Twenty website templates, and what each one is for

How to choose one, and it is not by looking

Pick the template whose sections match what you have to say. Not the one whose colours you like.

Colour, typeface and imagery are the cheapest things to change and the first things you will change anyway. What is expensive is structure. A template that has a priced menu with tabs, or a work history with company logos, or a specification bar under a featured listing, has already made a set of decisions about what a visitor needs to see and in what order. That is the part you are actually adopting.

So the small grey line under each card above is the useful one. It lists what the page is made of. Read those first, find the two or three whose section lists match the things you already have written down, and only then look at the pictures. If nothing matches, the honest answer is that you want a design of your own rather than a template, and that route is below.

One structural caution worth knowing before you fall for something. Siter.io has no CMS and no blog, so a template that looks like it wants a stream of posts behind it will not get one. The CMS and blog row reads No, and the blog-shaped cards in a few of these designs are individual pages you make and maintain by hand. The same goes for a shop. No — listed as upcoming, with no date, so the store designs here are catalogues that show products and prices rather than take payment for them.

The six portfolio templates, and how they differ

Six of the twenty are portfolios — every other category here holds exactly one — and they are the hardest choice on this page because at a glance they all look like the same idea. They are not. The difference is what each one assumes about your work.

• Typographic opens with one enormous word and numbers the projects rather than naming them. It suits work that does not need explaining, where the sequence matters more than the subject.
• Editorial is the serif, centred one. Projects carry real names, and the page expects to be read rather than skimmed — the right shape when the story behind the work is the work.
• Photography is the one that reads like a CV. Counters, a work history with company logos, a skills list naming actual tools, then the images, then a contact form. Pick it when you need to look hireable rather than only talented.
• Case study gives you three wide cards, image on one side and reasoning on the other. It is the shortest of the six and the only one built to be clicked into rather than read to the end.
• Minimal is an availability pill, a paragraph in the first person and links as pills. One image and one paragraph per project, and nothing else. It is the fastest to fill in and the hardest to hide behind.
• Art direction has almost no interface at all. Work falls down the page in a staggered column with the discipline set sideways beside it, closer to a contact sheet than a grid. It carries motion and 3D work better than the other five.

If you are choosing between them and cannot decide, the question that settles it is how much writing you are willing to do. Photography and Editorial want paragraphs. Minimal and Art direction want almost none, and will look thin if you have a lot to say. The structural version of this question has its own page, written for people building their own site rather than picking a starting point.

What a template is here, and what it is not

This is the section most template galleries leave out, so it is worth being plain. Very little about these templates is documented by Siter.io itself. The word “template” does not appear on the homepage, the features page or the pricing page, and the entire help centre mentions it once, as a starter template field you fill in when you add a page to a website. There is no template row in the pricing matrix either, which means no plan documents templates as something you get or do not get.

That absence is why this page describes what is in the screenshots and stops there. The count is the product owner’s own, given with one screenshot per template, and it is stated that way rather than dressed up as vendor documentation. Where something is genuinely unknown, the sentence says so instead of guessing.

• They are not Figma files. Nothing documents these as Figma Community resources or as anything that arrives through the plugin. They are picked inside the app. If you came looking for a .fig file to open, this is not that.
• “Fully editable” is not a claim made here. What is documented is the editor itself — text, image, button, icon, video, form and code tools, plus animations, components and version history. That is a real toolset and it is what you will be using.
• Responsive is your work, not the template’s. Three fixed breakpoints that you lay out yourself. A template gives you the desktop starting point; the tablet and phone versions are a thing you do afterwards, and how that works has its own page.
• Licensing is not documented. Whether a template carries a licence, and what it permits commercially, is not written down anywhere we can point at. If you are building for a paying client, ask before you ship.
• Nothing here is claimed to be fast or SEO-optimised. Those depend far more on what you put in the design than on the design you started from.

What it costs to put one online

The template does not have a price. The publishing does, and this is the honest sequence. No — the free plan builds and previews privately; publishing needs a paid plan. So you can open a template, rebuild it around your own words and pictures, and look at the result for as long as you like without paying — but the moment you want a stranger to be able to reach it, you are on a paid plan, from $7/mo billed yearly.

What comes with that: hosting and SSL included on every plan, a custom domain at no extra cost on paid plans, and the option to remove the Made with Siter badge. Page count is the constraint to watch, because a template that is five pages deep needs a plan that holds five pages. Solo at $7 holds 10 pages and 1 published website; the full ladder, publishing row included, is on the pricing page.

Two more rows worth knowing before you commit a client project to a template. Per-page SEO fields are a paid-plan feature, so the title and description a search engine shows are not something you control on the free plan — that is covered here. And there is the question of getting the markup out at the end. HTML download on Pro only; the contents of the export are not documented, and what that is worth is its own conversation.

If you already have a design in Figma

Then a template is the wrong starting point, and you do not need one. Siter.io’s actual premise is the other direction: you design the page in Figma, bring it across with the plugin, and publish it. Yes, on every plan including free — one-way import, no re-sync, which is the constraint to plan around. It is a one-way trip rather than a live link, so treat the import as the moment the design moves house rather than as a sync you can lean on.

What that means in practice is that the work you would do to a template — replacing the type, cutting sections, changing the order — you do in Figma instead, where you are faster anyway. The Figma to HTML route has a page of its own, and the section patterns behind these templates are broken down separately if you would rather borrow the structure than the design.

Fonts are the usual first casualty of either route, and the answer is the same for both. Yes — upload your own font files, on every plan including the free one, so the typeface in a template is replaceable with your own files rather than something you inherit. The detail is here.

Questions people actually ask

How do I choose a website template?

Match the sections, not the styling. Write down the four or five things your page has to say, then find the template whose section list already contains them. Anything you can restyle in ten minutes — colour, typeface, photography — should not be deciding this for you, and anything structural — a priced menu, a booking form, a work history, a specification bar — should be.

How do I use a template in Siter.io?

The documented flow is per page rather than per site. Inside a website project you add a new page, and one of the fields you fill in is the starter template, alongside the page title, description, link and preview image. From there the page is yours to edit on the canvas, and it goes live when you click Publish. Worth knowing before you commit to a choice: after a page exists, the settings the help centre documents as editable are its title, description, slug and preview image. Changing the starter template afterwards is not among them.

Can I publish a template site on the free plan?

No. The free plan builds and previews privately; publishing needs a paid plan, so a template you build on the free plan is something you and anyone you send a preview to can look at, and nobody else. Publishing to a public URL starts from $7/mo billed yearly.

Are these Figma website templates?

Not in the sense most people mean when they search for that. These are picked inside the Siter.io app rather than opened as Figma files, and none of them is documented as a Figma Community resource or as something that arrives through the plugin. The Figma connection here runs the other way: Siter.io is where a design you already made in Figma becomes a website. If what you want is a .fig file to open and edit, look in the Figma Community instead, then bring the result across with the plugin.

Will a template look right on a phone?

That is your work rather than the template’s. Three fixed breakpoints, laid out by whoever is building the page, so a template hands you a desktop starting point and the phone and tablet versions are something you arrange afterwards. It is not a fluid system that reflows on its own, and planning for that on day one is much cheaper than discovering it on launch day.

Can I use a template for a client project?

Technically nothing stops you, but read the licensing line above first, because there is not one to read. Whether these templates carry a licence, and what it allows commercially, is not documented anywhere we can point at. For your own site that is a risk you can take with open eyes. For work you are invoicing, ask before you ship. The mechanics of handing a finished site over — roles, and moving ownership out of your account — are on the collaboration page.