Professional designers know how to align your website with your business goals. As many as 94% of people will distrust a site solely based on poor design. If a user doesn't understand what you are offering in a matter of seconds, they will leave your site.

One problem with do-it-yourself (DIY) site builders is that they limit the capabilities of their site and often restrict graphics and text. Additionally, you'll need to add Call to Actions (CTAs), landing pages, and forms to be effective. Your product's benefits need to be crystal clear and geared toward the customer’s needs.

Website design is not only about how it looks. Color scheme, text, and navigation need to be user-friendly as well. Professional designers know how to make your design unique, unlike the DIY limited and overused template choices.

Custom designers also help the site to be more responsive. A single second delay in your website loading time can result in a 7% loss in conversion, and 40% of web users will abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. As many as 30% of mobile shoppers abandon a transaction if the experience is not optimized for mobile. Responsiveness is key to keeping viewers on your site longer.

Another reason custom web design beats template web design involves website management. Professional website companies have dedicated webmasters who help you to stay current with the latest trends while managing your website. Alternatively, using a template means you'll need to maintain the site yourself. Unless you have loads of time, you'll likely end up hiring someone to do this for you. Costs range from $500-$2,000/year for this type of service.

Furthermore many DIY site builders adversely affect your website by not allowing video,
RSS feeds, or links.

One of the most important reasons to hire a professional to build a custom web design is search engine optimization. Professionals are skilled at researching keywords and integrating them into a website. With Google owning 70% of the search engine market, make sure to optimize your site for keywords both in product and content strategy.

The infographic below highlights 3 Pillars to SEO: usability, relevance, and authority:

• Usability - As referenced earlier, your site must be user-friendly and will also affect your SEO. Optimization of speed, file names, and broken files increases your ranking.
• Relevance -Carefully crafting SEO in the content that is visible to users is important, including meta and alt tags, body text, headings, navigation menus, and links.
• Authority - Earning user trust goes beyond a well-designed website and great content; sharing content on social media and link building will gain user trust.

Want to rank higher on searches? Hire a professional web designer to implement the 3 pillars of SEO.

Websites are ever-evolving. With DIY, you're often on your own - domain holdups,  installing plugins, and paying monthly costs indefinitely to get the site you actually want. How skilled are you at the following: marketing, communication, HTML, CSS, photo optimization, search engine optimization, JavaScript, and possibly several other languages like Flash, PHP, and others?

If you value your time (and want it done correctly), choosing a professional designer is a better choice than DIY. Read this 5-Step Checklist to Website Redesign before you get started with a website redesign to make sure you're ready.

Conclusion

Do you have more than 5 reasons custom web design beats template design? We'd love to hear your experiences and opinions. Please share the infographic below and leave a comment to tell us
what you think!