What Is a Website Template?

Whether you’re building a virtual portfolio, starting a blog, or launching an online store, using a website template can help you turn your dream website into a reality. 

Website templates are pre-designed layouts that allow you to arrange content onto a web page to quickly create a well-designed website. You can drag and drop elements like image blocks, photo galleries, logos, and more into the template to make it your own. With a website template, absolutely no coding experience is required to create a high-quality website design customized to your brand’s needs. 

Read on to learn more about how website templates work and the benefits of using templates, whether you’re a seasoned developer or building a website for the first time.

How do website templates work?

While creating a website from scratch might sound like a lot of work, using a template can help you quickly get started with a homepage. 

When choosing a website template, keep in mind the purpose of your website as a whole. You can choose a template specifically designed for a small business website, for freelancers showcasing artwork, or page templates for displaying blog posts. Once you’ve chosen a website template that’s tailored to your needs, you can decide how and to what extent you want to customize your website’s functionality and design template. 

You can stay as close to the original template design as you’d like, simply swapping out the demo content with your own images and text. You can also venture outside the original design of the template by adding your own page content, header and inline images, color palettes, and fonts. 

If you have some web development experience, you can take your customization even further by adding CSS code to your new website. Using website templates gives you a head start on the design and development work, so you need less custom code to create the user experience you want.

What are the benefits of using a template? 

A website template is a simple way to create a polished, professional online home for your brand or business. Rather than spend time or expense on building your own website from scratch, website building templates set you up for success. Most website builders also come with tools to help you with search engine optimization (SEO), responsive design for viewing on mobile devices, and plugins for ecommerce and marketing.

Templates can also be a powerful tool to help larger businesses to stay on brand while scaling website production across their organization.

Templates as a design system

As a business owner, it’s important to customize your website template in a way that aligns your online presence with the overall branding of your business. Even if you’re creating a personal website or online portfolio, the template you choose can act as a design system to help your content stand out. 

You can make a layout your own by using your own custom color palettes and fonts in your web templates. Incorporating brand colors and fonts into your website template will give your website a polished look that is consistent with your other online profiles, like your social media presence. 

Customization options

Because most website templates are designed with simplicity and ease-of-use in mind, no coding is required to create a website that looks both professional and visually stunning. 

However, for those who do have coding experience, website templates can still be a viable option. Even when using a template you can access the underlying code of your webpage to modify the existing template or even create your own. Squarespace’s flexible grid editor, Fluid Engine, simplifies the process of making straightforward edits to your website.

If you’re ready to launch your online presence and think a template is the right way to go, Squarespace has plenty of options. Start a free trial to choose from our best-in-class template library or build your own custom template, explore our curated designer color palettes and font packs, and more.

This post was updated on February 1, 2023.