You can buy a will template from a stationer for about £20, or download one for less. The form is legal in principle: English law does not require a will to be written by a solicitor, and a template completed and witnessed correctly is a valid will. The trouble is that the law is unforgiving about the word "correctly", and a template cannot check your work.
What a template actually gives you
A typical will pack contains a pre-printed form with gaps for your name, your executors, your gifts and your signature, plus a leaflet of instructions. Fill in the gaps, sign in front of two witnesses, and you have a will. For a genuinely simple situation, one property, one long marriage, adult children, everyone agreeable, that can be enough. Templates have existed for over a century because sometimes they work.
Where templates go wrong
The problems cluster in four places, and none of them show up until after you have died, when nothing can be corrected.
- Execution errors. The signing and witnessing rules in section 9 of the Wills Act 1837 are strict: two witnesses, both present at the same time, watching you sign. Get the choreography wrong and the entire will fails.
- The beneficiary-witness trap. If a beneficiary, or the husband, wife or civil partner of a beneficiary, acts as a witness, section 15 of the Act cancels their gift. The will survives; their inheritance does not. Nothing on a template form stops your daughter witnessing the will that leaves her everything.
- No residue clause. Templates rely on you to write a clause covering "everything else I own". Miss it, or word it badly, and whatever falls outside your listed gifts passes under the intestacy rules instead of your will: a partial intestacy, and the single most common drafting failure in homemade wills.
- Stale law. A printed form cannot know that marriage revokes an existing will, that the statutory legacy changed in 2023, or that the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025 brought crypto squarely into your estate. You are drafting against a moving target with a snapshot.
The problem is not the form, it is the absence of review
Solicitors who deal with contested estates will tell you the same thing: homemade wills are dramatically over-represented in disputes. Not because the forms are defective, but because nobody with legal training ever read the finished document. A template cannot notice that you have left your house to one child in clause 3 and to all your children in clause 5. It cannot ask whether you own that house as joint tenants, in which case it may pass outside your will entirely. It cannot spot that your witnesses disqualified themselves.
When a will fails, the cost lands on your family. Rectifying a defective will through the courts, or administering the partial intestacy it creates, routinely costs thousands of pounds and months of delay. The £20 saved on the template is the most expensive £20 in the estate.
When a template is genuinely fine
- Your estate is simple, your family situation is settled, and everything goes to one or two obvious people
- You need something valid tonight, before surgery or travel, as a stopgap you intend to replace
- You are comfortable checking the execution rules yourself, twice, with the instructions open
Even then, treat it as a temporary measure. A will that was right at 40 is often wrong at 50, and a template gives you no relationship with anyone who will help you keep it up to date.
The middle path: guided questions, human review
The reason online will services have largely replaced the stationer’s form is that software can do what paper cannot: adapt the questions to your answers, refuse impossible combinations, and calculate shares that actually add up. Willful goes one step further, because software alone is not enough either. Every will is reviewed by a named, SRA-regulated solicitor before it reaches you, checked against exactly the failure points above, for £119 rather than the several hundred pounds a traditional firm charges. The questions are free to answer; you pay only when you submit for review.