We Reviewed Over 10,000 Website Templates. Only 929 Made the Cut

Open ten templates from any marketplace and most of them look finished in the thumbnail. Then you scroll. The spacing collapses at tablet width, the case study pages turn out to be static text pretending to be a CMS, and the mobile menu covers half the logo. A thumbnail is the part of a template the creator polished hardest, so it's the least useful part for deciding.

We've now reviewed more than 10,000 Webflow templates, Framer templates, and Shopify themes. As of September 30, 2026, 929 of them are published in our library. That's under 10% of everything our team has looked at. This post explains where the line sits, what the 929 look like in numbers, and what the gap between those two figures means for anyone choosing a template for a real project.

How Many Website Templates Are Actually Good Enough to Use?

By our standard, fewer than one in ten. Of the more than 10,000 templates and themes our team has reviewed across Webflow, Framer, and Shopify, 929 reached an Overall Score of 7.0, the minimum we publish. That breaks down into 333 Webflow templates, 401 Framer templates, and 195 Shopify themes. The remaining nine in ten aren't listed anywhere on our site, in any form.

The Overall Score is the average of two separate numbers: a Design Score from six designers and a Dev Score from five developers, each with more than ten years of experience. Every reviewer scores on their own, and each axis is averaged across its discipline. You can read how each of them evaluates on our review team page.

A 7.0 isn't a generous bar, and it isn't a harsh one either. It's the point where we'd still hand the template to a client without apologizing for it. Below that, the problems start showing up in the finished site rather than in the review.

What Does a 7.0 Minimum Actually Filter Out?

A 7.0 floor filters out templates whose weaknesses would reach the live site. The Design Score drops when type scale, spacing, and hierarchy stop holding together below the hero or at tablet and phone widths. The Dev Score drops when the CMS is hard-coded placeholders, breakpoints need manual fixes, assets are heavy, or there's no setup documentation. Templates that lose too much on either axis land under 7.0.

We don't publish itemized notes for individual templates, so there's no public list of rejects with reasons attached. What we can describe is where points go, because it's the same for every template we open.

On design, the most common failure isn't ugliness. It's inconsistency. A hero with a confident type scale followed by sections where heading sizes seem chosen at random. Padding that's generous on desktop and cramped on tablet. Image crops that look intentional at 1440px and accidental at 390px.

On build quality, the gap between demo and product is the usual problem. A blog that's really six static pages. Interactions built one element at a time instead of as reusable components. On Shopify, section settings so limited that a merchant can't change a banner without editing Liquid.

None of that shows in a marketplace screenshot. All of it shows up the week you start customizing. The full criteria for both axes are on our methodology page.

Why Doesn't Popularity Count Toward the Score?

Popularity measures what sold, not what holds up, so we leave it out entirely. Our reviewers don't look at sales counts, marketplace star ratings, bestseller badges, or how many followers a creator has. A template with thousands of sales and a broken tablet layout scores exactly what an unknown template with the same broken layout scores.

That cuts both ways. A well-known studio gets no allowance for its name, and a creator with one release gets no penalty for being new. The only input is the template itself, opened, resized, and worked with.

It's also why the library can't be bought into. There's no paid placement and no way to pay for a review or a higher score. We may earn an affiliate commission when a visitor we refer starts a paid Webflow, Framer, or Shopify plan, and that has no effect on which templates are published or how they score. We earn nothing when you buy a template. More on how we operate is on our about page.

What Do the 929 Published Templates Look Like in Numbers?

Even inside a filtered library, quality isn't flat. The 929 published templates average Overall: 8.2/10 with a median of 8.3. 248 of them, 26.7%, score 9.0 or higher. 390, or 42.0%, sit in the 7.0 to 7.9 band, which we describe as good with real limitations. Only 33 templates, 3.6% of the library, reach 9.5.

Measured against everything we've reviewed rather than everything we've published, the funnel gets steep. Fewer than one in ten templates reaches 7.0. Fewer than one in 40 reaches 9.0. Fewer than one in 300 reaches 9.5. Because the reviewed total is more than 10,000 rather than exactly 10,000, each of those ratios is a ceiling, not an estimate.

Webflow has the largest share of top-band templates at 29.7%. Framer has the largest library and the largest share in the entry band at 45.1%, which matches how many new creators publish there. We covered the shape of each platform's distribution in more depth in our earlier readout of the library's score data, written when the library held 860 templates.

Do Free Templates Make It Into the Library?

Yes, and more often than most buyers expect. 252 of the 929 published templates are free, 27% of the library. Free templates average Overall: 7.9/10 against 8.3/10 for paid ones, a gap of 0.4 points. 29 free templates score 9.0 or higher, and 27 of those are on Framer.

The platform matters more than the price tag. Framer accounts for 201 of the 252 free templates, and its free ones average 8.0 against 8.3 for paid. On Webflow, 36 free templates average 7.7 against 8.4 paid. On Shopify, 15 free themes average 7.6 against 8.2 paid, and none reach 9.0.

The practical read: on Framer, starting free costs you very little. On Webflow and Shopify, free templates that pass our bar are usable, but the gap usually shows up in CMS depth and section flexibility rather than on the homepage. We tested that question directly in are free Webflow templates good enough for client work, and the 30 best free Webflow templates for 2026 lists the strongest of them.

Where Do Design Quality and Build Quality Split Apart?

On Webflow and Framer, the two scores track each other closely. On Shopify, they don't. Shopify themes average Design: 7.9/10 against Dev: 8.5/10, and 176 of the 195 published themes, 90.3%, score higher on Dev than on Design. 43 Shopify themes have a gap of a full point or more between the two axes.

Webflow templates average Design: 8.3/10 and Dev: 8.3/10. Framer averages Design: 8.1/10 and Dev: 8.1/10. Across both, only 22 templates show a gap of 1.0 or more. That tracks with who builds them: on Webflow and Framer, one person often designs and builds the whole template. Shopify themes carry mandatory commerce engineering, cart, checkout, filtering, section schema, so build quality is tested harder and visual ambition is optional.

For a buyer, a split is a signal about what you'll spend time on. Strong Dev with weaker Design suits a team that will restyle anyway. Strong Design with weaker Dev is the riskier purchase, because the demo looks right and the shortcuts only surface during customization. How we score templates explains what each axis rewards.

What This Means When You Pick a Template

Three things follow from the numbers. First, starting from a filtered list saves more time than any amount of browsing, because nine in ten candidates have already been ruled out. Second, a published score in the 7.0 to 7.9 band is a prompt to check the specific limitation before buying, not a warning to avoid it. Third, read both scores, because the Overall Score hides the split that matters most on Shopify.

Then look before you click. Every one of the 929 published templates has a screen recording of its full homepage, captured from the live demo and played as a muted loop on its template card. On desktop it plays when the card is in view or under your cursor, and a scrub bar lets you jump to the pricing section or the footer. On a phone, the card in the middle of the screen plays as you scroll. You can rule out most of a category in the Webflow, Framer, or Shopify library without opening a single demo tab.

If you're still deciding where to build before choosing what to build with, our Webflow vs Framer vs Shopify guide covers the platform decision itself.

How We Count Reviewed and Published Templates

The reviewed figure is a running total kept by our review team, covering every Webflow template, Framer template, and Shopify theme we've opened and scored since we started. We state it as more than 10,000 because the count keeps growing. The published figures come from our live library on September 30, 2026: 929 templates, each with a Design Score, a Dev Score, and an Overall Score of 7.0 or above.

Every statistic in this post describes the published library only, since templates under 7.0 aren't in it. Scores are set by people, not algorithms: six designers score design, five developers score build quality, and each published score is the average of that discipline's independent ratings. The threshold applies equally to every platform, price, and creator. The complete process is documented on our methodology page.