Templates have revolutionized how websites are built — a natural continuation of the simplicity offered by today’s CMS platforms like WordPress or Wix. While a template can be immediately appealing, it’s important to understand its limitations and the risks it poses for a professional website.
What is a template?
A template is a pre-designed model that makes building a website easier and faster. It’s also a way for beginners to create a decent-looking website, or to reduce costs and get a low-cost or even free website. While a template provides the visual design, you still need to edit the text and some elements to fit your brand. Paired with a CMS like WordPress or Webflow, modifying the template is straightforward — and the result can closely match what you want to communicate about your services. You’ll also find a huge variety of templates online, covering almost any industry or niche.
The limits of a template
While a template seems attractive at first glance, its limitations quickly become apparent. First and foremost: your design will not be unique. It is virtually certain that thousands of other websites will look exactly like yours — which can seriously undermine your credibility. Moreover, most templates don’t really fit your specific business, even if designed for your industry. You won’t be able to truly highlight what matters most to you, since you’re forced to fill predefined sections without the freedom to genuinely showcase your services. Adding new pages that weren’t planned for the template also becomes complicated, and your site could quickly start to look like a patchwork. Finally, there’s no guarantee that your template is built with clean code and is actually capable of ranking well on Google.
In summary, while a template is an excellent starting point, I can only advise against using one to build a website — unless you know exactly what you’re doing.
Some outstanding template examples
With your success in mind, I want to show you some of the most beautiful templates that will help you retain visitors through a modern, design-driven aesthetic. These are , which are rarely identical from one site to another — especially among French-speaking internet users. And using paid templates further reduces this risk significantly.
You’ll find templates for virtually any type of business, including:
- E-commerce
- Blog
- Photography & Video
- Entertainment
- Travel
- Education
- Sports
- Medical
- Non-profit
- Beauty & Wellness
- Fashion
- Design
- Business
- Technology
- Marketing
- …
You can also find excellent templates on WordPress through :
Or through :
However, since these are WordPress templates built by the largest page builders, they tend to be far more widely used and thus less distinctive than Webflow’s offering.