Before You Buy a Website Template: The Checklist Nobody Gives You

Here's a pattern I've watched play out more times than I can count. Someone buys a website template on a Tuesday evening, full of momentum. They open the editor. They look at the first text box, the one that says "Your headline goes here," and they go to get their actual words, and realize they don't have them yet. Or they go looking for photos and find three blurry ones from a work event in 2022. The tab stays open. Then it doesn't.

Three weeks later, the template is still sitting there, half-started, and the guilt about it is somehow worse than not having a website at all.

This isn't a willpower problem. It's a sequencing problem. A template gives you the shape of a website; the layout, the structure, the places where things go. It was never going to give you the actual content that fills those places, and that content is usually the part that takes the longest to pull together. If you open the editor before that content exists, you're not customizing a template anymore. You're staring at a blank-page problem wearing a template's clothes.

So before you buy a website template, here's what's actually worth having ready.

Before you buy a website template, gather these four things

1. Your words, even rough ones

You don't need finished copy. You need a messy first draft of the things every site needs to say: what you do, who it's for, how someone gets in touch, and the one sentence you'd say if someone asked "so what do you actually do?" at a party.

A good trick: open your phone's voice memo app and talk through those four things out loud, like you're explaining it to a friend. Transcribe it later. Spoken explanations are almost always clearer and less stiff than what people write when they're trying to "sound professional."

2. Real photos. Not stock, not someday-photos

Template demo photos are doing a job: they're showing you what the layout looks like with photography in it. They are not included when you buy the template, and they're not meant to be your actual site either. You'll need:

• A photo of you, if you're the face of the business. Doesn't need to be a professional headshot, a clear, well-lit phone photo works

• 3–5 photos of your actual work, space, or product

• One photo that could work as a background or hero image. A bit of breathing room around the subject helps here

  
  

If you genuinely have zero usable photos, that's worth knowing before you buy, not after. It might mean a photo session needs to happen first, or that you lean on a style of layout that needs fewer images.

3. Your brand, or at least your colors and fonts

You don't need a finished visual identity to buy a template. Templates come with their own colors and type already set up, chosen on purpose, working together. But if you do already have brand colors, even just "I know it's this green and this cream, write down the hex codes if you have them, or save a photo of something that has the exact colour you mean. "Sort of a sage green" means something different to everyone who reads it.

If you don't have brand colours yet, that's completely fine. Use the template's. That's what it's there for. Don't let "I should probably get a logo first" be the reason this stalls for another six months.

4. The practical details, written down in one place

• The email address your contact form should actually send to

• Your service names and starting prices, even if they might change later

• Links to your social profiles, if you want them in the footer

• Your business address, if you have a physical location

None of these are hard to find individually. The problem is never finding them, it's remembering you need all five, one at a time, mid-edit, and losing momentum every time you have to go hunt one down.

The short version

Before you open the editor, you want: your words (even rough), 3–5 real photos, your brand colors if you have them, and your contact details in one place. Gather those first, and your first session in the editor becomes "place the things I already have" instead of "create everything from nothing while also learning new software."

What if you're just not going to have time for any of this?

That's a real, common answer, and it's worth being honest about rather than buying a template and letting it sit. If gathering your own content and doing the setup yourself isn't realistic right now, that's exactly what a customization service is for: you send what you have, even if it's incomplete, and someone else does the setup around it. I wrote a full comparison of the two paths if you're trying to work out which one actually fits your week — DIY vs Customization: Which One Is Actually Right for You.

Get the checklist

I turned this into an actual one-page checklist you can print or keep open while you shop, five short sections, with space to jot down what you've got and what's missing before you buy anything.

Before You Buy a Website Template checklist

5 short sections to help you move forward

download for free → Before You Buy a Website Template Checklist