The most common objection to buying a theme is not price. It is this: “I don’t want my site to look like everyone else’s.”
It is a fair worry, and it is also usually solved with less work than people expect. The reason template sites look like template sites is rarely the underlying layout — most good websites share the same handful of layouts, because those layouts work. It is that most owners change the content and leave every visual decision exactly as the theme author left it.
Those decisions are what your visitor is actually reading. Change enough of them and the same template stops looking borrowed.
Here are ten, roughly in order of impact.
The three that do most of the work
If you only do three things, do these.
1. Change the typefaces
Nothing announces “stock template” faster than the default font pairing, because thousands of sites are running that same theme with that same pairing untouched.
Typography is also the highest-leverage change available to you: it touches every single word on the site, so a new pairing transforms the whole thing at once. You do not need anything exotic. Pick one typeface with genuine character for headings, and one quiet, highly readable one for body text. Two families is enough — three is usually one too many.
One caution: check the weights you actually need and load only those, and make sure a fallback is set sensibly so text does not lurch when the font arrives.
2. Build a real colour palette instead of using theirs
Themes ship with a demo palette designed to look good in a screenshot — often five or six colours of similar intensity, plus a saturated accent chosen because it photographs well.
Replace it with something disciplined: one dominant neutral, one supporting neutral, and exactly one accent colour reserved for actions. That last rule matters more than the colours you pick. If your accent appears on the “Add to cart” button and the section headers and the footer links, it has stopped meaning anything. Scarcity is what makes an accent colour read as a signal.
3. Change the spacing
This is the one almost nobody does, and it is the one designers notice first.
Every theme has a spacing rhythm baked in — how much air sits between sections, how tight the padding is inside cards, how far a heading sits from the paragraph below it. Density is a genuine part of visual identity. A luxury brand and a discount retailer can use identical layouts and feel completely different purely through spacing.
Try opening up your section padding significantly, or tightening it deliberately. It is a single value in most theme settings and it changes the entire personality of the page.
The next four
4. Replace the stock photography
Predictable advice, but the reason matters: stock photos do not merely look generic, they look shared, and visitors have seen the same smiling headset woman on four other sites this month.
Real photographs of your actual product, workspace, or team will outperform polished stock even when the quality is lower. If you genuinely cannot get real images, apply one consistent treatment to every stock photo you use — a duotone, a consistent crop ratio, a subtle grain, one shared colour grade. Consistency reads as intent.
5. Pick one shape language and enforce it
Themes are often internally inconsistent about this: rounded buttons, square input fields, softly-rounded cards, a circular avatar, and three different shadow depths, all on one page.
Choose one. Fully rounded, or subtly rounded, or perfectly square — then apply the same radius, the same border weight, and the same shadow treatment to every element on the site. This is the sort of change nobody can name when they see it, but it is a large part of why some sites feel designed and others feel assembled.
6. Rewrite the microcopy
Your theme wrote a lot of words for you, and they are all still there: “Submit.” “Learn More.” “Read More.” “Oops! Page not found.” “Your cart is empty.”
These are the highest-frequency words on your site and they currently sound like software. Rewrite them in your own voice. “Send it over” instead of “Submit.” A 404 page that sounds like a person. An empty cart that suggests where to go next. It costs an afternoon, it touches every page, and it is completely invisible to competitors copying your design.
7. Delete more than you add
The strongest instinct to resist is filling the theme’s structure because it is there.
The demo had a testimonial carousel, a stats counter, a team grid, a logo strip, and a newsletter band, so owners dutifully find content for all of them. Two thin testimonials and a logo strip with three unrecognisable logos are worse than none.
Delete every section you cannot fill genuinely well. A shorter page with three strong sections will always outperform a long one padded to match a demo — and, incidentally, will load faster.
The last three
8. Rebuild the hero
The hero is the section most likely to still be the theme author’s design, and the most valuable piece of real estate you own.
Most template heroes are a rotating slider, because sliders demo well. They tend to perform poorly — visitors rarely wait for slide two, and the slider script is frequently the heaviest thing on the page. Replace it with one clear statement of what you do, for whom, and one action to take. Static, specific, and yours.
9. Use one icon set — or draw your own
Themes bundle a large icon library and then use whatever fits. The result is icons at different stroke weights and levels of detail sitting next to each other, which reads as subtly untidy without anyone quite identifying why.
Pick a single set with a consistent stroke weight and use only that. If you have the budget for a handful of custom icons for your key features, that is a small spend with an outsized effect on how bespoke the site feels.
10. Add one signature detail
Finally, give the site one thing that is only yours. A recurring shape or motif drawn from your logo. A specific hover behaviour on cards. A small custom illustration on the 404 page. An unusual but tasteful underline style on links.
One well-chosen detail, repeated consistently, does more for perceived originality than ten scattered tweaks. It is the thing someone remembers about the site afterwards.
Two practical notes
Do not do all ten at once. Items 1, 2, and 3 will get you most of the distance. Ship those, live with the site for a week, then decide what still bothers you.
Make changes in a way that survives updates. Use your theme’s built-in settings where possible, and a child theme or template overrides where not. Customisations made by editing core theme files will be wiped by the next update, usually at the worst possible time.
The goal was never a site nobody else could have built. It is a site that looks like a decision was made — because it was.
At eThemeStudio, we build our themes with the assumption that you will change them: exposed type and colour tokens, a consistent spacing scale, and clean override paths so your work survives every update. Working through this list and stuck on one of them? Send us the URL.
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