How to create a website template that *actually* sells: Our secret to best-selling templates!
Selling website templates (or any digital products) is an amazing add-on to any creative business.
Not only is it a great way to make extra income while doing less work in the long run (hello passive income 👋 ), it’s the perfect transition to finally stop trading your precious time for money, allowing you to actually work on your business rather than just in it.
But while churning out as many template designs as quickly as possible might sound like a totally plausible strategy to bring in more sales, it’s important to remember that quality is key!
Creating a successful website template takes a little more than just giving it your best creative shot. Yes, creativity and good design will take you a long way, but just like any other business, you have to get strategic when thinking about what will actually sell.
A pretty design might look great, but without doing some research and catering to your ideal customers' needs, you might end up with a bit of a flop!
To make sure this doesn't happen and you only come up with your very best work every time, we're sharing our best-seller recipe for template success in our latest chat with our good friend Paige Brunton so make sure to listen up! 👇
How to decide on a winning website template design
Ever wondered what actually goes into designing a best-selling website template? Or how to predict which designs will make it to the top? Here’s a little insider knowledge coming from us:
Looking at our sales (of over 7000 Squarespace website templates!), we can tell you that it's often our most recent releases that are the most popular. These are usually the templates with the freshest designs, hitting all the design trends of the moment!
One important thing to note though, is that staying on-trend with good looking designs is right on-brand for our ideal customers. This may be totally different depending on the ideal client that you are targeting or which industry you cater for! If your target market is lawyers for example, they might be more into a functional and professional template design, than one boasting fun and trendy graphics!
But this brings us to a crucial point: Your template’s success will heavily hinge on how well you’ve catered to your ideal customer.
To help you unpack who to target and how, follow our tips below👇
1- Focus on your ideal customer
Before starting with a template, it is key to have a clear picture of your ideal customer in mind. This will guide your entire template design process from idea to launch 🚀
Start by thinking about who your business' ideal customer is, next get even more specific for each template that you design.
For example, while your business might be targeting female entrepreneurs overall, you might want to niche down each template design to cater to beauticians, yoga teachers, or photographers specifically!
Think about:
Who do you want to sell this template to?
Who are they?
What do they do?
You'll then be able to think of your template design as any other website design project.
Get into your ideal customer's mind and think about:
What is this person like?
What is this person attracted to?
How does this person want to represent their business?
If you get this down, then everything else be so much easier!
Listen to your audience
Another way to pick a winning template idea is to fill a hole in the market.
Look at what you are missing in your template shop (if you have one already), or listen to your clients to see what they are asking for! If one person asks "do you have a template for this?" or "do you have a template that includes something like this?" It's likely another 40 people had the same question but hadn't bothered writing you!
2- Create a customer brief
Next, create an imaginary project brief based on the imaginary customer that you came up with above. Here’s some tips on what you should be thinking about! 👇
Purpose
What will the main goal of their website be?
Will it be to sell products (eg. a candle store)?
Will it be to promote services (eg. a wedding photographer)?
Will it be to showcase a portfolio (eg. an artist or graphic designer)?
Will it be to get people to book into classes (eg. a yoga studio)?
Thinking of the purpose of the website will help you figure out what type of elements and structures you will need to add to your template design.
For example, if you were a photographer browsing along for templates, you probably wouldn’t choose a template without lots of areas where you can add your photos to showcase your work. Therefore if your template was geared at photographers, you would want to include lots of galleries, full-width images, and largely focus on visual elements rather than tons of text.
Audience
Although these do tend to go hand in hand, thinking about who will actually be visiting the final website is just about as important as considering who will be purchasing the template itself.
Will the site visitors primarily be women looking for a beauty treatment? Your template might do well if it appears more feminine.
Will it be professionals? A more straight-edge style might work better.
Will it be men who like to hit the gym? Bold colors and fonts might suit best.
Plan the content
Once your ideal customer, purpose and audience are set, think about what features should go into the template.
While a template for a photographer will need features like galleries, portfolios, contact forms, and testimonials, a template for a yoga studio will instead need a booking system for clients to book into classes, maybe a member area for customers to access virtual classes, or a team member section with a bio for each instructor.
👉 Make a list of all the features your ideal customer would love in a website, or which features would be most helpful for them.
Then take your feature list one step further and divide it up into different pages:
Write down the pages that you will need to create (eg. Home, About, Contact, Shop, Portfolio, Blog, etc.)
Write down what should be included on each of those pages
Do some research and get inspired!
Now comes the fun part: Figuring out all the aesthetic elements that you want to include in your template like color palettes, images, graphics, and fonts! 🎨✨
Create a mood board
To help you come up with a cohesive style, we recommend starting with some mood boarding. Not only will this provide you with some hearty inspiration for the whole vibe of your template, referring back to a set mood board will help you stay on track and facilitate any design decisions you might have to make along the way.
Start by picking a visual platform like Pinterest, Canva, or a free stock photo site like Pexels or Unsplash to start collecting images that feel aesthetically right to you. Remember to keep your ideal client and what style they might like in mind!
Remember to also consider current design trends if that’s something that is relevant and appealing to your ideal client. You can find out what’s trending by having a browse on Pinterest, Instagram, or by checking out trend reports on sites like Creative Market for example!
We recommend collecting at least 10-20 cohesive images of all kinds of shapes, subjects, and textures, to get a well-rounded mood board.
👉 Read our full guide to creating the perfect mood board
Pick colors and fonts
Once your mood board has passed the vibe check, use a tool like Coolors or Canva to easily pick out a couple of different color palette options derived directly from your mood board. This method will work best if your mood board is quite cohesive though you can definitely get creative with it!
We recommend 3-5 colors, including at least one light color, one dark color, and try to make sure they have enough contrast!
👉 Read our full guide to creating the perfect color palette
Next, come up with some font options. Choose one main heading font, and one body paragraph font, and decide if you want any extra fancy fonts like some cursive elements for example.
Squarespace has some great built-in font options so open it up and have a browse through the Site Styles to find the perfect combo. If you don't quite find the perfect match, Adobe Fonts and Google Fonts are great places to find more custom fonts for your template that are free to use and easy to download for your future customers. If the fonts you end up picking are not available within Squarespace, here’s a tutorial on how to custom code them in!
The key with fonts is readability. You want site visitors to be able to distinguish the text as quickly and effortlessly as possible. Any strain to the reader is sure to lead to quicker bounce time away from the final site which is a no-no.
For example, avoid using a swirly handwriting fonts for body paragraphs.
Choose demo content for you template
Having the right demo content in your templates can make all the difference. Even if it's unconscious, customers most often make their final pick based on which template they like the look of most.
If your templates cater to a specific niche, using relevant demo content can help you draw in those particular customers. However, if your templates are more generic, it may be best to avoid using industry-specific content to appeal to a broader audience instead.
If you’ve found images from free stock photos for your mood board you can use them for your demo content as well! If you haven’t, then hit Pexels, Unplash, Kaboompics or Canva and save all the images and videos you think might be a hit for your template. Try to gather a variety of images from abstract backgrounds to portraits of people. Remember to refer back to your mood board and color palette to make sure that your demo content fits the vibe.
With all of these elements and a clear project brief in tow, everything will come together so much faster and you'll be designing a template that you can pretty confidently assume your ideal client will love! 💖
3- Get building!
It’s time to start putting it all together by actually building out your website template on your platform of choice (we love Squarespace of course!).
Remember though, even if you’ve nailed down your ideal client and you know exactly what they want, you still want to make sure your design is high quality! This doesn’t mean that you have to be an expert when you start, but you should always be working on improving your skills and keeping up to date.
Some elements to consider when putting together your template might be:
Responsiveness
Just like any great website, your template should look good and work well no matter what device your customers might be using. As you design the desktop version of your template, make sure to check on and customize the mobile version as well!
Readability
Once you’ve picked your fonts and start inputting them into your template site styles, you’ll see a ton of options to customize anything from weight, font size, to letter spacing. Make sure that all the text is clear, that the front size is not too small or too big making it difficult to read, and that the font colors contrast well enough with any background colors.
Accessibility
It’s important that all websites are accessible to as many people as possible, including those with disabilities. This may be particularly relevant if you want to target your templates at niches like psychologists or other health professionals for example.
Things to consider to make your template design more accessible includes having enough contrast between colors in your color palette and large enough fonts.
👉 Read the ADA website accessibility guidelines here
Navigability
Your template should be super easy for people to navigate. You want to make sure that you include a clear navigation menu with links to the other important pages in your template and call to action buttons throughout!
Easy to customize
You want your customers to be able to customize your template as easily as possible! Avoid heavy custom coding (unless your particular ideal customer is ok with that). Try to make use of your website builder’s built-in features as much as possible and if you really want to include external graphics to give your website some extra pizzazz, use a straight-forward graphics software like Canva rather than Photoshop.
What template resources should you provide?
Providing extensive template tutorials may sound like a great selling point, but in practice this isn't always necessary and may be more work for you than is actually worth.
At the very least, you should provide enough information so that your customers know how to access and use their template, but creating individual tutorials for each of your templates may be a bit overkill and will be painful to update with the frequent (and sometimes unexpected) Squarespace updates.
Given that Squarespace already has an extensive tutorial library available to the public, linking customers directly there can be a worthwhile solution in the meantime.
Tip! Be very clear upfront about what your template includes. This way, customers know exactly what they're getting from the get-go!
4- Promote it!
Hooray! You’ve researched, you’ve curated, you’ve created, and your template is ready to hit your shop (and your customers’ hearts) 💘
To ensure that your new template is a roaring success from the get go, here are some tips to help you get it in front of your audience:
Create content
Long form content, like blog posts or Youtube videos, is a great way to consistently bring eyes to your template shop by providing trusty advice. This will be sure to boost your SEO and searchability, as well as help you build trust and community with your customers by positioning yourself as an expert.
Further, you’ll be able to repurpose this content into posts and reels for your socials or even newsletters, simplifying your marketing strategy ten fold!
👉 How to start a blog with Squarespace
👉 7 blog post ideas to attract more clients
Use socials
These days, having social media accounts specifically for your business is kind of a must! Whether that be Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, or TikTok, pick a platform (or two) to regularly post on and engage with potential customers. Share all about your templates, your daily business routine, and bite-sized nuggets of information straight from those long-form content blog posts we talked about earlier.
👉 How to manage multiple social media accounts (with less stress!)
👉 How to create an organic Pinterest marketing strategy for your biz
👉 How to grow your business and get clients with Instagram
Sell on marketplaces
Marketplaces like Creative Market, Etsy, or Ghost Marketplace are great to get some extra eyes on your template designs with their millions of yearly visitors. Keep in mind that these platforms can charge up to a hefty 30-40% commission on sales so we do recommend still having your own shop to direct customers to (and where you get to keep 100% of the profits!).
👉 Where to sell templates to reach more customers and make more sales
Use freebies
Everyone loves free stuff! Which is why freebies, like quizzes, mini courses, or workbooks, are a great way to effortlessly grow your email list, This not only adds value for your audience but can also lead them to your paid products.
👉 Learn more about growing your email list with a freebie here
Build an email list
You might have heard literally everyone saying that you need to build your email list asap if you’ve got a business. And well, they’re not wrong, because emails tend to have the highest conversion rates!
Unlike the fickle nature of social media and their unpredictable algorithms, you actually own your email list and can reach an audience that actually wants to hear from you and you know is interested in your products every time.
👉 Learn more about email marketing for beginners here
Test your templates
Another way to build up some rep around your templates is to offer new templates that you create to a group of beta-testers for free or at a discounted rate in exchange for some honest feedback. You’ll then be able to use this detailed feedback to either improve your templates as necessary or as testimonials that may quite likely help sway future customers into purchasing!
Collaborate with others
Teaming up with others in your industry or in a niche that your template is aimed at is a great way to increase visibility and reach new audiences. Consider setting up an affiliate program where you give those promoting your templates a small commission for any sales that they bring you, making it a win-win for everyone involved!
How long does a website template take to create?
You can expect the template creation process to take roughly as long as a one-on-one custom design project. While building a template doesn't involve any time-consuming client back and forth, you do need to come up with all the content that a client might usually provide yourself. So if your website design projects generally take two weeks, you can expect the same when creating a website template!
There you have it - insights from a pro on designing popular templates.
Remember, understanding your ideal customer and being clear about what your templates offer are key to success. Happy designing!
If you're interested in starting your own template shop, make sure to check out our super actionable FREE training teaching you our top tips to set your template shop up for success from the very beginning, including:
Why should become a Squarespace circle member;
How to create live demos of your templates (without having to pay for a plan!); and
A full breakdown of exactly how to send templates to your customers with ease!
There you have it - insights from a pro on designing popular templates. Remember, understanding your ideal customer, staying on top of design trends, and being clear about what your templates offer are key to success. Happy designing!
Want more template shop tips? Check out the posts below! 👇
Why you should sell website templates, even if you're booked with clients!
How we sold over 5000 Squarespace Templates: Our best Template selling tips
How to price custom website design and website templates
How to send Squarespace Templates to customers after they purchase
How to create a live demo Squarespace Template (and what to do when the trial expires!)
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