What a website template does not include: the work that is still yours after you buy

The short answer

A template is the front of a website. Everything a visitor looks at is finished; everything that has to happen after they act is not, because none of it can be written without knowing where the site will live and who will run it.

That is not a defect, and it is not particular to this catalogue — it is what the word template means in this market. It becomes a problem only when the gap is discovered the week of launch. Four things account for almost all of it.

• The forms look complete and send nothing. You supply somewhere for the message to go.

• There is no admin screen. Editing the site means editing the file, so somebody has to be willing to do that.

• Some of the interactive templates fetch their animation library from a public CDN at page load.

• The file is one document with the images inside it, which changes how you host it and how you update it.

The forms: finished on the outside

37 of the 60 templates we can read the source of carry a form — 16 of the 18 classic ones and 21 of the 42 interactive ones. Every one of the 37 intercepts its own submit event and handles it in the page. None of them carries an action attribute, which is the attribute that names the address a form posts to.

It is worth being precise about what that does and does not mean, because the front end is genuinely well built. Take the enquiry form on Meridian: it runs a rule over each field, moves keyboard focus to the first one that fails, and only then reveals a status message — which is the behaviour an accessible form is supposed to have and the part people most often get wrong. What it does not do is transmit. The visitor sees "thank you" and nobody receives anything.

One to catch before launch: the search form on Larkfield answers with a property count generated by a random number, so the same search reports a different figure each time. It is demo furniture, correct for a demo and wrong the moment a real agency ships it. Read what your template does on submit before you hand it over.

Closing the gap is a small, well-trodden job: point the form at a form-handling service, or at an endpoint on whatever platform hosts the site, and keep the existing validation in front of it. Budget an hour, not a sprint — but budget it, and test that a message actually arrives before anybody announces the site.

Nobody can edit it but whoever edits files

We found no content-management system in any of the 60. No admin route, no editor, no build that pulls copy from somewhere else. The words on the page are in the page.

For a single-purpose site that is an advantage: nothing to update, nothing to get breached, no monthly bill, and the site will still open in ten years. For a client who expects to change the opening paragraph themselves on a Tuesday afternoon, it is the wrong purchase, and finding that out after delivery is the expensive way.

The honest question to settle before you license anything here is not technical. It is who will make the next edit, and whether they are comfortable opening an HTML file. If the answer is nobody, either the retainer covers it or the project wants a CMS rather than a template.

What the page loads from somewhere that is not your server

21 of the 42 interactive templates pull their animation library — Three.js, GSAP, or both — from a public CDN when the page opens. No classic template loads a script from anywhere but itself. Typefaces are a separate matter: 36 of the 60, including all 18 classic ones, fetch their fonts from Google Fonts, so almost nothing here is entirely self-contained once it is online.

In normal conditions this is invisible and fast. It matters in three situations worth knowing about in advance: a corporate network that blocks the CDN, a region where it is slow or unreachable, and any environment where an external script is a compliance question rather than a technical one. In each case the page still loads and the scene does not.

The fix is to download the library and serve it from your own domain, pinned to the version the template was built against. It is a ten-minute change, but it has to be a deliberate one, so check the template you are buying: the format line on each page of ours says whether a library is loaded from a CDN.

One file, and what is inside it

Almost everything here arrives as a single HTML document with its images encoded inside it. The sizes fall into two very different groups.

The classic templates are consistent because their weight is photography embedded in the document. The interactive ones are mostly tiny — a scene drawn by a few kilobytes of script — until one of them carries footage or pre-rendered frames instead. Five exceed a megabyte, and Nocturne is 11.2 MB in one file.

Two practical consequences. Updating one photograph means editing the document that contains it, so keep the original to hand rather than only the built file. And a browser cannot cache an embedded image separately from the page, so on a site people return to, moving the heaviest images out to their own files is usually worth doing — the trade is a slightly more complicated folder for a much smaller repeat visit.

What none of these numbers tell you is how the page will feel on a phone on mobile data, because that depends on your host, your images and your visitor. We have not measured field performance for these templates and do not publish a figure we have not collected. The mechanics of that question are in our guide to animation and SEO.

Before you promise a launch date

• Submit every form in the demo and confirm where, if anywhere, the message goes. Assume nowhere until you have proved otherwise.

• Read any result the page generates after a submit, and check it is not demo data.

• Agree who makes the next content edit, and how they will do it.

• Check whether the template loads a library from a CDN, and decide whether to self-host it.

• Find out where the images live — inside the document or beside it — before you plan a photo swap.

• Add the pages a template never ships: privacy, terms, and whatever your jurisdiction requires.

• Set up the analytics, consent and error reporting the template does not include.

If you are also going to recolour it, the companion question — where the brand is stored and how long changing it takes — is counted across the same 60 templates in our rebranding guide.

What this guide cannot tell you

Every count here is from the 60 templates in this catalogue whose source is a single readable document. Two are multi-file projects and are not included in the counts. Other marketplaces package things differently — some ship a CMS, some ship a build step, some ship a backend — so read this as one catalogue measured honestly, not as a law about templates in general.

It also cannot price the work for you. How long the remaining tasks take depends on your host, your stack and who is doing them, and a guide that guessed at your hours would be inventing them.