There are plenty of options available when you want to build a website for your business. A lot of small business owners will immediately turn to website builders to get things done. Effectively, these website builders are tools that let you create and design a site with no coding experience. They usually include drag and drop features to let you choose themes and put everything in place.
Why do lots of people opt for this way of making a site? Well, mainly because it’s cheap. But, don’t be fooled, a website builder may be cheap, but it’s probably not the best way to create your site. Instead, you are better off opting for a CMS or even hiring a professional web design agency.
Why? Here are three reasons website builders suck:
You don’t technically own the site
Effectively, you are renting out a virtual property on the internet. You don’t technically own the site when you use a website builder, making it difficult for you to move it from one server to another. Or, if you wanted to switch web builders to unlock more features, it can be extremely hard to do so. You’re also at the mercy of the website builders themselves – they could take your site down if they feel you’re violating their guidelines. Plus, if the company goes bust, your site will just go offline.
This is why a lot of business owners are encouraged to invest more money in actual web design agencies. Companies like WebX360 help you build a site from scratch that is 100% yours and can be altered as much as you like without a care in the world.
It’s bad for SEO
Most people aren’t aware of this, but website builders are typically terrible for SEO. The coding used to create the pages is apparently not optimized for search engines. So, Google struggles to crawl the pages and rank them accordingly. Yes, this all sounds very technical, so we won’t go into more detail. All you need to know is that your SEO will be pretty bad with a website builder.
Again, web design agencies can prevent this and design sites that have good SEO. The same goes for content management systems like WordPress – these are much better for SEO and often have similar user-friendly elements to website builders.
Really hard to scale
A website builder might be somewhat useful if you only need one or two pages. Unfortunately, the modern website requires way more than that. You might need dozens, possibly hundreds of pages as your business grows and gets bigger. All of these pages need content, and this is where site builders really struggle. They are terrible when you want to scale and grow your site, so you should avoid them.
Overall, website builders promise a lot but deliver very little. Be aware that if you want to save money and choose a cheap way of creating your site, you are going to get what you paid for! Remember, your site is literally the gateway for your business online – it can help you make a lot of money if you set it up correctly. So, don’t be afraid to make a big investment in the design and creation of it.
