DIY Website Builders are a BAD Idea

You are thinking about having a website for your business, and suddenly, you see the ads everywhere. Wix, Squarespace, and others. Bombarding you with the good news: YOU can make a website yourself, and it’s easy and cheap! Well, so far, that sounds great!.

Such applications allow you to design web pages without having knowledge about it, in a fairly simple way. The system is based on an easy drag and drop interface were the user drags content to incorporate it on each page.

So, what's wrong? Why not use a DIY builder for your website?

Poor Search Engine Optimization

DIY builders already have several years in the market. Even so, and despite having improved considerably, their customers are not happy, especially in the face of SEO search engine positioning (something we already know is essential to succeed on the Internet).

They tend to make it difficult, oven impossible to do proper SEO in each article, image or page.

Besides that, most DIY builders tend to use outdated code on their websites. The bad optimization of the resources used in their websites is often penalized by search engines such as Google.

Also, DIY do not help you with content, other than giving you access to generic graphics to use in your website. Nowadays, Google, the most popular search engine in the world, takes content into account when ranking websites in search engine results. The proper language and formatting for your content is crucial for SEO, and DIY builders will offer no help with that.

Your website will not be unique

The look and feel of your website is limited by the campabilities or range of templates available. This tends to make DIY websites very similar to each other. This can have the unfortunate side-effect of affecting your search results even further.

They might own the content of your website

Please, please, read the fine print. If you hire a web designer to build your website, you probably will be able to host it anywhere you want, and everything on it, images, text content, even the look and feel of it, is yours. On the other hand, DIY builders may own the design, images, and even content of your website. If you stop paying for their services, your website may simply be no longer yours to claim.

Your website is trapped inside their box

Custom features and coding is oftentimes impossible on DIY builders. Imagine that you have an online store that you created with a DIY builder. At first, it might work well enough. But down the line, if you want to offer multiple options and features on your online store, you might find that it’s not possible with the available tools of your DIY builder. And since custom work is not possible in most DIY builders, you are stuck with a website that can’t be upgraded to meet your needs.

 

In short, if you want to have a professional page, well positioned on search engines, that can be adapted over time, and can migrate to any server if necessary, avoid website builders.