Avoid Cheap or Free Online Website Builders!
Online Site Builders are exceedingly popular these days. Being touted as cheap and easy to use, these solutions can be adequate for novice users and startup businesses who are just dabbling with the idea of building an online presence.
Many who are looking to establish a serious and trustworthy presence online or grow a business opt for these page building tools. Yet, these tools often turn out to be a poor choice. There are many strong points backing up the claim above, and this article will go through all of them in order.
After reading through this piece, you’ll be much better informed in determining the best ways of establishing your online presence, which starts with building a business page that will represent your company. You’ll realise that online website builders are really not as advantageous as you might have perceived.
In fact, these tools are not even as user and SEO-friendly as websites specifically developed by web designers. Not to mention, they are severely limited and absolutely inadequate for anything but a casual attempt at creating pages for the web.
So What Makes Online Website Builders a Poor Choice?
Website Builders may Make Your Online Presence Look Cheap.
Online website builders can either be free to use or have a cheap price tag on them. Either way, they are best avoided. The first big reason why you should avoid online site builders is that they simply make your business page look cheap. The flashy ready-made templates may seem appealing to novice users, but not to the trained eye.
That is because the sheer ubiquity makes them redundant. At first, you may think you’ve just set up a tasteful site, but since you’re essentially picking from a limited selection of themes, the chances of having your site similar to other businesses who use the same platform are inevitable. And this could highly affect the credibility of your business.
In short, building up such a site is comparable to eating instant foods: it can satiate your hunger, but you will not get any substance or nutritional value from it.
Even if you can’t tell the difference, or you may have done a lot of customization on it to make it more you, your site’s visitors will still see the big comparison to the other sites who have used the same ready-made templates.
In addition to this, you won’t actually own the website you want to be created for your business, the online website builders will. This will limit your control over the website in the future.
Website Builders Offer Extremely Limited Features.
When you create your business page with online website builders, the features that you can use for your web page are very limited, and what’s worse, you can’t use other
Since you are not that well versed when it comes to customising your website with code, you may end up messing up the site – so more time will be wasted in re-doing the site. Keep in mind that in business, time is money. And if this precious time is lost repairing your website, imagine how many profits and conversions you will lose.
It’s Like Building a Home in a Borrowed Land.
There are also unapparent technical factors that really bog down the usefulness of an average site builder. Most critically, building your pages using these tools is akin to building a home in a borrowed land.
This means, you will never have control over your fate and will be subject to the whims of the owner. What if one day the parent company files bankruptcy or decides to shut down the service? Then all users are simply given a short notice informing their sites and pages will be shut down. What if for some reason they decide your content is not aligned with their community?
They can shut you down on a whim. What if you eventually decide to move all your content to a professional-grade server or try a different platform? Usually, there aren’t any accessible import/export tools to be found in typical online site builders… because that is never intended as an option, to begin with.
Pages created through one of those sites are meant to stay there in the back corners of the Internet, rather than having a chance to grow and evolve.
Little to No Chances of Content Monetization.
There are no free lunches. With site builders, this
You, in turn, get none of those benefits – your one perk is being allowed to create ugly pages easily, without the need to learn how to use new tools.
Should you ever decide to try running Google Ads or even deal directly with a publisher… you simply can’t. Because you don’t own anything except the claim to authorship.
No self-respecting digital marketer would ever consider purchasing ad inventory from a site developed on such platforms. It may sound a bit depreciating, but it’s just how things work: anyone setting up a shop or site at an online site builder will immediately be regarded as an inexperienced novice.
Even if the creator of those pages happens to have a great concept or idea, the average reader will not pay attention, since a simple glimpse at the homepage will convey the impression of little authority.
Do You Have any Kind of Ambition for Your Site?
Would you like to keep expanding it, adding new features, maybe calling in a web designer to spark things up later down the road? If you’re using an online builder, those options will be severely limited.
Although free or cheap online website builders have been conceived to be easy to use, the opportunity to upgrade your website, make content management simple, monetize it and make it switchable to eCommerce is next to impossible.
There are no chances of web design expansion and updates. Unless however, you will create another page which will be designed by professional web developers.
In other words, those sites are not meant to last! They’re not conceived as credible business platforms, or even as thorough HTML creation tools. Unless you’re just putting up your first personal site detailing your hobbies, you need to move on to better, more contemporary tools or otherwise get the help of a professional designer.
For someone new to HTML and site building, the layouts available from a standard site builder may look just fine, but it really pales in comparison to what is possible with a proper web design. Changing the look of the site by choosing a layout is just the tip of the iceberg of what’s really possible!
Limited SEO Options With Online Site Builders.
If you’re concerned about optimising your website to achieve better search engine rankings, then you need to get up to date on the current SEO best practices. However, there’s little you can do in terms of optimisation when you’re using an online builder. Since those online builders focus on allowing novice users to use an easy tool to create pages, SEO is not the main consideration.
This can be a problem when you start picking up traffic and feel like expanding since you’ll realise that using online site builders aren’t really the best option. Aside from that, when you build your website with online site builders, you will never know if all your marketing campaigns, designed to reach your target market are successful because online site builders are not created to be SEO-friendly.
You are bound to what online site builders offer, which make you forever behind your competitors, who entrust the creation of their web page to professional web designers. And best of all, they could help in making the best SEO practices at work in optimising your page. These reasons were given regarding the incompetence of online site builders, successfully show why you shouldn’t settle for less when you can have more.
As a business, you deserve the best possible website, and only a professional web designer can achieve this. Online site builders might give you the hunch of what it’s like to be hands-on with your business page, but they will not give you the valuable lessons and experiences that could make you a better business owner, who is struggling to become closer to the target audience that uses the world wide web.
Key Takeaways…
So instead of wasting your time in building your business page with ready-made templates provided by online website builders, it is best to hire professional web designers who design websites that you and your website visitors really want.
Rather than design a website based on what the latest technology or design ideas are that most mediocre website building tools offer, professional web designers will design your web page based on the “What do you want?” concept.
Instead of doing all the talking on how your website should look, these web designers will listen to your wishes and objectives. After all, business websites are all about you and your customers’ needs, so why not have your website designed according to what you want, which in turn could be beneficial to your website’s visitors? No matter how fast-paced and
Even if there are lots of free site builders, you should still look for web designers who will help you in shaping up the identity that you want to project online and offline – and that is via one of the reputable industry leaders consumers can trust. Keep in mind that building a website could either make or break your business.
Whether the website is intended to persuade, entertain and inform people with meaningful content, or provide products and services that could help consumers in their everyday needs – you should be cautious on how your website should be created, managed, upgraded, and monetized.
Rather than spend time on creating a website with little knowledge on how it should be built, it is best to have the professional web designers do the job for you.
In this way, you can spend more time managing your business and strengthening your marketing strategies, whilst professional web designers build the website that reflects your company’s goals.
It’s like hitting two birds with one stone – you’ll have a fast responsive website directed to the right target market and a well-managed business, with no time wasted in between.
So stop wasting your time building your business website with online site builders, when you can come to pudDesign and have an exemplary website designed.