Buyer guide
Custom website vs template
Alex West had already shipped more than fifteen Rails apps. His first landing page for a new idea was a Carrd template, plus Mailchimp and Gumroad, in under two hours. He was testing whether anyone wanted the thing. A custom build would have answered that question later, and more expensively.
Written by SiteMivo. Drafted with research assistance and checked against the sources linked below. We do not publish a price on this page, and we do not promise a ranking.
Use a template when you are still proving the offer
A brochure, a campaign page, or a shop that already matches the theme does not need a studio. You edit it yourself. You might abandon it in a year. West’s post is the honest version of that choice: the template was the product test, not the product. His Indie Hackers note does not claim the template outranked a custom site. It claims a faster first URL.
The bill shows up when the theme breaks in public
A WooCommerce shop on the Minimog theme kept serving a normal storefront to visitors while Google indexed Japanese spam and casino posts. The owner noticed on 19 February 2026, chasing a Merchant Center flag. The person who cleaned it up dates the malware files to 22 January and says the hack sat unnoticed for over a month, because nothing looked wrong in the browser. Wordfence’s quick scan reported zero malware. The cleanup write-up does not prove the theme was the entry point. It does show what a pile of third-party code costs you when the public page and the indexed page disagree.
Rainbird’s marketing team hit a quieter version of the same wall. After more than a year of Elementor updates, their agency called the site practically unusable and rebuilt it as bespoke blocks so editors could change a page without a rescue. That is the agency’s case study, not Rainbird’s, and it is not a claim that every Elementor site ends this way. Read it as one rebuild, not a category verdict.
Ask whether you can leave
Wix’s own help page says the site has to stay on Wix servers. The content is yours. The site is not a thing you can host somewhere else. Squarespace will export certain content as WordPress XML, and it will not export the design, custom CSS, or the pages that depend on its own JavaScript. Elementor keeps the layout as JSON in post meta. You can move that JSON between WordPress installs. You cannot hand it to a host as ordinary HTML.
Hand-coded is the longer-lived choice when the page has to do work the theme cannot model, or when you need the repository, the domain, and the deploy in your name. Custom websites and the process describe that handover. A clean build does not buy you traffic. Google ranks the page people find useful, not the stack.
If the template is already the wrong fit, start a project with the constraint that decided it.