3 Reasons Why a DIY Website Approach Is Bad for Your Business

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PROGMATIQ
  • Date Published
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DIY website solutions make a process of building a website look almost effortless. But is it really that good?

DIY solutions like Wix or Squarespace can trick people into thinking that building a website is so easy.

And yes, there are use cases when DIY builders are useful, for example when you want something done fast and easily and don’t care about the overall user experience on mobile devices or SEO.

However, there are a few reasons why building a custom website is a better approach.

Let me give you 3 that are the most important in my opinion.

1. DIY Websites Limit Your Marketing Arsenal and Customization Options

A DIY website is usually limited in terms of customizations that you can do. It is reflected in all major marketing areas like SEO or using custom marketing elements on the website to convert users.

When you use a DIY builder you usually pick a theme that looks all nice and shiny. However, once you do it and you start customizing it – you can run into big troubles.

Why?

Because you’re limited to the number of things you can do with that theme.

You can’t add custom non-trivial forms, popups or other elements that are not defined in that theme.

And even if you can trick the system and add those – then likely they’ll look ugly and non-professional.

Think about it – Wix doesn’t use Wix builder for its own homepage (at least it doesn’t look like it’s built with Wix after doing a bit of research).

And they recently started changing the DIY approach to a more developer friendly one by announcing their new coding system – Corvid.

2. They Limit Your SEO Efforts

Most of these DIY builders heavily rely on Javascript (JS) to create cool animations and nice flow.

And that’s great.

But there is one big problem for that.

This solution is far from being optimal when it comes to SEO.

Why?

Because JS does most of “heavy lifting” by showing, animating and manipulating content on the website.

If you go to a website built on Wix or Squarespace and disable JS – you’ll see a page that is almost blank.

Why Is It Important for SEO?

Because Google robots don’t like websites built like this.

Yes, they are now better in “reading” content from websites that heavily rely on JS, but this is still far from the optimal approach.

3. They Lock You In

Once you’ve built a website using a DIY builder – you’re pretty much locked. You pay a monthly subscription for your hosting and other features that might be included.

Let’s say that you’ve built this awesome looking website and you want to use a cheaper hosting solution and migrate your website to another server.

Well…. you CAN’T

It’s because Wix, Squarespace and most of the other DIY websites run on their own core and you can’t separate the 2 without breaking them.

And what happens if all of a sudden your DIY provider wants to increase their prices?

You can’t control that and you have to pay what they say you must pay.

Conclusion

Even though building a custom website might cost more at first, you will save yourself a lot of time and nerves.

There is no ideal solution in this world, however hiring a company or a freelancer to build you a website is something that I highly recommend you consider.

I hope this article was helpful.

If you need help building your website – feel free to contact us here.