Ready-made or a Custom Magento Theme - Which one should you choose

by JONATHAN PAUL Jonathan Paul working at PHPProgrammers, a leading

Got a Magento project? Have you decided which theme you want for the store, a readymade one or a custom-made theme? If you are confused then know the pros and cons of both shared by an expert in Magento development in Sydney and choose the right one for your project.

Got a big Magento project to build? Need to drive the maximum leads and sales through the store design? The first thing you need to consider for this is your store’s UI. An interactive, simple, and creative UI can turn the maximum visitors into your permanent customers that can in turn lead to a tremendous increase in sales.

A visually appealing eCommerce site can encourage customers to buy more. But with this context, again a question arises and that is which kind of theme must be used for the storefront to attract the maximum customers - a ready-made theme that may not be a unique one or a custom theme that is always unique and designed according to the business needs? Though it has been seen that ready-made themes look quite attractive, custom themes with the business-specific designs, on the other hand, have always proved to engage more customers resulting in more revenues and better prospects for the store.

To help you out, a skilled professional of Magento development in Sydney has unfolded the pros and cons of both the themes here. Take a look.

Ready-made Magento themes:

Getting ready-made theme designs can be a good solution for those who are beginners in Magento development field. If you have studied the platform in details then you must have come across the tons of themes available in Magento that you can simply download, install and customise for your project. However, in this case, also, you have some pros and cons. Owing to both, let’s begin with its pleasant side.

The Pros:

Affordable: - Working with ready-made themes can be easier, faster, and affordable.

Support: - As these themes As these ready-made themes are created by designers across the world, it is more likely to get support from them if you encounter any kind of issue while implementing or customising the theme for your project.

It needs less time to implement: - Basically, even if you not an expert designer or developer, you can easily use and implement a Magento ready-made theme in your project by directly downloading the theme, installing it, and then applying the same for the store-front. Just a couple of hours is all you need to get the entire thing done.

Comes with in-built features and UI elements: - The ready-made Magento themes come with in-built features like blogs, the main-menu, categories, etc. So, with this, you don’t have to create anything on your own except making some changes in the names given there.

Cons:

No uniqueness: - As it is an in-built theme, all companies and developers handling different Magento projects can access them and it might also happen that two different developers managing two different projects for different businesses choose to work with the same theme. In simple words, there is no uniqueness.

Limitations in customisation: - If you are using any ready-made theme, you cannot expect to customise the whole thing. You cannot change all the features and elements in this case which limits the customisation options.

Now, let’s talk about Custom-made themes:

If you want to create your own design for your Magento store, go with custom themes. This option gives you the freedom to use your own ideas and creative skills within your budget. But this too has some advantages and disadvantages.

The Pros:

Lets you maintain uniqueness: - Your store’s success directly depends on the originality of the store. If you can create something unique and interesting, you can surely grab the attention of more customers and can ensure a great experience to your online shoppers.

Full control over the look and functionality of the site: - If you are the creator of the store design, you will have full control over the changes needed to be made to make it look better.

SEO-friendly codes: - When you are writing the design codes on your own, you can get the option of using SEO-friendly codes to make the design and the overall store optimised for better rankings, higher ROI, and more customers.

Cons:

Time-consuming: - As you have to create the entire theme including the elements, features, menu, functions, etc., it will obviously take a long time as compared to the ready-made ones that are already built-in and are ready to use.

Sometime may cost you higher: - It may sometimes happen that you have to cross the budget given to you while fulfilling your client theme design requirements. But this may not be the case always.

Now that you know almost all the aspects of both the ready-made themes and custom themes of Magento, you can choose anyone as per your projects and your client requirements.

Jonathan Paul is an experienced developer of a reputed company for Magento development in Sydney, PHPProgrammers. The author has written this article highlighting the pros and cons of both a custom-made theme and a ready-made theme to help developers choose the right one every time for their Magento projects.