Free website templates: what to check before you use one
Free templates are genuinely good now. The cost has moved from the price to everything around it — what the licence says, what the markup weighs, and whether it is still yours when you outgrow the builder it came from.
Free website templates used to mean a compromise you could see. That is mostly over — the free end is now genuinely good, and the real cost has moved somewhere less obvious.
Here is what to actually check, in the order that saves the most time.
1. What the licence lets you do
Read it before you fall in love with the design. The three things that matter: can you use it commercially, do you have to keep an attribution link, and can you modify it.
An attribution requirement is not a scandal — it is the deal — but it is better known on day one than on the day a client asks why their site credits somebody else.
2. What it weighs before you add anything
Open the template's own demo and watch it load on a phone connection. A template that is slow empty will not get faster once you add your photographs.
The usual culprits: four webfont weights where two would do, an animation library used for one fade, and a hero image nobody resized.
3. Whether the type survives your content
Templates are designed against perfect copy. Yours is not perfect copy.
The test: put your actual longest headline in. Then your actual shortest. A template built for a six-word headline often breaks at fourteen — the hero collapses, the nav wraps, a card grows past its neighbours.
Do this before you commit. It takes two minutes and it is the single most common reason a template that looked perfect feels wrong a week later.
4. What it does on a phone, not what it says it does
"Fully responsive" is on every template ever published. Open the demo at phone width and check three specific things: does the page scroll sideways, is any tap target smaller than about 44 pixels, and does the navigation actually work with a thumb.
Sideways scroll on a phone is the most common defect in free templates and the most annoying to fix afterwards, because it is usually one element with a fixed width buried three levels down.
5. Whether a person using a keyboard can get through it
Tab through the demo. You should be able to see where you are at every step. If focus vanishes — a very common failure on templates with custom menus and modals — it will fail for real users and it will fail an audit.
6. How much of it is really yours
This is the one that matters in year two rather than week one. Ask where the template runs. A template that is a folder of HTML and CSS is yours in a way that a template locked to one builder's rendering service is not.
7. Whether it was designed or assembled
The tell is the spacing. Assembled templates have sections that each look fine and do not agree with each other — different padding, different measures, three type scales. Designed ones hold a rhythm down the whole page.
Scroll the demo slowly, top to bottom, and watch only the gaps between sections. You will see it immediately.
On DragGo's free shelf
DragGo's market carries templates, sections, blocks and themes, official and community-made, and a large part of it is free. The ones in this article are templates, but the more useful thing for most people is the section shelf — you rarely need a whole new site, you need a better pricing block or a footer that does its job.
Everything opens in the editor rather than downloading as a zip you have to wire up, and what it produces is static HTML and CSS you can host anywhere. Which is the answer to check number six.
Free templates whose output is yours. Static HTML and CSS you can host anywhere. No runtime, no lock, no attribution link. Browse the free shelf.
The shortest version
If you only do two of these: put your real headline in it, and open it on a phone. Those two catch more problems than the other five together.