What is the difference between a site template and a page builder?

When it comes to websites, we often use the anglicisms. If you're not familiar with the language of Ed Sheeran, or if you're more of a Team Académie Française fan, you'll understand ‘Template’ as ‘gabarit’ and ‘Page Builder’ as ‘constructeur de page’.
In the end, their names are pretty clear: the template frames the layout of your site's pages, and the builder lets you build them page by page, with the option of saving layouts to repeat them, to get closer to the benefits of the template. So why use one or the other, and what are the differences?

Website template

This is the basis for the colours, fonts and images used on all the pages of the site. Certain elements are common to all pages, such as the logo, navigation, footer, etc.
The template will enable you to share the code and images required for your website. The result is a coherent, consistent site with relatively few resources. Generally, the website template reflects the graphic identity of the company or brand it represents.

Content template

This part is less often described, but it is extremely important. Depending on the content to be displayed on the page, an appropriate layout will be required. A contact page is not built in the same way as a page presenting a product, or a news listing... Several content templates are generally used on each site.

Advantages of a template

A template is pre-coded by web designers, location by location, and everything is pre-machined for the end user. In concrete terms, an image block is and will remain an image block, it's placed like that, the image will crop or resize itself, its ratio will change according to the type of screen... The same goes for text positions, sliders, and so on.

By proceeding in this way for the whole site, you only code what is useful, guaranteeing lightweight code and a responsive site.

The biggest advantage is that you don't need to know much about the web to manage the content of your site.
All you have to do is open the page you want to modify, fill in a form and save.
Each type of page (news, editorial, marketing, product, etc.) will have its own form. You can then concentrate on the quality of the content of your page, and all you need is some knowledge of office automation.

Disadvantages of a template

It is almost impossible to change the display of the site yourself without going back to the web designer who created it. If you want different displays from one page to another too, it's pretty rigid. Apart from what the text editor allows, you are constrained, and modifying the content template of one page will modify all the others of the same type.

A page builder will provide flexibility

A page builder, as its name suggests, allows you to create/modify the template for each page. All you have to do is click and drag a block of text, a block of images, a block of video... until you have the page you want. There's no need to know how to code, everything is done with the mouse, and it's easy to modify a page without affecting others of the same type. Some even offer ready-made layouts that are ready to use.

Beware of page builders

• You can't improvise yourself as a webdesigner to produce pages that will please both you and your visitors.
• This tool makes it easy to create page layouts, but makes editing content cumbersome and complicated (see next image) - and because of the many parameters to master, it requires knowledge of the web and not just office automation.
• A Page Builder uses a large amount of code and shortcodes, which slow down your site.
• They generate additional costs - some can be bought for life, others are subscription-based.

What should I choose for my project?

To sum up, we would recommend sites based on a made-to-measure template, especially for B2B, and even more so if you don't have in-house resources. It will require less knowledge to administer afterwards. It's tight and rigid, of course, but the guarantee is that the site will be displayed in the long term, while still performing well, even on basic hosting.

If you have a site that needs to evolve over the course of its life OR if you have web-savvy resources OR if you want to regularly create heterogeneous ‘landing pages’, Page Builder is for you - you just need to take the time to optimise the configuration and hosting to avoid ending up with a slow site.

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