undo:

Platform	Can you switch templates later?	What that means for you
WordPress	Yes	Posts, pages and media stay; menus, widgets and pages built with the old theme’s own builder may need redoing
Shopify	Yes	Products, collections and pages stay; you set up the homepage sections again in the new theme
Squarespace 7.1	There’s nothing to switch to	Every 7.1 site has the same features and style options, so you change the look with styles and sections
Wix	No	A new template means a new site: the plan and domain move across, the content is copied and the design rebuilt

Squarespace says all version 7.1 sites are part of the same template family, so a redesign there means restyling. Wix is just as plain that an existing site can’t switch to a different template: you start a new site and move the plan and domain to it, and the design, the store and the bookings stay behind. So on Wix, choose the template you’d still like in two years. If those two are your shortlist, Squarespace vs Wix compares them, including the choices you can’t take back.

Free or paid: when a paid theme earns its price

Squarespace and Wix templates come with the plan, and Shopify’s own themes are free. The question is real on WordPress, and on Shopify once you look at other makers’ themes.

A free theme is enough for most first sites: the WordPress.org theme directory lists more than 8,000, each reviewed by the WordPress themes team against its rules before it appears. A paid theme earns its price when it has a layout you’d otherwise have to build (a lookbook for a fashion label, a menu set out like the printed one), when its starter site (the ready-made demo you import and make your own) already matches most of your pages, or when you want the maker’s support and updates. Before paying, check:

1. Yearly or once. Divi is $89 a year or $249 once; Shopify Theme Store themes such as Prestige, at $400, are paid once.
2. What stops if you stop paying. Elegant Themes says you can keep using the Divi you’ve downloaded, but updates and support end.
3. Refunds. Elegant Themes refunds within 30 days. Paid themes from the Shopify Theme Store are final sale, which is why Shopify’s trial matters: you can try a paid theme in your own store with your own products, and you pay only when you want to publish it.
4. The last update. A theme its maker hasn’t touched in a long while may fall behind its platform.

The themes and page builders we’d start a first site from, each with its price after the first year, are on the Tools page.

The checklist on one screen

1. Finish the sentence: from the homepage, a visitor should be able to…
2. Choose the feel, then shortlist three templates whose demos look close.
3. Picture each with your five real photos, your real headline and your longest page.
4. Match your pages to the demo’s; plan to delete every sample review, logo and figure.
5. Open the demo on your phone.
6. Check you can set colors and fonts for the whole site.
7. Add up year one and year two, with the plan you’d need for bookings or payments.
8. Find out whether the platform lets you switch later.
9. For a paid theme: yearly or once, what stops if you stop paying, refunds, the last update.

More roundups by kind of site, from portfolios to shops, are in the Themes section.