Why Custom Code Still Wins
Templates promise speed. They deliver sameness. A case for writing software from scratch in an age of no-code everything.
Why Custom Code Still Wins
Every week, someone asks me why I don’t use Squarespace.
Fair question. Templates are fast. Drag-and-drop builders are accessible. You can have a site live in an afternoon. For plenty of businesses, that’s enough.
But “enough” has a ceiling. And you hit it faster than you think.
The Template Tax
Templates front-load speed and back-load pain. The first 80% is free. The last 20% costs you everything.
Want to move the logo 30px to the left? Sure. Want the contact form to conditionally show different fields based on the service selected, then route to different email addresses, then log to a CRM? Now you’re fighting the platform.
Every template has an opinion about what you should want. When your needs align with that opinion, it’s magic. When they don’t, you’re writing workarounds on top of workarounds.
I’ve inherited projects where the “quick template site” had more custom CSS overrides than a from-scratch build would have required. The client paid twice: once for the template, and again to undo it.
Performance Is Not Optional
A typical Squarespace page loads 2-4MB of JavaScript. A custom Astro site doing the same job loads 50-100KB. That’s not a rounding error — it’s a 20-40x difference.
On a 3G connection in rural Sussex, that’s the difference between a page that loads in 2 seconds and one that loads in 12. For a local electrician whose customers are Googling “emergency electrician near me” from a van, those 10 seconds are lost revenue.
Google knows this. Core Web Vitals aren’t suggestions — they’re ranking factors. A fast site outranks a slow one, all else being equal.
Custom code lets you ship exactly what you need. No unused carousel library. No analytics bundle for features you turned off. No jQuery loaded because the theme was written in 2019.
Ownership
When you build on a platform, you’re renting. Squarespace can change their pricing. Wix can deprecate a feature. Shopify can alter their API.
Custom code on your own hosting is yours. The HTML, CSS, and JavaScript will work in a browser in 2036 the same way they work today. The web is the most backwards-compatible platform ever built.
I’ve seen businesses trapped by platforms — wanting to leave but unable to export their content cleanly, their SEO history, their URL structure. Migration becomes a project larger than the original build.
Start with code you own. It’s slower on day one. It’s faster on day 1,000.
When Templates Win
I’m not a zealot. Templates genuinely win when:
- You’re validating an idea and need something live this week
- Content is the product and you need a CMS with zero friction (a personal blog, a newsletter)
- Budget is genuinely zero and you’re bootstrapping with sweat equity
The mistake is staying on the template after the idea is validated. The MVP becomes the production system. The hack becomes the architecture. Technical debt compounds silently.
The Real Cost
Custom code costs more upfront. But the total cost of ownership over 3-5 years is almost always lower.
No monthly platform fees. No premium plugin subscriptions. No “enterprise tier” upgrade when you need a feature that should be basic. No rebuilding when the platform pivots.
And there’s an intangible cost to sameness. When every competitor’s site looks like it came from the same template library — because it did — custom design becomes a genuine competitive advantage.
Your website is often the first thing a potential customer sees. Making it feel like you, not like a theme with your logo swapped in, matters more than most businesses realise.
Build it once. Build it right. Own it forever.