Buying a Website Template Instead of Designing One: Is Envato Market Worth It?

A small team without a designer on staff usually has two paths: pay for custom design or buy a ready-made template and adapt it. Envato Market is a marketplace built around the second option.

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Envato Market

Envato Market is a marketplace where independent authors list website themes and templates for sale, covering common site types like business sites, portfolios, and online stores. Instead of briefing a designer and waiting for mockups, a team picks a template that's close to what they need and customizes it themselves or hands it to a developer for a few days of setup work.

Who it's for: small teams or solo founders who need a working, reasonably polished website quickly, and who are comfortable adjusting colors, text, and layout inside an existing template rather than building one from scratch. It also suits agencies who want a starting point instead of building every project from a blank canvas.

What would make you look elsewhere: if the site needs a genuinely distinct visual identity that a template can't fake, or if it depends on integrations and functionality specific enough that no pre-built theme covers them well. In those cases the customization work to bend a template into shape can end up costing more time than starting fresh with a designer or developer.

Browse Envato Market

What to buy first

If the goal is simply to get a functional, decent-looking website live without commissioning custom design, start by browsing Envato Market for a template that matches the site's purpose and see how much of the work it does for you before deciding whether custom design is worth the extra cost.