When working on a full-cycle design project or a turnkey website (including layout and content), web developers (and today we’re talking about them specifically) sometimes choose to work with a template. It also happens that frontend specialists use pre-made solutions they didn’t create themselves but found online. Before you frown and think how wrong and terrible that is, ask yourself — how many times in your life have you coded or designed the same thing over and over? How many times have you created almost identical UI elements or made only minimal changes? Or described the functionality and animation of a slider that differed only in size?

That’s why many frameworks come with ready-made themes, templates, and widget sets — not to mention the fact that clients themselves often insist on using a particular CMS with a pre-built site theme. Today, as examples we’ll take Bootstrap and WordPress and explore how justified it is to use templates in web layout. But first, let’s look at some general information to build a foundation.

Pre-made Themes Aren’t So Simple

Bootstrap themes are bundles of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code that provide styling, UI components, and page layouts for use in a web project. In essence, they are pre-built website templates that a developer can customize for their goals (or a client's request) and use. These themes are usually installed into Bootstrap and extend its feature set. If you're already familiar with the framework, you’ll likely recognize parts of the code.

But in this case, to use Bootstrap themes effectively, you need to understand how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript work. You also need to know how to implement interactivity using technologies like PHP, Ruby, Java, .NET, Angular, and so on.

The exception is Bootstrap themes that integrate with an existing CMS like WordPress. In that case, you can simply install them and start working with the content, without touching the code at all. However, you’ll often find yourself editing some code — maybe the menu bar feels too wide, or you’d like the tag line under posts to appear elsewhere (sometimes it's stuck under the ad section). But serious changes in the code usually aren’t necessary.

Types of Templates

Unfortunately, the terms "Theme" and "Template" are often used interchangeably. That’s true in the Bootstrap ecosystem and across the web. What’s called a theme in WordPress is called a template in Joomla, and a skin in DNN (DotNetNuke). This leads to confusion — people end up using the same words for different things or different words for the same thing.

So semantics won’t help distinguish between products. However, when it comes to Bootstrap, there are roughly four types of themes, each with its own set of features:

Now that we’ve clarified what kinds of themes exist, let’s look at their broader benefits.

Speed of Ready-Made Projects

Let’s be honest: many clients request ready-made themes or ask developers to find and customize them simply because it’s… cheaper. With this approach, a frontend developer doesn’t have to build everything from scratch using HTML, CSS, or PHP. All they need to do is install the theme on a CMS and customize it visually through system or theme settings.

But that’s from the client’s side. What are you looking for in templates and ready-made projects? Ideas, at the very least — or the ability to show the client how their future project might look. And when you show these screenshots, you can be fairly sure that most clients won’t even know you're using a template. Plus, ready-made templates allow you to demonstrate interactivity, animations, and other dynamic features.

Practice and Learning Layout

Templates, themes, and UI kits can be great learning tools. They give you the chance to understand where a particular piece of code appears, how files are grouped and organized, and offer insight into new techniques or layout strategies. In this way, using these packages helps you learn how to assemble your own components.

Designers also find cool ideas and UI kits that can blend with different styles. Likewise, developers find ways to describe interactivity, animations, or scripts quickly and efficiently.

Clean Page Code

Some might argue that the code in pre-made themes — especially WordPress ones — is messy or full of unnecessary lines and variable descriptions. But let’s look at it differently. Many developers and designers love creating themes and templates to share online. Some charge for them, some don’t. But in both cases, their goal is to build a reputation as a skilled professional. Recommendations influence their work, orders, status — everything. So they often put effort into making their templates high-quality, which means clean, readable, and easy-to-use code.

You can usually identify such authors and their work by the number of downloads, community discussions, ratings, and presence on official platforms. And of course, if a project hasn’t been updated in years, it’s better to steer clear.

Your Own Team-Up

Finally, themes and templates can help expand your ability to build various site components. Tools and technologies change constantly, and most of them are already used in one theme or another. So when designers and developers work together, they can combine their expertise. Developers describe the logic and structure through scripts and styles, while designers draw and visualize the experience.

Fun Analytics

Great — we’ve established that using templates and themes is useful. It’s also a moment where developers can learn from designers: don’t be afraid to reuse code. There are tons of resources for sharing code, frameworks, plugins, and themes. These are usually communities built around a framework, CMS, JS library, etc.

But designers often rely on inspiration to create something new from scratch. And developers? As someone (maybe Picasso?) once said: “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” Don’t be afraid to use things that way (as long as you’re not violating copyright, of course). Don’t be afraid not to reinvent the wheel. Just focus on the real uniqueness of your work. Then even the wheel will look different — and uniquely yours.

As a result, we often get a funny situation: developers, using all these UI kits, can build projects without hiring designers. Just as designers can install a WordPress theme and skip hiring developers. Developers use kits and some design knowledge to create good-looking layouts — saving time and budget.

One way or another, using ready-made UI kits and having your own collection of reusable components, as well as finding the right snippets and scripts online, makes working on a project much easier. Clients can be... unpredictable, right? So when a client calls you at the end of a project and says: “Hey, what if we changed the whole design to pink? My wife would love it!” — you can just tweak a few color parameters and it’s done. And even if the client later asks you to change all the icons, the frontend developer can handle the sprite swap in seconds, updating a single image rather than rewriting the entire codebase.

Conclusion

So, what’s the takeaway here? Ready-made UI kits, themes, templates, code samples, scripts, and so on save tons of time and effort — effectively doing work you no longer have to do yourself. At the same time, well-structured layouts — especially for small, detailed components — often work better, because their creators have found smart solutions or optimizations you either haven’t learned yet or chose not to use. It happens!

The major downside is that you’ll never be the only one using a particular piece of code. Authors typically sell hundreds or thousands of copies — especially for code (even more so than design), which means others out there will be using the same components. You can avoid this to an extent by customizing or reworking things in your own way. But in any case, it makes life easier for developers.

Another drawback is that these themes usually have a limited feature set. If you need an unusual component, you’ll either have to add it yourself or hire someone to build it. Some theme authors offer paid customization services as an add-on.

Still, using pre-built themes and templates for CMS platforms or frameworks definitely has its place — its own justification, its pros and cons. But one thing always remains true: either make your code unique, or learn to build the same things from scratch. Not to make your life harder — but to gain knowledge and experience.