Top Reasons to Avoid DIY Website Builders
It looks appealing to spend a few dollars a month to get a sleek, eye-catching website. Especially when expert web designers have quoted you quite a bit more for the same thing. But is it truly a value when a DIY website limits your control, keeps you from standing out in the crowd, and disappoints your customers?
It certainly does not sound that way. Here are the top reasons why you need to avoid DIY website builders and get help from a professional web developer instead.
1. Your Website is Not Your Own – Technically
This is hugely important which is why it is the number one reason to avoid DIY websites. When you build a website using a service like Weebly, Wix or Squarespace the code and all the files belong to them. Not you. This is the case even if you are paying for it.
If you decided to move your website to a different platform, you have no way to do so. Access to files, custom style sheets, and backend data is extremely limited. You are either going to have to stick with the DIY service or start all over again to build your site someplace else.
Of course, you can use online web building tools to design the website. You need to stick to using open-source content management systems. This lets you retain ownership of everything. Joomla and WordPress are examples of open-source CMS. They have the many of the same benefits that make DIY site builders appealing.
2. Your Unique Design is Like Everyone Else’s Unique Design
It is very hard to stand out from the crowd as a business. You cannot afford to have your website look like your competitor’s website. It does not help customers pick your company over them. Customisation is the ultimate key when getting your brand down on a website. It forces it to stand out.
If you are not creating the design yourself by using a DIY service, customisation is almost impossible. This is especially true when using the free service DIY web builders offer. What you get are generic templates that let you edit a few fields of text and graphics. That is about it. The templates are used by thousands of other businesses. This hardly makes them unique.
Having said this, we are not dismissing the use of templates. A total custom build is not always right for everyone. There are, however, some services that are better than others. Some are mentioned above. We do not recommend you start using them without some professional web design help.
3. Poor User Experience
User experience is a crucial part of running a website. If your website runs slow, does not function correctly or underperforms, your users will not be happy. They will stop visiting your website, too. Your goal is to get people to go to your website, stay awhile and come back. They will only do this if the site is quick to load, easy to read and simple to navigate.
Visitors in the world of the Internet are certainly not patient people. They cannot wait for a page to load. You have to host a website on a high-capability server with quality servers.
One issue with DIY website builders is they are crowded. Your website gets thrown on a server with hundreds of accounts. These servers may be sizable, but if all of these websites are accessed at the same time, websites will be slow to load. A DIY website just does not have the performance ability as professionally built one does.
4. Efficiency Is Not That Easy!
A big selling point of DIY website builders is that they are simple to use. They make getting a site up and running quick. That is true if you are not particular about how your website performs or how it looks. You may even want to put a website together quick and get it live for your own reasons. But, if you want one that will draw customers to it and keep them there, you will need a lot more to be efficient with DIY builders.
According to Manawire, there are close to 100 percent of users of DIY websites that never get round to publishing a single one. They may build a site, but that is where the story ends. Many people, close to over one billion, have used professional web designers. Their websites populate about 74 percent of the sites on the Internet. Out of these, just 3 percent were made with DIY services.
We must admit that building a decent website takes time. Patience will pay off, however. You will have a solid website and one that excels in how it looks, how it functions and how it performs.
5. Not Google Friendly (SEO)
DIY web builders make website building simple. That seems great, but there is another problem with these services. Google does not find them all that easy. In fact, they confuse Google.
Effective SEO strategy takes on-site optimisation. This is not something you get easily with DIY builders. Real SEO involves file customisations and modified settings. If you cannot access core files on a DIY builder, you cannot optimize the website pages properly. This is just another limitation to be forewarned of. There are strict SEO standards to adhere to for a website’s effectiveness.
Google figures out what a website is about by reading its code, following its URL structure and then crawling through the content. Drag and drop builder websites have poor coding because they are mass produced. This confuses Google. Google has to do more than be amazed at your website’s colour scheme. It has to read your code from the back end to get it to show up on the Internet properly.
If coding and other things are incorrect, Google will not appreciate this. This will result in your website going way down in the results pages. That is a big problem which threatens your website’s SEO performance. Your website cannot be found if it cannot get noticed by Google.
This is just a list of the top reasons to avoid DIY website builders. What is more, there are many other reasons to avoid them. It seems smart to save money on a website’s design from a business perspective. But, as you can see, it is not exactly a good value and can even cost you more money in the long run.
If you need help, contact the team at iSmarts. We will get you on the right path to website success.
