Most website builders will have a number of themes or templates available to choose from. Depending on the type of CMS and provider you choose, this can mean slightly different things.

Visual-only themes/templates

For services like Squarespace, the theme is mainly used as a way to organise your layouts on the page and does not really affect the website functionality (ie. you can still do everything no matter what theme you choose). In this case, your choice of theme is not as important and it’s relatively easy to switch later if you need to. In which case the main thing we suggest is to think about how your website will scale if it needs to grow in the future. For example, if every brand you service has its own page (a question we explore for chapter 9), will the theme make it easy to build those pages and keep them looking good but consistent?

Themes/templates with in-built functionality

For other website builders though, the theme is not just cosmetic; it can come with functionality that makes doing certain things easier or harder. For example in WordPress, a travel theme might automatically put a search box on your homepage, whereas a generic theme would require you to find a plugin for this functionality. Some themes may also come with different workflows for laying out a page (eg. some WordPress themes also act as drag-and-drop page builders).

In this case, setting up the theme might be more time-consuming and it’s also harder to switch. Your choice of theme becomes more important. Some things to be aware of:

• Can you use a plugin to do what you want instead of a whole theme?
  It may be hard to find a specific theme with all the functionality you need. Don’t worry though, if there is a marketplace of plugins or add-ons you can extend your website’s functionality this way too, whether you start from a generic theme or one that’s built for websites in your industry.
• Your choice of theme will affect website speed
  Typically, basic themes without a lot of functionality are faster because their coding is leaner. Themes that do everything for you out-of-the box (or have built-in page builders) often do this by loading a lot of code and functionality on every page whether you need it or not, which slows your website down. When we build a website we typically start with a lean theme and only add the required functionality on top of it (however this is more time consuming).
• There’s often a tradeoff between a theme’s functionality and how easy it is to customise
  If you are relying on your theme for a lot of website functionality (eg. that homepage search function), then you may find it difficult to customise. Typically themes with the most functionality also have a lot of options and admin screens and require a steeper learning curve.

Just like picking a website platform, you will need to find a sweet spot between a theme that makes the build easy vs its adaptability and speed/performance. We recommend looking at reviews and example websites built with the theme (see chapter 15 for speed testing).