6 Figma file checks before you hand a template to engineering

A Figma template can look finished and still be hard to build from. The screens are polished, but the developer opens the file and finds detached buttons, colours typed in by hand and a mobile layout that exists only for the homepage.

None of that shows up in the cover shots on a listing. It shows up a week into the build, when every unclear spot turns into a question, a guess or a second round of fixes. The six checks below take an hour or so, and they are worth doing before the file goes to whoever is writing the code, whether that is your own team, a freelancer or you.

1. Repeated elements are real components

Click a button, a nav link, a card and a form field on a few different pages. In the layers panel, each one should be an instance of a component, and right-clicking should let you jump to its main component.

If the same button is a detached group on one page and a component on another, the developer has no way to know which version is correct. Look for variants as well. A button component with primary, secondary and disabled variants tells engineering what the code needs to support. Five slightly different loose buttons tell them nothing, and each one tends to become its own piece of CSS.

2. Colours, type and spacing come from styles or variables

Select some text and check the right panel. It should use a named text style, not a font, size and line height typed in by hand. Do the same with a few fills: they should point to colour styles or variables with names like primary or surface, not raw hex values.

This is the part of the file that becomes your design tokens or Tailwind config. When styles are applied consistently, the developer can set them up once and reuse them everywhere. When they are not, someone has to sample colours from the canvas and decide whether two greys that look almost the same are meant to be one value or two. If the template uses Figma variables with light and dark modes, check that switching the mode actually changes every screen.

3. Frames use auto layout

Pick a few sections and resize their frames. With auto layout, content reflows and the gaps stay consistent. Without it, items sit at fixed positions and overlap the moment a headline gets longer.

Auto layout matters for engineering because it maps closely to how layouts are built in code with flex and grid. Padding, gap and alignment are written in the panel, so the developer does not have to measure distances between layers. A file built from absolutely positioned groups forces them to work out the spacing system by eye, and they will not always guess the same way the designer intended.

4. Every breakpoint is designed

Count the frames for each page. A template meant for a real site should show at least desktop and mobile, and ideally a tablet width, for every page, not only the homepage.

Then look at what changes between them. The nav should have a mobile menu, multi-column grids should show how they stack, and long headlines should have a smaller type style. If the mobile versions are missing, the developer will design them as they go, and that usually means the result looks less like the template you bought.

5. The states between the screens are there

Static mockups tend to show everything working. Code has to handle what happens in between: hover and focus on links and buttons, an open and closed mobile menu, form fields with an error or a success message, an empty blog category and a 404 page.

Go through the interactive parts of the design and look for these. Prototype links help too, because they show how the menu opens, which pages connect and where each button goes. Every missing state is a decision someone will make in the browser without the designer.

6. Assets, names and licences are ready to hand over

Check that icons are vectors and set up for export as SVG, and that photos and illustrations can be exported at the sizes the site needs. Open the layers panel and see whether frames and layers have names like Pricing / Mobile rather than Frame 812. Clean names make the file faster to search and make it obvious which screens are final.

Then look at the fonts and images. The file should list the typefaces it uses and where they come from, and the listing or docs should say whether the photos are placeholders or licensed for use. Swapping a font after the build has started means rechecking every page.

What a passing file means for the build

If a template passes all six, your developer can spend their time building rather than asking what the designer meant. If it fails a couple, that is still useful to know before you buy, because you can budget for the cleanup or pick a different file.

Every Pixels71 template comes with a live preview you can test first, and our checklist on what a live template preview should prove covers the coded side of the same question. If you are still deciding which stack the design should end up on, see when Astro wins for a marketing site. And if you expect to use more than one template, the All-Access Pass is $99 once and includes future templates.