The first template a site is generated with is a starting point, and every website builder that pretends otherwise eventually meets a customer who liked the content and outgrew the design. The question is what switching costs. On Buildly the answer has to be: nothing that was written.
Content and design are two different things
Every site’s content lives in one structured shape - pages, blocks, collections, theme - that no template owns. A template is a renderer with opinions: how wide a hero sits, whether services list as rows or cards, how a gallery breathes. The two meet at a contract. The template promises to draw every block the contract defines; the content promises to need nothing the contract omits. Neither side knows the other’s name.
What switching actually does
- The org picks a new template for the site.
- Every page re-renders from the same content through the new template - no export, no import, no mapping wizard.
- The owner reviews the result as a draft, exactly like a generation.
- Publishing is, as always, a separate human act.
What changes even though the words do not
Honesty about the limits is cheaper than support tickets later:
- Arrangement changes - a services list that was three columns may now be one, because layout is the template’s opinion.
- Section counts can shift - a template that draws collections as a single scrolling page replaces one that paginates them.
- The theme carries over - colors, fonts, and photos are the site’s own settings, not the template’s decoration.
The words, the photos, and the leads were always yours. The template was always rented. Switching is just settling the lease.
The contract is also why the publish gate works the same for every template: review checks content against the interview, and content is the one thing no template ever rewrites.