In today’s cutthroat business environment, having a polished, appealing website is a must. Your website gives you the ability to showcase your products and services while offering customers a way to learn and discover more about your business. Having a robust, custom digital property that sets your brand apart from the rest of the marketplace gives you a strong advantage over competition.
When building a new website, there are two predominant routes one can take: templated or custom. The frequent adoption of certain SaaS products and DIY culture has allowed businesses and marketers to create digital properties based on a pre-configured model, and remove the requirement for development, leaving many to wonder, “Why should I invest in a custom website?” Here are the top 5 benefits of investing in a custom website:
Deliver a Better User Experience
When creating a website, it’s essential to make sure your audience is engaged and your site is providing a good user experience. A site that does this well will realize higher conversion rates.
Understanding, and addressing your audience’s needs is something a templated website simply cannot do as well as a custom build. Creating custom web designs allows you to build your website with your customers’ best interests in mind.
Custom sites provide the opportunity to pick and choose which specific elements your site should display, allowing you to better deliver necessary information to your audiences. Whether it’s focusing on providing clear pathways to purchase points or describing your services with custom illustrations, you can cater to your audience in a scalable way. Being able to streamline any user’s journey will enable them to find what they need more quickly and effectively.
Convey Your Brand’s Unique Value
When building a custom site, it’s easier to include all your brand’s components in the design. Additionally, having the ability to change or update designs, ensures that your brand components are arranged on your website in a way that makes them distinctive and appealing to your target market. James Weiss, Big Drop’s Senior Director, stated the following:
We’re speaking here mostly about a customized design rooted in research, and branding a user experience to support that data, but it’s equally important to think about what design and functionality requirements the site will need to have in the future, and whether or not an environment that predefines your site’s capabilities is really the best fit. Templates, or ‘themes’, favor aesthetic over true strategic implementation, and if your site ever needs to scale, you would have to make the right choice in the template the first time. Fortunately, there is already a world in which both can work well, and grow, together – spoiler alert: it’s a custom website.”
Templated websites are restrictive in offering multiple ways to properly convey your brand. Your capacity to use unique brand components to better differentiate from the competition becomes severely limited. Additionally, because templates are offered to virtually anyone looking to create a digital property, other websites that employ the same template will look and feel the same.
Updating your website is important now more than ever. In this new COVID endemic era, the majority of people are turning to the digital world for their wants and needs. Having a website that conveys your brand in a clear manner is crucial to attracting and converting end users.
Readily Scalable
With a custom build, you have the ability to modify your site immediately, offering the option to scale as the site’s needs expand to efficiently meet the needs of your users – an asset in an ever-changing digital world. Custom websites are inherently better equipped to handle higher traffic volumes, create ease to increase the visibility of new products and services, add new features to support evolving business models, and adjust items like the main navigation layout to better meet audience demands over time.
Templated layouts present challenges to adapt to changing needs having been built with only specific use cases in mind. Feeling stuck yet?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
When building a custom website, it’s easier to control SEO. Listing on the first page for organic search results is essential to running successful digital marketing initiatives. According to Sistrix, over 80 million keywords and billions of search results found that 28.5% of people click the first organic Google search result.
With a custom design, you have the ability to build your site with the best SEO practices in mind. You can remove bulky code to speed up your website, construct an intuitive navigation system to make it more user-friendly, reduce bounce rates, and enable a more responsive design to improve the user experience for both desktop and mobile users. Read more about the effects of SEO and load time here.
Better Security and Control
Customized websites also offer better protection. Specific vulnerabilities are less problematic when they can be dealt with in real time without being beholden to a separate provider or vendor. Additionally, you’ll have a decreased likelihood of falling victim to cyber-attacks. Plus, a custom site also aids in eliminating security issues that can affect your SEO – web security has been part of Google’s search algorithms for several years.
Improve Your Website Today
Our team at Big Drop provides custom website design services to cater to your particular needs. We are not only thinkers but also innovators as we are well determined to re-imagine the process of web design development and digital marketing.
Reach out today and learn about your custom web design options.
