Choosing the right template for your business

Choosing a template is the most enjoyable part of building a site and the part people most reliably get wrong. Not because they pick an ugly one — they almost never do — but because they pick with their eyes and then discover the design they fell for doesn't do the work their business does.

Here's how we'd evaluate it: function before beauty, honesty about what you actually have, and a reminder at the end that the decision matters far less than it feels like it does.

Start with the work, not the look

Before you look at a single design, write down what your website has to do. Not what you'd like it to look like — what has to happen on it. For most businesses it's one or two of these:

• Sell products online. A real store: cart, checkout, orders.
• Show a catalog without selling. A menu, a product range, a lookbook — browsable, but people buy in person or by phone.
• Take bookings. Appointments, consultations, reservations, quote requests.
• Sell recurring plans. Memberships, classes, subscription boxes.
• Publish. A journal, stories, case studies, news.
• Explain and convince. A brochure site whose job is to make someone call you.

Every template in our catalog lists exactly which of these it's built for — online store, products page, online booking, subscriptions, journal. That list is the first filter, and it eliminates more candidates than taste ever will. A stunning photography-led design with no booking page is simply the wrong template for a clinic.

Beautiful is the easy part. Every template in a decent catalog is beautiful. The question is which one is beautiful at the shape of your business.

Use industry as a shortcut, not a rule

You can filter the catalog by industry — retail, restaurants, home services, construction, beauty and wellness, automotive, photography, legal, travel, agriculture and the rest — and it's a good way to shorten a long list quickly. A template designed for a flooring company already thinks in terms of project galleries and service areas; one designed for a coffee roaster already thinks about origin stories and subscriptions.

But don't let it become a fence. Some of the best sites we've seen came from a business borrowing the structure of a different trade — a landscape designer using a photographer's layout, a bakery using a retail template's product grid. If the structure fits your content, the industry label doesn't matter.

Be honest about what you actually have

This is where most mismatches happen. A template is a container with an appetite, and the appetite is visible if you look for it.

How much photography does it want?

A design built on a full-bleed hero is asking you for one genuinely excellent wide image, and it will look thin without it. A dense three-column grid wants dozens. An editorial layout with large text and small images wants good writing more than good pictures.

Count what's in your folder before you choose. If you have four good photographs, choose the template that makes four photographs look generous, not the one that makes them look sparse.

How much writing does it want?

Some templates lean on long-form copy — substantial paragraphs, story sections, an editorial voice. Others are almost entirely visual, with a headline and a caption doing all the work. Neither is better. But if you're not going to write a thousand words about your business, don't choose a design whose whole character depends on them.

How many products or services?

A layout designed to make eight products feel considered will make eighty feel cramped. A layout built for a large catalog needs filters and categories, and will look empty with a dozen items in it. Match the density to your reality now, not to the catalog you hope to have.

What every template gives you regardless

It's worth knowing what isn't a differentiator, because it takes a lot of anxiety out of the choice. Every template in our catalog has to pass the same parity audit before it ships, so every one of them comes with:

• A responsive layout and a working mobile menu — not an afterthought, a requirement.
• Site search, in both the desktop and mobile navigation.
• A journal, wired up and styled in that template's own type and colour.
• Privacy and terms pages, with footer links to them.
• Brand colours you can set once and have flow through every section.
• Your logo, at a height you control, replacing the placeholder everywhere.
• A cart, present but switched off unless your site sells — so a brochure site never sprouts one.
• Per-page titles, descriptions and share images for search and social.
• Sections for locations, subscriptions, testimonials and featured products, all reading your real data.

So you're not choosing which features you get. You're choosing a structure and a mood.

How to actually evaluate a shortlist

Get to three or four candidates, then judge them properly rather than by first impression.

Look at it on a phone

Not a narrow browser window — a phone. More than half your visitors will see this design in one hand, and the desktop impression is a poor guide to that. Scroll the whole home page. Open the menu. Tap through to a second page.

Read the whole page, not the top of it

Everyone judges by the hero. Scroll past it. The middle of a home page is where a template's real quality shows: how it handles a list of services, whether its testimonial section looks right with two quotes instead of six, what the footer does.

Check the page you'll use most

If you take bookings, look hard at the booking page. If you sell, look at the product page and the catalog page, not the home page. The home page is the one you'll fuss over and the one customers spend the least time on.

Ask whether it flatters your worst content

Any design looks good with a perfect photograph. The useful question is how it copes with the average one — the slightly-too-dark shot of a real product on a real day. Templates that only work with immaculate imagery are a commitment to immaculate imagery, forever.

The part that takes the pressure off

Here's what changes the whole calculation: the decision is reversible, and it's free.

Every template is included on every plan — there are no template fees, no premium tier, and no charge for changing your mind. And because your content is stored separately from your design, moving to a different template doesn't mean re-entering your site.

Better still, you don't have to gamble on it. Make a sandbox version of your site, switch that copy to the template you're curious about, and look at it privately with your own words and pictures in it. Your live site keeps running the whole time — same domain, same orders, same customers. If the new one is better, apply it. If it isn't, delete the sandbox and nothing happened.

That's the honest answer to “what if I choose wrong?” You'll find out with your real content, in private, at no cost.

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Making the call

Filter by what your site has to do. Filter again by industry if it helps. Then, from what's left, pick the one whose appetite matches what you actually have — the photographs you own, the words you'll write, the number of things you sell.

And then start. A site built on a merely good template with real content beats one built on a perfect template that's still waiting for a photoshoot. The template you can fill this month is the right template.

Once you've chosen, our getting started guide picks up from there.