Free website builders are costing your business valuable digital exposure
As published on www.eventerprise.com/blog:
In an age where Google has just about replaced the yellow pages, it is imperative for your business to have a dynamic digital presence. If your company is not already online, you’re already losing business since your potential customers can’t find you.
If you’ve done any research into what constitutes a robust digital presence, you would’ve undoubtedly heard that your starting point should be a website. For someone without an existing site, there are three basic options to get started; hire a web developer, use a CMS (content management system) like WordPress or Joomla, or use a visual website builder like Wix, Squarespace, or Weebly.
While visual website builders might seem like the perfect answer to get you started, they are, for the most part, an exercise in futility. Sure, website builders will allow you to have a functioning “good enough” site running in under an hour, but that is where the advantage of using a site builder ends. We did some research and found six fallacies that website builder companies seem intent on spreading.
1) Website builders are great for organic SEO
First of all, what is SEO? In a nutshell, SEO is what determines where in Google (or other search engines) your website ranks. The Holy Grail for SEO is to be the top-ranked site for a specific search term, with the second prize going to being featured on the first page of the search results. The lower your site appears on the list, the less likely it is to attract customers. Think of your own online experience, and how often you go to page two or three in Google search results to find what you’re looking for. Additionally, people don’t trust websites that don’t rank well as much as top ranked sites. It should therefore be evident that SEO is imperative for your site.
Website builders would have you believe that they’re great for SEO, but in reality, they’re deceiving you. One website builder even goes so far as to boast that one of their users went from page 14 to page one in Google in less than a month. So, how precisely, are website builders bending the truth regarding SEO?
Let’s first look at the possibility of going from page 14 to page one in a month.
The only way you will ever achieve this is if you operate in an industry that has very little online competition, like selling pirate ships in Las Vegas. Any SEO specialist worth their salt will tell you that it takes a few months to a year for your SEO efforts to start bearing substantial results. It is important to note that Google uses over 200 factors to determine where a site should rank in search results; these factors include competition for a particular search term, page load speed, mobile friendliness, the quality of your content, and technical SEO, to name a few. Another factor that Google looks at when assigning an SEO score to a website is how old the domain is.
So if your domain has only been active for a month, Google won’t consider your site to be an industry authority. While this does not mean it’s impossible to get to page one rankings, it makes the entire process much tougher.
If website builder companies were as good with SEO as they claimed, they would instead release stats like “six out of ten sites built with our builder have ranked on the first page of Google search results”. But, instead of boasting about how consistent their sites are for SEO, they brag about the one statistical outlier and imply that you too can achieve these incredible results. When it comes to SEO, consistent results are far more valuable than one freak occurrence is.
In addition, the websites that most website builders churn out have not been adequately optimised for SEO. Sure, they offer the basics but what they don’t provide can often mean the difference between being featured on page one as opposed to page two rankings. In a competitive industry, like wedding planning, you need every single SEO advantage available to you; having “most” of the tools you need just doesn’t cut it.
2) You don’t have to worry about technical SEO with website builders
There is a distinct difference between something you don’t have to worry about as opposed to something you can do nothing about. What website builders mean when they say “You don’t have to worry about your technical SEO”, what they mean is, “If there’s something wrong with your Technical SEO, there’s nothing you can do about it”. Technical SEO refers to various aspects of your site’s performance like loading time, structured data, and mobile optimisation. If you hire a developer to build your website, they should be taking care of the technical SEO for you. If you find something that is not performing well on your site, like your page loading time, then you can ask your developer to take steps to improve this. If you go the WordPress route, there are hundreds of free plugins you can download to help your site’s performance. However, if you are using a website builder, there is nothing you can personally do to improve your technical SEO.
If you notice that there is a technical issue with your site, your only real course of action is to get in touch with the customer service department of whichever website builder you are using. The problem is that the website builder company will not offer you a bespoke solution; they will instead present platitudes, then do nothing, or wait until enough people complain about the problem before remedying the issue.
3) Website builders are free – you’ve got nothing to lose
Website builders are like mobile games; sure, they claim to be free, but if you want to perform well it will cost you money. This is because website builders are for-profit businesses with massive marketing budgets and sales targets, so they are not likely to give anything of value away for free. WordPress, on the other hand, is a powerful open source CMS that drives 27.6% of the world’s sites, including many of the world’s top websites and platforms.
At first, using a website builder will cost you nothing except your time, but it’s important to note that the free options are terrible for marketing. One of the reasons for this is that you do not get a user-friendly or SEO optimised URL. So instead of having www.yourbusiness.com, you will have yourbusiness.websitebuilder.com. Most people will not remember your URL, which will cost you direct traffic, and since the URL is not SEO optimised there is a good chance no one will find your website in Google search results. What good is a website that no one visits? Sure, you could print the URL on business cards and give those to prospective clients, but human nature dictates that if your URL is too long, people won’t put in the effort to type it out.
The solution, if you chose to stick with website builders, is to pay a monthly fee. At the lower tiers, these monthly fees don’t offer you much. Wix, for example, start’s their packages at US$4.50 per month, but at that price, the company still displays banner ads on your site, only offers you 500mbs of storage space, keeps their branding in the footer of your site, and doesn’t provide you with a custom domain name (URL). To buy a custom domain name will cost you in the region of US$5 extra, taking the total cost per annum to around US$59.
By contrast, you can host a WordPress site from as little as UD$2.50 per month. For that, you will get one gig of storage space, and there won’t be adverts or banners on your site unless you specifically want them there. Your domain will still cost about US$5, but the overall pricing comes in at only US$35 per annum, making it a much cheaper option than the “free” option offered by website builders.
4) Website builders offer you the most streamlined design and editing process
This is more of a half-truth than an outright deception since most website builders will allow you to have a “good enough” looking website up and running in less than an hour. The problem, however, is that you are very limited in your design options, fine tweaking your site can take a lot of time, and there is no option to add custom styling code if you ever need to.
The truth of the matter is that WordPress takes roughly ten minutes longer to get a “good enough” site running, and takes just as much time to tweak. WordPress and other CMS options however have some significant styling advantages over website builders, in that you are not limited, at all, in your design possibilities. Sure, it’s not always easy to get the exact styling you want, but it is possible.
The one claim to fame that website builders had over the other options is that they were visual based design options, so building a site was as simple as playing with Lego. Fortunately for us, there are now a variety of options that can turn your WordPress site into a visual site builder, but without the SEO problems listed above.
5) Website builders offer you all the apps and extensions you need to build a fully fledged professional website
Most website builders offer you some apps and plugins to add additional functionality to your site, but their options are limited. One of the most well-known website builders only has 288 apps available; whereas the WordPress marketplace currently has over 54 000 free plugins!
The cause of this considerable disparity is that WordPress has an enormous community of developers who consistently release new apps and features. By contrast, the apps for website builders need to be developed in-house meaning there is no way a website builder company can compete with the volume or quality of apps available to WordPress users.
6) It’s YOUR website
This is one of the most egregious deceptions that website builders spout to their client base. Sure, you control what content you add to your site, and you control (to an extent) what your site looks like, but that’s where your control ends. In reality, you don’t own your data.
Let’s imagine that you’ve built your site using a website builder, but now you want to move to something more modern and competitive. The only problem is that there is no native way to export your data. If you’ve produced some top quality content, the only way to move it to a new site is to copy paste every single post. This might not be too much of a pain if you only have five or ten pages on your site, but if you produce content on a regular basis, moving tens or hundreds of articles can be a massive time sink.
Now, you might be wondering why there is no native way to export your data, and the insidious truth is that website builders want to lock you into using their product for life. The marketing guru’s behind these website builders know that once your site is live, if it’s too much effort to move it, most people just won’t bother.
At this point, you might be thinking to yourself that a website is too much effort and that you just shouldn’t bother with one. And depending on why you want one, you might not be far from the truth.
If your goal is to grow your digital presence and expand your brand awareness (both online and offline), then a website is a necessity. If you use a proven CMS like WordPress, put in the effort to ensure that your SEO is up to spec, consistently produce high-value content, and exercise patience, your website will rank well in Google.
On the other hand, if the only reason you want a website is so that you can have some form of an online presence, there are better options for you to consider. If you just want your company to be listed online, and have no interest in creating content, then your absolute best option is to list your business on an industry-specific third-party platform. To illustrate this point, if you search for something like holiday houses in Thailand, platforms like TripAdvisor and Airbnb outrank almost everyone else.
In an ideal world, you would have an SEO optimised website and a profile on a trusted third-party platform, but if you were presented with a false dichotomy and were forced to choose one or the other, the platform option will give you the best results.
By Warwick Levey | March 14th, 2018 | Categories: Technology | Tags: Business, digital platform, website
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6 年Love the featured image design, well done Malikah Dollie