For a great many businesses a well-chosen template on a good platform is genuinely the right answer, and we would rather tell you that than sell you something larger. The question is whether your site is a brochure or a piece of operational machinery.
Who this is for: Businesses whose current site was built by a founder, an assistant or a marketing hire, and who are trying to work out whether that is still the right answer.
If two or more of these describe you, stop reading and go with that. We would rather you did than spent three weeks discovering it.
The moment the site is taking orders, holding customer accounts, feeding a CRM or gating access to something people paid for, it stops being a page and becomes a system. Site builders make simple things easy and complicated things nearly impossible, and the wall is abrupt when you reach it.
Template businesses ship the same few hundred layouts to millions of sites. That is fine until you are being compared side by side with three competitors on the same template, at which point the only remaining differentiator is price.
Someone maintains it. Usually someone whose job is something else, in evenings, without a specification. It does not appear on any budget line, and it is frequently the single most expensive part of the arrangement.
| Squarespace, Wix, Shopify or Webflow, built in-house | futr | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost to start | Very low | A real project cost |
| Cost to change later | Rises sharply with complexity | Predictable — it was built to be changed |
| Differentiation | Shared with every other user of the template | Yours |
| Automation and integration | Whatever the platform permits | Whatever the business needs |
| Performance and accessibility | Platform-determined | Budgeted and published |
| Who maintains it | Someone whose job is something else | Us, under an arrangement |
The builder is cheaper until the site has a job to do. Our honest guidance is to stay on a template until you can name the specific commercial thing your site is failing to do — take an order properly, feed the CRM, be found for the search that matters, stop embarrassing you in a pitch. Once you can name it, a build has a return you can measure. Before that, it does not.
Often, and it is usually the first thing we look at. Structure, search visibility, performance and conversion can all be moved on an existing platform. We would rather do the cheap version that works than the expensive version that impresses.
Yes. The platform is a consequence of what the business needs, not a starting position. We have migrated stores onto WordPress and built bespoke Shopify storefronts in the same year, because those were the right answers for those businesses.
Tell us what is changing in the business. If the answer is a freelancer, a hire or leaving it exactly as it is, that is what we will say — it costs us one project and saves you a year.