The Downsides of DIY Website Builders Part 2

If you read the first part of our blog series about DIY template website builders like Wix and Squarespace, you’ve already seen several ways that they fall short for businesses who are focused on building their web presence and positioning themselves as leaders in their industries. As helpful as they are for individuals and potentially startups who need a website but don’t have funding, they don’t have the capabilities an established company needs in order to grow. To continue with this educational series, below are three more reasons you should choose a custom website over a DIY template website builder.

Design Limitations

At first, it seems like a positive thing that free website builders have pre-made templates you can just fill in and publish. It does make the initial web design go quickly. The problem is that you end up with a website that looks like so many others floating around the web. Your website needs to be one of the most powerful pieces of branding in your entire company. If it looks like you copied and pasted it from someone else, you’re missing out on that vital opportunity.

Of course, we don’t mean to say that it’s impossible to make custom changes to your website if you use a DIY builder. It is, but it becomes complex and inefficient in a hurry. A professional developer would need extra time to figure out how the site’s code is working because they weren’t the ones who wrote it, and then they need to figure out how to work within their limited code to make the customization you want. Sometimes this ends up being such a challenging process that you pay almost as much to customize your DIY site as you would have paid for a custom site built from scratch.

Setting Up Your Pay-Per-Click Ads for Failure

Pay-per-click ads, or PPC ads, are among the most effective digital marketing strategies today. If you’ve ever seen the “ad” label on the first three or four results in your Google searches, those are PPC ads.

As important as it is to design your PPC ads well, their success also hinges on the landing pages users will see when they click on those ads. Each ad needs to go to a landing page that is relevant to its specific purpose. For instance, let’s go back to that med spa example. If you have a PPC ad that advertises Botox injections, that ad will get the best results if it goes to a specific Botox page. In fact, Google will block pay-per-click ads if your ad’s content doesn’t match the page it links to. If you only have a one-page website you built with a DIY website builder, you don’t have that option. Even for website builders that do have workarounds to let you add new pages, it’s often more complex than the process would be if you had a traditional website.

Limited Mobile Capabilities

While not all businesses realize this, it’s more important for your website to function well on mobile devices than on desktops. In 2015, Google announced that mobile traffic had officially overtaken desktop traffic, and its lead has only increased since then. In other words, more people will see your site on mobile devices, so you should design your site with mobile in mind.

The problem is that responsive web design, the most effective way to make sites work smoothly on mobile devices, is a more complex way to design a site. As a result, template-based DIY website builders tend to struggle with mobile optimization. That may not have been a big deal five or six years ago, but it’s a significant problem today. Not only will it put a damper on the professional look you want your site to have but it will have a negative impact on your search engine optimization as well.

As a business owner, you always need to have a handle on your financial situation. You need to know your budget inside and out, and when your balance sheet is always on your mind, it’s easy to think that you’re getting a great deal with a free or low-cost DIY website builder. Unfortunately, it can cost you far more in the long run in the form of hidden expenses and, most importantly, leaving revenue on the table but you aren’t getting the traffic a traditional site would bring. Our team at McCauley Marketing Services is well-versed in the art of building effective websites that bring our clients results. If you want to find out more, contact McCauley Marketing Services to discuss your needs.