When building a WordPress website, one of the first major decisions you’ll face is choosing between a prebuilt theme or a starter theme. Both options come with their own set of advantages and challenges, depending on your project needs, customization requirements, and development resources.
What is a Prebuilt Theme?
Prebuilt themes are fully designed and functional WordPress themes that can be installed and activated right out of the box in just a few minutes. These themes come with various layouts, design elements, and preconfigured options and even demo content that allow you to get a website up and running quickly.
- Ready-made designs: Prebuilt themes usually come with several design options, often targeted to specific industries such as blogs, eCommerce, portfolios, or corporate websites.
- Customization options: Most prebuilt themes allow for some degree of customization through theme settings, widgets, and page builders.
- Functionality: Prebuilt themes come with lots of built-in functionality, such as sliders, portfolios, and even integrated plugins for SEO, performance, and social functions.
- Ease of use: Designed with ease in mind, prebuilt themes are typically suited for non-developers and DIY website owners looking for a quick, off the shelf solution.
What is a Starter Theme?
A starter theme (sometimes called a skeleton theme) is a minimalistic theme framework designed to give designers and developers the building blocks they need to create custom WordPress sites. Unlike prebuilt themes, starter themes offer very little in the way of prebuilt layouts or styling, giving developers complete control over the design and functionality through either their visual page builder or custom code.
- Bare-bones foundation: Starter themes provide just the basic structure of a WordPress theme without any heavy design elements or pre-configured features built-in.
- Highly customizable: Since starter themes don’t impose any design choices, you have full control to build out the theme from scratch, adding your own blocks, layouts and code.
- Lightweight and fast: Without the overhead of excess features and design elements, starter themes are almost always faster and more performance-optimized compared to prebuilt themes.
- Developer-friendly: These themes are geared toward experienced designers and developers who want a clean slate to create highly customized websites that provide a unique use experience for frontend users.
Comparing Prebuilt Themes and Starter Themes
- Development Time
- Prebuilt Themes: One of the biggest advantages of prebuilt themes is their quick deployment. With a prebuilt theme, you can have a fully functional website up and running in just a few clicks, most of the work is done for you. The design, layout, and many of the features are ready to go right out of the box. This drastically reduces the time it takes to launch a website, making prebuilt themes ideal for projects with tight deadlines or very limited budgets.
- Starter Themes: Starter themes are designed for true designers and developers, and they require a good understanding of WordPress right off the bat. If you’re not familiar with WordPress, you’ll likely struggle with building a site using such a theme. While the end result may be exactly what you want, the time investment can be substantial, especially for complex websites.
- Customization and Flexibility
- Prebuilt Themes: While prebuilt themes offer customization options like changing colors, fonts, and layouts, your control is often restricted by the theme’s design, layout limitations, and any integrated page builder. You can make adjustments to certain elements, but unless you’re comfortable editing theme files or navigating the visual builder, making significant changes beyond the provided options can be difficult. If your design requirements go beyond what the theme supports, it could end up costing more than just starting with a starter theme from the beginning.
- Starter Themes: When it comes to customization and flexibility, starter themes shine. Since they provide only the bare minimum, you have complete control to build out the design, layout and functionality exactly as envisioned.
You can take a traditional website development approach by first having your site designed in a tool like Figma, a web design program, and then having your team develop it from scratch using a starter theme. You can create custom layouts, integrate complex functionality, and fine-tune every aspect of the website.
- Performance and Scaling
- Prebuilt Themes: One of the drawbacks of prebuilt themes is that they are almost always bloated with unnecessary features, such as extra scripts, plugins, and design elements because they are trying to provide everything to everyone. This leads to slower load times, increased resource usage, and performance issues, especially as a website grows in audience or complexity. Prebuilt themes are typically not recommended for professional businesses looking for a long-term solution.
- Starter Themes: Since starter themes are minimalist by nature, they are almost always much lighter and faster than prebuilt themes. You only add the functionality you need, which keeps the website lean and efficient. For developers focused on optimizing site performance, skeleton themes offer a significant advantage.
- Cost
- Prebuilt Themes: Prebuilt themes are typically affordable, with many available for a one-time purchase or annual subscription. You can also find free themes in the WordPress repository, though premium themes usually come with better support and more features. However, they remain cost-effective only if you plan to use the theme as-is. If you need to make significant modifications or work around the theme’s limitations, costs can quickly escalate to cost more than if you had started with a starter theme.
- Starter Themes: While starter themselves are often free or included at no extra cost with most commercial paid page builders, the cost comes in the form of development time. Unless you’re an experienced designer or developer, you may need to hire someone to build out the site for you. This can quickly become expensive, depending on the scope of the project.
- Support and Updates
- Prebuilt Themes: Most premium prebuilt themes offer customer support and regular updates, which is a significant advantage for non-technical users. However, many of these themes are designed with a limited lifespan, and as they age or sales decline, support may eventually be discontinued. Additionally, because they often rely on proprietary, smaller page builders or need to maintain compatibility with third-party builders, updates can pose a higher risk of breaking the site.
- Starter Themes: Starter themes are often maintained for the life of the project. This is especially true for visual page builders and since there are only a finite number of page builders compared to themes, these themes tend to stay maintained for longer than prebuilt themes. Plus due to being less complex themes, updates tend to be less likely to break or require more effort to update.
Which Should You Choose?
Deciding between a prebuilt theme and a starter theme comes down to your specific needs, skills, and resources.
- Choose a Prebuilt Theme if:
- You need a website up and running very quickly.
- You have limited coding experience and are trying to DIY the website build.
- You’re working with a very small budget.
- You won’t ever need much in terms of layout or functionality customization.
- Choose a Starter Theme if:
- You’re a WordPress expert or plan to use a WordPress agency.
- You want a custom web design or plan to design in something like Figma or Adobe XD.
- You want more control over the design and functionality.
- You’re focused on performance optimization.
- You’re willing to invest time in development.
- You want a fully customized and unique user experience on your website.
Both prebuilt themes and starter themes have their place in WordPress development. Prebuilt themes are a great option for DIY users looking to quickly set up a professional-looking site with minimal effort, while starter themes provide the foundation to build highly customized, performance-optimized websites.
At Inspry, we work almost exclusively with starter themes as you might expect.
Need help deciding which approach is best for your project? Contact us and we’d be happy to discuss your options!
