All entrepreneurs know and accept the importance of a good website. Every business, irrespective of size and scale, needs a user-friendly website with the necessary features and seamless performance.

It is one of the most effective online ways to make people familiar with the products or services you offer. But then, many startups find it expensive to hire a web design company to build a website, and therefore, they may opt for DIY website builders.

Whether you start a new business or facing tough times in this pandemic age, building a feature-rich website should be a priority to survive. However, it is difficult to make such a website on a limited budget or even for free.

Here DIY (Do it yourself) website builders come into the picture! Though they can assist you to create a website on your own for a fraction of the cost of a professionally built website, we will see the disadvantages of website builders in this article.

A well-built website can cost more money, but it is worthy as it will pay dividends for years to come. On the other hand, a website builder is relatively cheap but it can create problems in the long run for your business.

Here are the key shortcomings of DIY website builders.

What are the disadvantages of using a website builders?

1. No Uniqueness

DIY platforms have generic website templates. In other words, all websites built by using these templates will have the same navigation structure, layout, and styles. Entrepreneurs have limited ability to alter the design to make their websites unique.

Such a similar website cannot stand out from the crowd and get failed to build your brand over the period. Branding needs a tremendous amount of customization regularly, which is impossible in the websites built by using DIY website builders.

2. Poor SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential for increasing the website’s visibility and higher ranking on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

Unfortunately, DIY website builders fail to offer strong SEO capabilities to business websites. Most DIY website builders do not allow Google to verify the respective website in their Webmaster Tools, which can hurt its search rankings badly.

What’s more, most of such websites do not integrate with Google Analytics, and you may not get the important data related to the performance of your website.

3. Not Responsive

It is necessary for your business website to have a responsive design to ensure a good mobile experience.

These days, mobile devices cover over 50% of all web traffic globally, and therefore, your website should be ready for mobiles and tablets. With responsive design, your website gets ready as per the size and dimensions of various screens. It also contributes to improving search rankings because Google also prioritizes websites with responsive designs.

Most DIY websites are not responsive and give a poor performance on search engines.
 

4. Minimal Support

Your website has many components for ensuring proper functionality. If you fail to take care of these components, they may lead the business website to malfunction. Some of the issues that occur because of this include-

• Visitors/users receive error messages on certain pages
• Website faces downtime
• Web pages take more time to load
• Various elements stop functioning

All such technical glitches need technical assistance in real-time, but DIY website builders provide very limited customer support and your website may remain down for a longer time.
 

5. No Ownership

This is one of the biggest disadvantages of DIY websites. Often, you cannot get ownership of the website you have built using a DIY website builder.

In many instances, the website builder may own the design and even content for your website. If you stop paying for their services, you may not use these assets.

As a result, you may have to build another website from scratch. Also, you cannot migrate the website to another server when it is created by a DIY builder.
 

6. Performance Issues

DIY website builders use outdated code at times to save costs and keep the web development process easy for all. However, this can lead to website performance issues including slow website speed, lack of security, and navigation limitations.

Your target audience finds it difficult to navigate such websites and their requirements may not get fulfilled. Such a poor user experience can drive the potential web traffic away from the website.

7. Reduces Value

If your website looks similar to many other websites in content, display, or features then customers or visitors will know that you are using a cheap builder to create your business website.

It certainly devalues your business and diminishes your brand identity. When you opt for a cheap route with your website, you will always get cheap results.
 

8. Single-page Development

Most website builders enable you to make a single web page, which is not useful for SEO campaigns or creating an online buzz.

Your business website should have multiple pages and it should keep on growing. It is the most effective way to bring Google bots repetitively while keeping your website relevant for the target audience.

A single-page website does not serve any business objective effectively, and therefore, your company may not get any benefit from it.

9. Non-CMS Website

CMS systems are powerful and necessary tools that help us manage websites and content.

For example, WordPress is a robust CMS that facilitates writing, organizing, editing, and publishing content online for the business website. CMS offers full control over the design, documents, and display of the unique content.

However, a website builder enables you to create a static web page based on HTML, which is not compatible with any content management systems.
 

10. Slow Speed

A slow website is a really bad news for sales and search engine rankings.

As per the Hubspot study, the change in a website bounce rate spikes to 100% when a page takes 4 seconds or more to load. Now, website builders offer common servers to all their clients, which creates fewer resources for websites.

As a result, the website’s speed reduces significantly and visitors avoid such websites in the long run.
 

11. Advertisement Issues

This is another big disadvantage you need to consider when you make a website by using such DIY builders. Your business website may display a large advertisement.

It not only affects your brand value but also spoils the user experience. It instantly indicates that the website owner has not taken enough care in building a real website. As a result, people prefer to stay away from such websites and you experience a reduction in web traffic over the period.
 

12. Domain Name

As mentioned above, you do not own your website completely when it is built using a website builder. You do not even get a specific domain name for your website as well.

Most website builders will give a combined URL, which is worthless. People lose trust in a website with such a long domain name and tend to avoid contacting you.

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Conclusion

We can mention many other disadvantages of website builders. In a nutshell, custom websites are preferable as compared to the same built using DIY website builders. You can make the most of the CMS and other advanced features by developing a customized business website for your company.

Solwin Infotech is a leading Magento and WordPress Web Development Company. We assist our global corporate clientele to come up with robust and reliable web solutions.

Our 360-degree web development services include development to deployment and maintenance to marketing to boost your business online. Do you want to give your company an advantage in the web world? Simply send your requirements to info@solwininfotech.com and we will get back to you soon.