Today, more than 4,000 CBD brands and websites are attempting to grab a share of the CBD market, hoping to get a big piece of the more than $4.9 billion in annual sales.
The one thing that CBD entrepreneurs, bootstrapped startups, and even established brands have in common is the need for a high-performance website.
The right website template can help your brand earn trust with your audience, provide immense value, create an enjoyable shopping experience, provide support, and drive sales.
For many in the CBD industry, technology and coding are not their strong suits, leading many individuals to seek out CBD Website Templates to help them hit the ground running.
The right free CBD website templates can help you avoid the costly, tedious, and time-consuming ordeal of creating a website from scratch. However, the opposite is also true. Free CBD website templates are not without their risks.
In this guide, we explore what aspects to look for when evaluating free CBD website templates, and the key risks to be aware of before choosing one for your CBD company.
What Are CBD Templates?
It’s a simple question, but when we dig deeper, there’s much more to a website than its template. In simple terms, CBD templates are pre-made website templates that include both coding (HTML and CSS), as well as design (layout, graphics, etc.).
However, it is important to remember that CBD templates don’t include functionality. For example, if the template you found has a ‘contact form’ or chat support box, these are not part of the template and require third-party connections with other service providers to make those features usable.
Are FREE CBD Website Templates Safe to Use?
It depends. CBD templates are meant to be uploaded and hosted on your hosting provider. The code powering the website is already pre-written, and in most cases, unaudited for safety, performance, and security.
Free website templates are (in some cases) too good to be true. The team behind DankGator has been in the web design and marketing industry for decades, and in that time we’ve seen some scary situations caused by the use of random free CBD templates found online.
A not-so-uncommon threat includes intentionally vulnerable code and/or the presence of ‘backdoors’. In some cases, the template or theme creator will code in ‘backdoors’ that allow them to later hack into the site and do damage. These types of hacks can be used for a broad range of malicious purposes including but not limited to negative SEO attacks and hacked backlinks, posting and publishing harmful content, stealing your visitors’ data, and grabbing passwords that could be used for identity theft or financial crimes.
FREE CBD Website Templates from DankGator
At DankGator we specialize in CBD websites, templates, funnels, and marketing tools engineered, battle-tested, and proven to help CBD brands reach their full potential.
Unlike most ‘template’ or ‘theme’ providers, we offer a full suite of tools and services aimed at helping you get and stay ahead of the competition.
All DankGator customers gain access to a library of performance-tested FREE CBD website templates. Each template has been meticulously developed by experienced developers and designers, melding visual appeal and aesthetics with performance.
Each of our free CBD website templates offers an incredible user experience, intuitive navigation, high converting layout and design elements, and more.
Must-Have Features When Choosing a FREE CBD Website Template
Clean Code
The problem with many free website templates is bloat. No, not that feeling you get after eating too much. What we’re talking about here is code bloat. Poorly written code might still result in a nice-looking site, but it can cause serious performance issues down the road. From lagging functionalities, bugs, and errors, to reduced page load speed and increased hosting costs, unoptimized code can be a major bottleneck.
Page Load and Speed
Google has placed an increased focus on the user experience, with its ‘Core Vitals’ algorithm update making the speed of page load a key/core ranking factor. More than that, several large studies have shown that reduced page load speed has a serious impact on conversion rates. Page load speeds of 3 seconds or more results in a 40% reduction in traffic due to bounces, while increases in page load speed of as little as 100ms can result in measurable increases in conversion rates.
Conversion Rate Optimized
All the marketing in the world and all the traffic from Google won’t matter if your free CBD templates don’t actually convert. This is where many free template providers miss the mark. At DankGator our background is in eCommerce and digital marketing. Each of our free CBD templates follows best practices with regard to conversion rate optimization, utilizing data-backed strategies, layouts, color schemes, and more to help you get the most from your hard-earned web traffic.
Search Engine Optimized (SEO)
In today’s modern market, nearly 8 out of every 10 purchases are influenced in some way by a search engine query. With Google owning the vast majority of search market share, ranking on their search engine isn’t just a goal, it’s a necessity.
Tapping into decades of experience and a documented track record of ranking client websites, the team behind DankGator has baked in high-performance SEO elements into every template we offer.
Security
More than 30,000 websites are attacked DAILY, with around 64% of companies reporting at least one attack in the last 12-month period. Free CBD templates from some sites don’t pay much attention to secure code in their sites. After all, it's ‘free’ and they don’t really have any incentive to protect your site once you download and go on your way.
At DankGator we’ve seen just how devastating a ‘hack’ or cyber attack can be on a brand, many of which are never able to fully recover or re-gain the trust of their customers. Our code is always written with both performance and security in mind. Although web security is a multi-faceted topic, we are committed to doing our part to keep you and your customers safe.
User Experience and Navigation
User experience is an important but often overlooked element of free CBD website templates. While some designs may look visually stunning, they sometimes lack usability. Clean designs that aren’t too ‘noisy’, along with a nice layout and flow, combined with intuitive navigation and features, go a long way in driving sales.
The Best FREE CBD Website Templates at DankGator
We hope you found this guide helpful. As you can see, there’s a lot more that goes into choosing a free CBD website template than first meets the eye. At DankGator we’re proud to offer free CBD templates that perform as good as they look, helping our customers keep pace in the highly competitive CBD market.
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