7 reasons you shouldnt choose a diy website for your business

7 Reasons You Shouldn't Choose a DIY Website for Business

"A website is not an expense. It's an investment in your business and your hardest working employee."

A solid percentage of our clients once had an existing website they built themselves on a do-it-yourself (DIY) website builder. These come in many forms and just about every major hosting company offers their own easy website builder -- Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Godaddy, and the list goes on. There's a time and place for such a website, but if you're serious about the face of your business, your 24/7 digital billboard that does not stop working for you at any hour, then a DIY website isn't your permanent solution. So, why do most people choose to use a DIY website?

Budget. To save money, of course. These DIY services would have you believe that there's a designer in us all. What we can tell you is that we've sold many commercial templates to other designers, and even they can't follow the outline of an out-of-the-box solution. The odds are you'll want something customized and you'll run into trouble, if not during the production, then most likely during the deployment of the not-so-easy for everyone solution. A website is never complete. It should be constantly evolving to accommodate your visitors and/or products or services. There are several factors you should consider when deciding between a professional web designer and building a website yourself.

Don't try this at home.

1. Professionalism

It looks easy enough to put together you own website, and while the process itself may come easy to you, there's a ton of research backed into what a true professional might do.

"The definition of an expert is someone who knows what not to do."

Your website layout, ease-of-navigation, overall content, and functionality are just a few of the things that give your website a professional touch. These design-by-numbers websites don’t often have the curb appeal that your competitor has provided for their customers, and it will show. Aside from the results of something you may not be fully proud of, a DIY website will not compete with your competitors and most certainly won't outrank them in search engines.

2. Not SEO-friendly.

DIY website builders are not 100% search engine friendly. The code used to build DIY websites isn't read well by Google. SEO is just as tech related as it is content driven. Your DIY website can be the best-looking site in the world, but if Google can't make sense of the code, there's little you can do to make your rankings climb.

These websites try their best to keep up with the all too often algorithm changes in the SEO world, but implementing these changes across an entire system isn't so easy and it takes time. Time lost in SEO can be ground or rankings lost. A professional web design and/or SEO specialist will plan for SEO during the development of the website vs your site's SEO being an afterthought of the design.

3. Not so mobile-friendly.

Mobile usage will account for over 60% of all website visitors. What you can't control is the browser or device a visitor may be using to visit your website - Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and the dreaded Internet Explorer in combination with the various sizes of an Android or Apple or any other phone or tablet in between. The drag-and-drop DIY website builders are not often optimized for every major browser, device, or screen resolution. What if you were to lose that one customer because he or she couldn't view your website properly? A professional designer or developer will thoroughly test your website to ensure everything is working as it should on every possibility. DIY websites are often slow to load on mobile devices, which is also a consideration in SEO. One additional second of page load speed can cause a loss of up to 10% of traffic.

4. Site management / speed

When you build your website with a DIY website builder, you're often at the mercy of their hosting server or code to load in a browser. Heavy JavaScript functions and http requests can be detrimental to your website speed. So, not only will search engines not favor you, a visitor isn’t likely to have patience if they do find you. Google is all about the user experience. If they find that your website doesn’t provide a good user experience because they’re turned away by your speed, it will be reflected in your rankings.

"If it’s fast, it must be professional!"

Speed facts:
• 47% of people expect your site to load in less than 2 seconds.
• 40% will abandon it entirely if it takes longer than 3 seconds.

5. Security & support

Designing and publishing your DIY website is far less complicated that securing it. You’ll have little to nothing to do with the security of your DIY website, which may sound great, but think again. If your DIY website company is hosting your website and you’re on a shared server, it only takes one hacker to get into one website on the same server for your site to be vulnerable. Your website could be shut down for a time until it can be moved or secured. What’s the downtime worth to you?

Things DIY builders don't want you to know...

6. Ownership

Did you know that websites like Wix or Squarespace own the rights to your website? If one of these companies decides to fold or go out of business, you’ll lose everything. You have no rights to any of it or any of the customer information that may be saved within your admin area. If your domain and emails are tied to these companies, you’re starting from scratch. Chances are that you’ll choose a professional the next time.

7. Limited number of pages

Not all website builders are created equal, and many of them offer fixed, limited packages of features that encourage you to upgrade to expensive (and often overpriced) subscription accounts. Want more pages, upgrade here. Less content means less keywords, less keywords means less indexed content in Google and other search engines.

Cost is the only real advantage of building your own website on one of these DIY website builders, but can you really afford not to use a professional web designer? How much is your time worth to develop a not so mobile-friendly, poorly search engine optimized, unprofessional or basic website that looks like everyone else's website? The results will be lackluster, and you'll wish you had gone the other direction in the beginning.

Webunderdog Web Design is a professional web design company in Huntsville, Alabama, offering "custom" web design, development & SEO services for businesses and organizations of all sizes througout the U.S. We've been in business since 2008, and we're an Elite Author on the world's top selling digital marketplace for commercial web themes and templates. We know our stuff. Have questions? Get in touch ⟶