Twelve questions to ask before you buy a website template

A demo is built to sell. It runs on perfect content, professional photography, and a server nobody else is using. Your website will have none of those three.

The twelve questions below are the ones where a wrong answer costs money, in order of importance. Sending this list straight to the seller is fine — a shop that answers all twelve is a shop worth buying from.

On ownership

1. Do I receive the complete source code, not minified and not obfuscated?

The most important question and the most commonly dodged. "Yes, you get the source files" is not enough — ask explicitly whether the code is readable and editable. Some sellers hand over deliberately mangled code.

2. Does it depend on a licence server?

If the template phones home to the seller's server to run, the day they close is the day your site goes dark. The test question: "if I unplug from the internet, does the template still run on my machine?"

3. How many projects does the licence cover?

Matters if you are an agency or run several brands. Some licences are priced per domain.

On the technical base

4. What is it built on, and who still maintains that?

WordPress, Next.js, Laravel — each has consequences. The real question is: if I need to hire someone to change this in two years, does the market have people who know it? The more common the base, the cheaper the changes.

5. How many plugins or third-party libraries are required to match the demo?

Count them. Each one is something that can break and something that may charge a fee. More than five required plugins is a warning sign for an ordinary business website.

6. What is the demo's own PageSpeed score on mobile?

Measure it yourself; do not take the seller's number. Open PageSpeed Insights, paste the demo URL, pick Mobile. Under 60 means the template will cost you customers and rankings. We wrote separately on speed and Core Web Vitals if you want to know what to measure.

7. Is there an admin area for editing content, or do I edit code?

If content lives in code, every price change is a phone call to somebody else. Ask where you would change the home page headline.

On SEO

8. Can each page have its own title and description?

It sounds obvious, but plenty of templates use one title site-wide. Without per-page titles you cannot rank for more than one thing.

9. Are there a generated sitemap, robots.txt, canonical tags and structured data?

These four are the technical SEO floor. Without them Google still finds the site, but you are competing with one hand tied. If you sell in two languages, ask about hreflang too.

10. What format are images served in, and are multiple sizes generated?

A template that pushes a 4000px original down to a phone will never pass Core Web Vitals, however good the rest is.

On what happens after the sale

11. How long do updates last, and are they free or annual?

"Lifetime updates" and "12 months of updates" are different products at different prices. Ask which, and ask whether an update overwrites your own edits.

12. How long is support, on what channel, and what response time is committed?

"Lifetime email support" with a three-day reply is useless while the site is down. Ask for an hour figure, and ask about the channel — Zalo answered same-day beats email answered next week.

How we answer these twelve

Plainly, since you will ask: SourceViet templates ship the complete, readable Next.js source — not minified, no licence server, runs offline. Each one includes an admin area for content, a generated sitemap and structured data, and images served as WebP in multiple sizes. Updates are free for the life of the product; support runs six months over Zalo with replies under 24 hours.

What we do not do, also plainly: we do not write your long-form content and we do not photograph your products.

One last trick

Before you pay, open the demo on your own phone — not a desktop window made narrow. Scroll the whole home page, tap into a product, try submitting the contact form. Most of a template's problems surface in those three minutes, and it costs nothing.