If you are currently using Yell, Wix, Squarespace or any other drag and drop website builder you maybe hurting your bottom line.

These website builders offer less technically-gifted business owners the opportunity to create a website in a matter of minutes. However, whilst you can create a site for your business in an afternoon, there is a price to pay.

You may not own your site

A lot of pay monthly website builders can hold your site hostage. Although, sometimes I think the word website is thrown around freely.

These website builders essentially rent you templates that you can make minor cosmetic adjustments to. This isn't necessarily building a site rather making updates to a site that already exists.

With some providers you can not move your website away if you decide you would like to revamp your site or to add new features.

In the long term, when you do have to move your site, it will cost to get another site created.

Limited functionalities

Website builders offer the very basic features a website needs: a homepage, about us, services and contact.

Although, there is nothing wrong with this, depending on your industry you may need other functionalities. For example, a mortgage advice business may need a mortgage calculator or estate agents may want a portal for their tenants.

On a bespoke site these features can be gradually added, so what your site can accomplish is limitless.

Your website already exists

As stated before, when you use website builders you are effectively just editing a template, so you are limited in features and design.

We recently came across two businesses that used a website builder and had the same website but different color schemes.

Your website should be an extension of your brand, you wouldn't decorate your office the same as your competitor, so why would you have the same website as them?

SEO Will Suffer

Website builder sites are notoriously bad foroptimise for SEO because of how rigid they are. Most of these platform will also offer SEO services, however you should be cautious.

A source working inside Yell told me that the company do not actually employ any SEO experts. All of their digital marketing is outsourced to agencies who then outsource the work again to low-cost operators in South East Asia. Several Yell clients told me they are routed to the Philippines when contacting Yell with questions about their SEO service.

Richman SEO said this about Yell's SEO service:

Because of the rise in social media many business owners no longer see SEO as an important factor, however, just because you can advertise your site on Facebook does not mean you should disregard trying to appear high on organic search on Google.

The internet is now too competitive

Everyday 1000s of sites go live and all are vying for attention, therefore your site has to be good. So many times we run audits on website builder sites and often they have been badly optimised.

The learning curve for these platform is very easy, it can fool you into complacency. Once you see you site is live and working you pat yourself on the shoulder and call it a day.

However, you should understand how and why your website functions, the way it does. When you edit templates you do not get this knowledge.

In conclusion, website builders can be useful to students, artists and anyone who just needs a placeholder site on the internet.

But if you are serious about creating a great website that can drive traffic and get you leads, you need to go bespoke.

Get a free audit of your site below or get in contact to see how we can help you.






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