Ever thought of using an online website builder to build your business website? While they may appear like the right way to go for a small to medium-sized business, there are many pitfalls to consider with using one. In the long run, it might be a better idea to have your site built by someone with experience in building websites for small businesses instead.
Here are just some reasons not to use an online website builder for your business
- Limit on pages
- many online web builders only allow a certain number of pages on your site, under their free plans. This can create issues down the line with limiting landing, info pages and SEO.
- Limit on features
- Many sites have only a few features available on their free plans. Paying for additional features can become pricey as you get farther involved.
- Not fully mobile
- while some online web building tools are becoming more mobile friendly due to Google’s changed algorithm requirements, they are still limited in what they can do in this area.
- Can have slow loading speeds
- These tools can have a lot of additional code associated with them which can cause them to take a longer time to load in browsers. As reported on Marketing Dive, according to Google, 53% of mobile users will leave a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. This means that the best looking site on the web doesn’t matter if everyone leaves it before its done rendering.
- Website elements can look off
- Sometimes things just don’t line up making them look broken or off. Shifts like this can even make the meaning of your content change unintentionally leaving your visitors confused or in extreme cases, upset.
- limited template selection
- many do-it-yourself web building sites have only a few templates for any specific business niche yours might fall into. You are limited to using what they have available, swapping out colors, text and images.
- Learning curve
- Even though many online web builders are intuitive with drag-and-drop features, there is still a learning curve to using their system. This can change as well as they add / enhance features, remove functionality or reconfigure tool placement as they continually develop their software.
- Search Engine Optimization can’t be fully utilized
- There are specific customizations to SEO and Analytics that these online web building sites can’t do. If you can’t, nor would you want to, get to the underling code files to make these modifications then you can’t benefit from their added value.
- No site personalization and limited branding opportunities
- Since things are templated, you are extremely limited on personalizing or branding the site to fit your business.
- Doesn’t look fully professional
- There is the risk that your business site might look very similar to a competitor’s site since you are both using the same templates etc. This can confuse potential clients and muddy your brand.
Reasons to hire a web development company to build your website
- They will work with you to realize your vision
- A good web development company will partner with you to ensure that the message you are conveying is what you want.
- Add additional content / make suggestions so your site is seen by more people
- They know what works and what doesn’t and can help build a site that includes all of the right pieces so that you get noticed.
- Can use advanced SEO, SEM and Analytic techniques
- They build everything from scratch so they have full control over everything. This helps a great deal in specialized search engine optimization, keyword analysis and social marketing your site.
- You own your site
- When complete, your site and all it’s content belong to you to do with as you wish.
- Handle security and upgrades
- A good web development company will handle all the back-end server things that could potentially become a major headache when doing these yourself. No need to wait on a phone for support or check warning messages for an emergency patch when they can handle that for you.
Technology and search engine criteria are changing faster all the time. It can be overwhelming to build and manage your business website on top of running your business itself. Having a professional, well designed and developed website built for you that shows your potential customers what you offer and how to contact you increases your chances of getting new clients. Sites that take a long time to load, are poorly designed or are not easily findable get pushed to the back and don’t get noticed. We can help your customers find your business. Give us a call today.
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