A good template gets you 80% of the way to a finished website. This guide is about the remaining 20% — the part where a beautifully designed demo becomes your site, with your brand, your words, and your photography.
The secret is doing things in the right order. Customize globals first and content last, and the work compounds; do it the other way around and you'll touch every page twice. Here's the workflow we recommend, honed across hundreds of template builds.
Before you start: open the project file
Every template from Blocs Templates includes the native Blocs project file. Open that — not the exported HTML — in Blocs. The project file carries all the structure, global styles, and responsive settings, which is exactly what makes customization fast.
Take five minutes to click through every page first. You're building a mental map: which sections exist, what's reusable, what you won't need. Don't change anything yet.
Hour one: rebrand the globals
Swap the color swatches
Templates define their colors as global swatches, and this is where the magic is. Change a swatch, and every button, link, icon, and accent that uses it updates across the whole project at once.
Bring your brand colors in deliberately:
- Primary brand color — replaces the template's main accent. Used for buttons and key highlights.
- Dark and light neutrals — most templates use a near-black and an off-white; you rarely need to change these, and they're doing more work than you think.
- One secondary accent at most. If your brand has five colors, your website still only needs two of them.
Resist the urge to introduce colors the template doesn't already have slots for. The palette discipline is part of what you paid for.
Set your fonts
Change the heading and body fonts in one place, globally. If your brand has no set typefaces, keep the template's — type pairing is one of the hardest design skills, and the pairing you got was chosen carefully.
If you do swap fonts, check the headline sizes afterward. A font that's wider or rounder than the original can wrap differently in heroes, and a two-line headline that becomes three lines changes the feel of a page.
Replace the logo and favicon
Drop your logo into the project settings and the header and footer update everywhere. While you're there, set the favicon — it's a tiny detail that makes an in-progress site feel real, and it's the kind of thing that's embarrassing to discover missing after launch.
Hour two: make the content yours
Rewrite the hero first
The hero section does more persuasion than the rest of the site combined. Replace the placeholder headline with the clearest sentence you can write about what you offer and for whom. Then make the button say what actually happens next — "Book a free consult" converts better than "Learn more" every single time.
Replace images at the right sizes
This is the most common place template customizations go wrong. Two rules keep you safe:
- Match the aspect ratio of the image you're replacing. The template's layout was designed around those proportions; wildly different crops cause awkward gaps and overflow.
- Export at roughly twice the display size, compressed. WebP or quality-80 JPG. A hero image rarely needs to be wider than 2400px or heavier than 300 KB.
If you don't have photography yet, keep the template's included photos — they're copyright-free and chosen to fit — and swap them gradually as real images arrive.
Edit the copy, section by section
Work top to bottom through each page, replacing the demo text. Keep roughly the same length as the placeholder: template layouts are balanced around those line counts, and tripling a paragraph breaks the rhythm. If you have more to say, that's usually a sign you need the next section, not a longer one.
Hour three: reshape the structure
Delete boldly
Templates ship complete, and your site shouldn't use everything. No testimonials yet? Remove the section entirely rather than filling it with thin placeholders — you can reinstate it in two clicks when the quotes exist. A shorter page of true things beats a longer page of filler.
Reorder and duplicate
Blocs makes moving sections trivial, so arrange each page to match your argument: what you do, why it's believable, what to do next. Need two service pages instead of one? Duplicate the page and change the content — the design carries over.
Check the navigation and footer
Update the menu to match your real page list, fix the footer links, and put your actual contact details everywhere the template has placeholders. Then click every single link. Broken nav on launch day is always one of these.
The final pass: mobile and polish
Before you export, walk every page at the tablet and mobile breakpoints. You're looking for headlines that wrap badly, images that crop oddly, and buttons that crowd together. Blocs lets you adjust any element per breakpoint, so fixes are local and safe.
Finally, fill in the SEO fields — page titles, meta descriptions, image alt text — and export. The whole process, done in this order, is a genuine afternoon for a typical five-page site.
Start with a template worth customizing
The better the starting point, the better the finish. Take Designer — one of the most popular Blocs templates in the collection, and a perfect example of the kind of polished foundation this workflow turns into your own site in an afternoon:
Browse the full collection of 70+ Blocs templates — every one includes the project file this workflow depends on, with lifetime updates and unlimited use on personal and client projects. And if customizing templates becomes your business, the Lifetime Membership puts the entire collection in your toolkit for one payment.