Choosing a website template: eight checks before you buy

A template is first judged on a picture. That is natural: the picture is what makes you want it. But it shows neither the mobile version, nor keyboard behaviour, nor page weight, nor what you will be allowed to do with it. Those points can be checked in fifteen minutes, as long as you know where to look.

1. Does the content look like yours?

A restaurant template designed for a twenty-dish menu will not suit a food truck that serves four as is. Before looking at colours, list what your site must contain: number of pages, services, available photos, forms, opening hours, reviews. Then compare with the template's structure.

A good template is built with realistic content: real headings, texts of plausible length, credible prices. Be wary of mock-ups filled with fake Latin: they hide the layout problems that will appear with your real texts, which will be longer or shorter.

2. Does the preview hold up on a phone?

More than half of the visits to a small business website happen on mobile. Open the live preview and shrink the window to 360 pixels wide, or use the preview's size selector. Check three things:

• no horizontal scrolling appears;
• the menu can be used with one hand;
• call-to-action buttons ("Book", "Call us") stay visible without searching.

3. Does everything work with a keyboard?

Press the Tab key from the top of the page. At every moment you should see where the focus is, and be able to open the menu, go through the links and submit the form without a mouse. It is the fastest way to spot a template that neglected accessibility, and therefore part of your visitors.

Look at contrast while you are at it: light grey text on a white background is elegant on a screenshot and unreadable on a phone in the sun. WCAG requires a ratio of at least 4.5:1 for body text.

4. Are the pages light?

A small business website has no reason to load several megabytes of JavaScript. In your browser's developer tools, Network tab, reload the preview and look at the total transferred. Images in WebP or AVIF, fonts limited to two families and few scripts are good signs.

Loading speed matters to your visitors, and to your search ranking too: Google uses the Core Web Vitals signals to rank pages.

5. Does the format match the way you work?

The same design can come in several forms:

Pick the format that you, or whoever will maintain the site, can evolve. A React site handed over to someone who can only edit WordPress quickly becomes a frozen site.

6. Is the code readable?

If the product page offers a source viewer, open a few files. You are looking for understandable class names, semantic HTML (header, nav, main, footer, headings in order) and no unnecessary dependencies. Clean code is modified in an hour; messy code in a day.

7. Does the license cover your use?

This is the most often forgotten question. A site for your own business, a site delivered to a client, ten client sites a year: these are not the same rights. Read the license summary before paying, and pick the one that matches the real use rather than the cheapest one. Our article on licenses covers the common cases.

8. What exactly is in the archive?

The product page should list the archive contents: files, fonts, images, documentation. Check that the demo images can be reused, or plan to replace them, and that documentation explains how to change colours, fonts and the logo.

In short

Spend fifteen minutes with the live preview open: content, mobile, keyboard, weight, format, code, license, archive. A template that passes these eight checks will save you days. One that fails two of them will cost you as many.