Template or custom, for a roofing company.
What a $5,000 template build gives you, what it quietly withholds, and when custom earns five figures.
The trade being made
A template build buys speed and a predictable look for $2,500 to $6,000. What it withholds is control of the thing that decides how the site performs: the markup. Page builders emit deeply nested containers, headings chosen for size rather than hierarchy, buttons that are styled divs, and inline scripts per section. Two sites with identical content and very different markup perform very differently, and the difference is invisible in the editor.
Why markup decides outcomes
A crawler, and an answer engine extracting a passage, both depend on structure to know what a page is about. Headings that describe hierarchy, native form controls, and content that renders before any script runs are what make a page legible to a machine. That is also most of the accessibility baseline, which matters when 60.8 percent of roofing homepages ship at least one critical WCAG violation.
Template build against a custom build.
PRICE BANDS FROM PUBLISHED VENDOR RANGES. WCAG FIGURE FROM WEB TONIC ROUNDUP.
When custom earns the money
When the site has to hold structure a template cannot express: separate residential and commercial architectures for two different buyers, per-suburb pages that say something true about each suburb, a claims answer set that can be extended the same day a storm lands, and schema connecting all of it. Below that complexity, custom is an expensive route to the same result and a template is the better purchase.
The failure mode of both
A template fails by hitting a ceiling. A custom build fails by being priced against design hours instead of research, which produces a bespoke site with the same content problem the template had. The question to ask any custom vendor is who researched the queries, and to ask for that research as a document.
What to ask a template vendor
Five questions that reveal how much of the ceiling you will hit.
The migration cost nobody prices
A template build is not a permanent decision, but leaving one is more expensive than arriving. Content locked into builder-specific blocks does not export as clean markup, so a later rebuild pays to extract it. If you expect to outgrow the template within three years, the cheaper path is often to buy the architecture now and the visual build later, rather than paying twice for the same pages.
A middle option that works
Buy the plan, build on the template. A written page architecture, query map, and schema specification can be implemented inside a good theme as far as the theme allows, which is further than most people assume. You get the thinking at $2,500 and defer the five-figure build until the ceiling is actually costing you work.
Related guides.
The direct answer, every published band, and how to work out which one your company belongs in.
Generalist agencies bill $3,000 to $5,000 a month on long terms. Here is what that buys, and what it does not.
What a roofing website actually costs, from DIY to a $50,000 rebuild, with the ranges published rather than quoted on a call.
Want this run on your market?
$2,500, and you find out what is winnable.