Chairs, not pixels
For a salon, the template-or-custom question is about how many chairs the website fills. A regular client is worth a visit every four to eight weeks for years. If a custom site books a few more of them a month than a template would, it has paid for its extra cost quickly and keeps paying. If it does not, the template was right. Here is how to tell.
The template
A salon theme or builder layout with your logo, colours, photos and copy, and a link to your booking platform.
Cost: low thousands.
Good at: launching fast, looking like a salon.
Weak at: speed (salon templates are galleries and sliders, slow on phones); a price list that is a page of text or an image rather than editable records; stylist pages without their own Book buttons; booking as a link to the platform's page rather than deep-linked per service and stylist; looking like the other salons on the same template; hosting and domain often with the vendor.
The custom build
Designed around how your salon books: services with prices and durations as records; stylist profiles with Book-with buttons; your booking platform embedded and deep-linked; a fast gallery; built to pass Google's speed thresholds on a phone; structured data; tracking; everything in your name.
Cost: mid four figures, fixed.
Good at: ranking for "[service] [town]", booking in one tap with the right stylist, prices the manager updates in seconds, and reporting what it produced.
Weak at: the invoice, and two to three weeks of build.
Where the extra bookings come from
Speed. A salon template at four seconds on a phone loses a share of visitors before the Book button appears. Most salon traffic is on phones, from Instagram and Google Maps.
Service pages that rank. "Balayage [town]", "men's fade [town]", "keratin treatment near me". A template with one Services page ranks for none. Structured service pages rank for several.
Stylist booking. Clients follow a stylist, not a salon. A profile with a Book-with-Sam button converts followers who arrive from Sam's Instagram. A template sends them to a generic widget where they hunt for Sam's name.
Prices visible. Clients compare. A visible, current price list beside the Book button converts; an image of a price card from 2023 does not.
The arithmetic
A salon with a template site getting 400 visits a month, converting 3 percent to bookings: twelve bookings a month from the site, many of them existing clients who would have booked anyway.
A custom site that is faster, ranks for four service terms and books per stylist might reach 650 visits at 6 percent: thirty-nine. Of the extra twenty-seven, even if only a third are genuinely new clients who become regulars, that is nine new regulars a month. Nine regulars at a typical visit value and frequency cover the price difference between template and custom within the first few months.
At a third of that uplift it still pays back inside a year.
When the template is right
- One chair, just starting, using the booking platform's free profile as the main channel. Template or platform page now; custom when the diary is filling.
- A salon full by referral with a waiting list, whose site is a business card.
- A salon about to move, rebrand or sell within the year.
When the template is a leak
- New clients matter and the salon is in a competitive area.
- The current site takes over three seconds on a phone.
- The price list is an image, and clients ask prices by DM.
- Stylists have their own Instagram followings and the site cannot book them individually.
- The site is on a vendor's hosting for a monthly fee.
Deciding
Three numbers: monthly visits, monthly bookings from the site, and the value of a new regular. If conversion is under 3 percent or the site is slow, a custom build at a fixed price pays back in months. If the site is fast and booking well, keep it and spend on photography.
Our salon sites are custom builds at a fixed price, with stylist booking, editable prices and speed included, because that is the version that fills chairs. The template costs less on the invoice and more on the diary.