Why I still write HTML by hand in 2026
Page builders are faster to start and slower to live with. After a decade of shipping templates, here's why I keep writing the markup myself.
Every year someone tells me hand-writing HTML is dead. Every year I ship another template by hand, and every year it loads faster than the drag-and-drop alternative.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a calculation.
The builder tax
Page builders are wonderful for the first hour and expensive for the next five years. They get you a hero section in ten minutes and a bloated, un-auditable DOM forever. You inherit their update cycle, their breaking changes, their idea of what a “section” is. The day you need to do something they didn’t anticipate, you’re fighting the tool instead of the problem.
Hand-written markup has the opposite curve. Slower to start, then it just keeps paying you back. I know exactly what every element is doing. There’s nothing to “deactivate.” When something breaks, it breaks in a file I can read.
Speed is a feature, not a setting
A template that ships clean HTML and a few KB of CSS doesn’t need a performance plugin. It’s fast because there’s nothing in the way. Vellum has four home variants and thirteen pages and still loads like a static document, because it is one.
Buyers feel this even when they can’t name it. A site that responds instantly reads as quality before they’ve read a single word.
Code is part of the craft
When you sell a template, you’re not just selling a look. You’re selling the thing underneath it that another developer is going to open, read, and extend. Sloppy markup is a broken promise, no matter how nice the screenshots are.
So I write it by hand. Semantic, accessible, commented where it matters. It takes longer. That’s the point — the care is the product.
I’m not against tools. I’m against tools that make the easy thing easy and the right thing impossible. Until a builder can ship markup I’d be proud to put my name on, I’ll keep doing it myself.