Understanding Why custom TYPO3 Template Isn't an Ideal Choice

Every day, many individuals, business owners, and marketing executives are teared out trying to decide how much or how little to invest in redesigning their embarrassingly outdated websites. But the choice between a custom website and a template-based website doesn’t have to come with a problem.

We feel you’d be making a new TYPO3 website. Or maybe you’d be redesigning your current one and presumably, have a wide range of thoughts regarding how you need your website to look and what sorts of cool impacts you need on it.

You begin exploring the templates, even the most well-known one with unlimited options, however, it doesn't have that exceptional something you need.

You begin to wonder internally, "I'm sure it would be a better option that I hire a TYPO3 person to develop the entire TYPO3 website from the start with a custom template so it looks and acts precisely as I need."

Do. Not. Do. It! The measure of overhead and upkeep that will be required will transform your fantasy into a bad dream.

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Don’t believe us? Read this blog to know why with detailed case study of both the cases!

Why custom TYPO3 Template is not best choice

What’s The Difference between Ready Made TYPO3 templates and Custom built TYPO3 templates?

A Ready Made TYPO3 template is something you buy from a Shop such as T3Planet. These are meant to be sold over and over again to suit your business needs.

Custom-built TYPO3 development is the process of wireframing, designing, and developing a custom website to fit your business needs by TYPO3 freelancers or by a TYPO3 agency.

Factors that affect the selection of TYPO3 Templates

	Ready-Made TYPO3 Template	Custom Built TYPO3 Template
Costings	Feasible	High
Business goal	Meets specific needs	Meets specific needs
Brand identity	Matches	Matches
Time constraints	Swift Development	Takes too long to develop
Flexibility to customization	High	Cannot be determined
Options and variance	Unlimited	Not possible

TYPO3 Templates, TYPO3 Decision Makers and TYPO3 Community

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Considering feasibility and cost as a factor, people drop the idea to proceed with TYPO3 and move to WordPress due to ready-made template variances and it’s cost-effectiveness.

If you ask for estimations of custom development of a TYPO3 template to a TYPO3 development with the required functionality. We bet the cost would be much higher than a ready-made TYPO3 template.

The custom design and development is of course that the starting price is much higher, typically ranging from $2,000 to $8,000, depending on your needs and desired outcome. Of course, the more pages, forms, and templates you have, the more costly the web design will be.

But why to do so? A ready-made TYPO3 template with revolutionary features like that of T3 Karma would cost you $500. It is more feasible than a custom-designed TYPO3 website.

IMHO, TYPO3 needs more TYPO3 templates! Because why not!

Since the beginning of the TYPO3 core and community, people have not thought more of TYPO3 templates and has focused more on other important features like rich content, user access, and roles, workspaces, install tool, etc., And that’s completely fine, but now it’s time to make it happen because why not!

T3Planet has been a pioneer to be a home of TYPO3 templates for your every need.

TYPO3 is truly an amazing OpenSource CMS with more than 1000+ backend features, no other CMS have such numerous features in their CMS-core. Feeling proud of the TYPO3 Community. BUT, one thing is missing, the official and common way to develop the TYPO3 Templates Builder system, and hence we say [Wanted] Official TYPO3 Templates Builder Since 20 Years!

Valid 8 Reasons why TYPO3 Custom Template Development is not an ideal Choice

#1 You need to keep paying to have it updated.

You may have budgeted for the initial development of the custom template, but did you budget for having its code updated by your TYPO3 Development partner? If your custom-built template is not maintained, checked, and rewritten regularly by a developer, it leads to bugs, security vulnerabilities, and incompatibilities.

In our journey as TYPO3 solution providers, we come across TYPO3 website relaunch due to incompatibility with PHP versions. PHP 7.4 is currently the recommended version for TYPO3 and comes with a TON of performance enhancements that aren’t available with older versions of PHP.

However, if your theme isn’t updated to be compatible with PHP 7.4, it will start causing a lot of problems for your website if your server’s PHP version is updated to 7.4.

TYPO3 core updates should be kept track of. When new TYPO3 versions are released developers test their templates and extensions to make sure they work with the updated TYPO3 version.

If your template is not maintained and regularly updated by the TYPO3 developer who wrote it, your website can degrade.

#2 Template May Not Work With Popular Extensions

One of the most common issues we face at service based agencies is the security and compatibility break issues. Premium ready made templates are to be sold to numerous customer audiences and are used at many websites, and have been tested to work well with all of the top and necessary TYPO3 extensions by TYPO3 vendors.

Imagine you have a brand new website, custom built and best in appearance. Then you add an extension to optimize SEO and the CSS breaks. So you remove it and try a different SEO plugin, and then the navigation vanishes.

On the other hand, a custom developed template won’t be tested to work with all of the top extensions until you try to use them on your site. At which point, they may break your website.

#3 It might not be well coded.

When a template is built by a TYPO3 vendor for TYPO3 Shop, it is used on many websites, customers report issues to the developers on a regular basis and that leads to better code and template enhancements.

However, a custom-built TYPO3 template is only being used on your website alone for you. The only person to check and verify template’s code are you and whoever developed the template. In these situations, several bugs can negatively impact your site via malware, site performance issues, or both.

#4 Expensive Approach

Custom TYPO3 template development could charge you up high bills. TYPO3 design and development from scratch with the desired functionality could cost you thousands of Euros. Yet for a little customization, you need to reach to the developer you partnered with for changes and modification, down point it would be done on developer's availability. Not to forget you will be charged for every change or even correction you wish to make.

Whereas the ready-made TYPO3 templates start from 49 Euros to 599 Euros. You can go through the template demo and check if the template satisfied your needs. Ready-made TYPO3 templates are built to be scalable and even if you face any issues, generally the template comes with a limited period of free support but you can go for extended support for a few dollars for companionship and support for the template.

#5 Time Consuming

In custom design, you need to have patience and time because it takes time to develop a website from the scratch – developing a layout, implementing and element building in TYPO3 back end, and building a website (images, videos, graphic design, backend coding) and the final touch with quality assurance and testing requires a great amount of time.

I’ve seen custom TYPO3 development last from two months to over a year! How long are you willing to wait for the couple of special features and layouts you simply can’t live without? Is it worth the wait?

Thus for a business website to launch quickly, a Ready-Made template is perfect for you. It is pre-developed, designed, tested, and used by numerous customers. You just need to download, install, customize and you're ready to go!

#6 Core Updates Can Break Them

Recently, we came across a client project that was custom-built by some developer they lost touch with. Specific problems we found included:

The navigation was showing up twice on desktop, one standard dropdown menu and another in the “hamburger” menu which was built for mobile views only
Pages had vanished
Several images suddenly broke and would not load
Internal links lead to 404 pages when the destination pages still existed
Some of the page templates stopped loading the way they were originally built, and formatting was all over the place (fonts, colors, margins, etc.)

There were other minor issues, but these were the big ones. We dug for a long time to figure out what happened. Finally, we came to the conclusion that problems started with one of the major TYPO3 core updates that have been performed.

We tried to get in touch with the original developer, but we were unable to reach them. As I mentioned earlier, they were either uninterested or incapable of fixing the problems, so they simply decided not to respond.

Of course, our recommendation was to move off a custom theme. It was the only reasonable answer in this case. Major TYPO3 Updates or customization can break the look, feel, and functionality of your TYPO3 TYPO3 website.

#7 You’re paying someone to reinvent the wheel

When someone is creating a completely custom theme for you, they’re doing something that has already been done and perfected by many others. No matter how good of a developer they may be, they are still having to unnecessarily write code that would not have needed to be written if you had instead started with a ready-made TYPO3 Template.

When editing a readymade template to fit your design needs, there is no need to hire a developer for you to make changes, plus you avail free support for the initial period of your purchase to utilize.

Even if you need customizations, the amount of coding needed is significantly less than what would be required to create the template from scratch. The difference in time and cost isn’t counted in minutes and hundreds of dollars, but rather in hours and thousands of dollars.

The amount of time and money spent reinventing the wheel could instead be used to perfect your business services or for marketing.

#8 Template Options and Variance

Let’s understand this point by taking an example of T3Terminal, there are 50 plus TYPO3 Templates for sale.

That is a lot to choose from and have quality themes there for pretty much every industry. This gives you a great starting point for your business and can even help provide some inspiration!

Whereas for custom TYPO3 templates, you won’t be able to have variance.

Customer Case Study: Custom TYPO3 Template Vs Ready-made TYPO3 Template

The points stated above may have helped you to clear your confusion. If not, we have a real customer diary for you.

Customer Requirement:

A parent group of companies needed to develop a TYPO3 website that displays a variety of niche services and businesses they needed to showcase. Some of their businesses were textile, automobile, Retail services, education (colleges), stock market services, and manufacturing firms.

They required a website template that can satisfy the look and feel of all the individual niches from a single website i.e from a parent website that showcases their businesses and on clicking an individual business it redirects users to its specific website with different looks but same structure.

Custom Template Development approach:

Following were the time and cost estimations for the requirement to develop everything from scratch,

Development Time: 2.5 to 3 months (300 hours approx)

Cost: 9000 Euros (300 hours of development with €30/hr)

Ready-made template (T3 Karma) approach:

When the customer got aware of T3 Karma, the ultimately multi-purpose template with hundreds of elements and website layouts, here are the estimations,

Development Time: 0 hours

Cost: €499

The template was the fruitful option to the customer and he proceeded happily for it. Why should one pay more price than it actually is.

We hope this case study would have cleared your confusions and you’d have a right direction to think!

From where can I get Ready-Made TYPO3 templates?

Unlike WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, TYPO3 doesn’t have many TYPO3 Templates available.

But T3Planet has taken the initiative to build flexible TYPO3 templates for TYPO3 lovers.

You can find TYPO3 Templates from

T3Planet TYPO3 Shop
TER (TYPO3 Extension Repository)

We welcome you to partner as a TYPO3 vendor at the shop to share your amazing TYPO3 products with the lovely TYPO3 community!

Wrapping Up!

You may love your fancy custom website, but I recommend avoiding a custom TYPO3 template if at all possible. You can now easily identify the perks and differences between getting exactly what you want and saving time and money after reading this article.

And to be honest, some non-custom templates can be purchased for as little at $45 on T#Terminal, so shop around before picking your best template.

It may not seem like a custom theme is too expensive to get the features and design you want, but when you factor in all the hidden costs listed above, I hope you will consider using a well-supported readymade commercial TYPO3 template. We wish you to please consider the future of your website!

What are your views on it? What do you think? Leave us your views in the comment section below!

Would you prefer a Ready-made template(s) or a Custom one for TYPO3?

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Dhyana Chauhan

Tech Expert & Customer Manager

Dhyana Chauhan is the customer support manager at T3Planet, having vast experience as an technology lead who loves exploring everything that’s in trend, especially TYPO3. Being a TYPO3 fanatic, in her free time, she loves…