There is a faster way to make most of the sites I build. Pick a template, pour the words in, swap the photos, done by Friday. I know it well, and I still start almost every project with an empty file instead.

That sounds stubborn. It is really just about who pays for the shortcut later.

A template is a loan

A template gets you moving quickly by making a thousand decisions for you up front. That is the appeal, and also the catch: those decisions were made for a generic site, not yours. The day you want something the template did not plan for, a slightly different layout, a section that behaves its own way, one less thing cluttering the page, you are no longer designing. You are negotiating with someone else's code.

Hand-building costs more at the start and less every day after. Nothing on the page is there by accident, so nothing fights you when you want to change it.

Speed you can feel

Templates carry weight you never asked for: sliders you will not use, scripts for features you turned off, a page that loads three times what it needs to. A site built by hand ships only what it actually uses, which is why it tends to load before a visitor has finished deciding to leave.

Fast is not a feature you add at the end. It is what is left when you never added the things that make a site slow.

When a template is the right call

I am not precious about it. If you need a simple site live next week on a tight budget, and it will not need to grow much, a good template is the sensible choice and I will tell you so. The craft is in knowing which project is which, not in hand-coding for its own sake.

For anything meant to last, to grow, and to feel like yours rather than a theme half the internet is also using, the empty file wins. Every time.

If you want to see what that looks like in practice, the work on this site was all built this way.