Most people who end up here want a website soon and would rather not spend a month building one. That is what a template is for. You start from a site that already works, with its pages, menu, contact form and layout for phones all done, and you swap our words and pictures for your own. It sounds simple because it mostly is. The hard part is picking the right one, and knowing what to do once it is downloaded, so that is what this page is about.

What you actually get in a website template

One of our HTML templates is a complete website with sample content: a set of HTML pages, the CSS that styles them, a little JavaScript for things like menus and sliders, and the images. There is no installer and no database. You open the files, edit them, and upload the folder to a web host.

Every template is responsive, which only means the layout rearranges itself to fit a phone, a tablet or a wide screen. This year we went back through the older designs one by one and rebuilt most of them, and a good number picked up booking pages, order emails and the like along the way. You can see exactly what was done to each one in the version history on its page.

Free, and when it is worth paying

All of our HTML5 templates, more than 190 of them, cost nothing, and that includes using them for work you are paid to do. We ask for one thing in return: a small credit link in the footer. If that doesn’t suit a client’s site, you can remove it from a single template for a one-time fee.

Paying makes sense in two cases. The first is the credit link. The second is when you would rather run the site from a dashboard than edit HTML. Our most popular designs also come as WordPress themes, Elementor themes, Next.js templates with an admin panel, and Astro sites. The Pro plan covers all of it for a year in one payment. If you are unsure, start with the free version of the design; you can move to another format later without changing the look.

Choosing the right template

Ignore the colours at first. They take five minutes to change. Look at what the site has to do. A café needs a menu people can read on a phone and a way to book a table; a gym needs a class timetable; a photographer needs big images and an enquiry form; a shop needs product and checkout pages. Our category pages are written with this in mind and point out which templates have which features:

• restaurants and cafés, gyms and studios, salons and fashion, hotels and travel
• companies and consultants, builders and manufacturers, estate agents
• portfolios, photographers, online shops, product launches

Once you have two or three in mind, try their demos on a phone, not just a laptop. Tap through the menu, fill in a form, scroll the longest page. You will usually know within a minute which one you can live with.

From download to a live site

1. Make it yours. Replace the text page by page and the images at the same sizes, so nothing jumps around. Delete any section you can’t fill with something true; an empty testimonials block does more harm than no block.
2. Connect the forms. A static site can’t send email on its own, so point each form at a form service such as Formspree or at your host’s mail script, and send yourself a test.
3. Pick a host. An HTML template runs happily on free static hosting like Netlify, Cloudflare Pages or GitHub Pages, or on any ordinary web hosting plan. The WordPress versions need WordPress hosting, and the Next.js ones need a host that runs Node.js.
4. Check the basics search engines read. Give every page its own title and description, keep one main heading per page, write alt text for your images, and make sure no link leads nowhere.
5. Test, then tell Google. Click every link on a phone and a computer. When you are happy, add the site to Google Search Console and submit its sitemap so it gets found sooner.

A few things we’ve learned

The sites that turn out well from a template rarely owe it to the design that was picked. Their owners wrote their own words instead of keeping the sample copy, used their own photos even when they weren’t perfect, and put the phone number and opening hours where nobody has to look for them. Do those three things and almost any of these templates will serve you well.