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Website builders have become a popular option for individuals looking to quickly and easily create a website for their business. Over the last few years, website builders have evolved becoming more affordable, easy to use, and sophisticated in terms of the dynamic features that they offer.
Why Choose Website Builders?
However, with the rise of website builders for small businesses, there are notable issues that you do need to consider in choosing the best website builder to create your website. In this guide, we will help you decide if website builders are a good option for you based on your personal and business requirements.
We will do so by sharing the pros and cons of website builders for small businesses.
Pros of Using Website Builders for Small Businesses
Listed below are the main reasons why website builders have gained popularity, the pros:
1. Pricing
The primary reason why most small business owners go for website builders over getting their website built by a professional developer is because of the associated price tag. With popular website builders such as Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace, prices start from $0 to $30 a month (for a premium small business website).
However, with the free plans that some website builders offer like Wix, Weebly, Google Sites, and many others, you do have many limitations. Some of them are ads on your website, a branded non-personalized domain name, and more.
If you hire a developer for creating your small business website, you’re looking at thousands of dollars upfront, $35+ on top of that monthly for hosting and management, and about $80+ a month for future customizations.
Hence, pricing is a big advantage for website builders.
2. Ease of Use
Another great advantage of using website builders for small businesses is the ease of use. They are ideal for beginners that have little to no experience in web design.
Many of these website builders have a simple drag-and-drop builder that allows anyone to simply drag and drop elements, add content to their website, and then simply hit publish when you’re ready to go live.
Most website builders also offer free professional website templates to build from. With many of these builders, you do not need to worry about hosting, emails, and support as they are all-in-one platforms that have all these complementary and essential features for building an online presence – all in one place.
If you’re looking to grow your small business and you require more personalized and advanced features down the track, then more often than not you will grow out of the limitations that website builders provide
Cons of Using Website Builders for Small Businesses
In this section, we will explore the disadvantages of using website builders.
1. Ownership
You don’t have ownership of your website if you’re using a website builder. This is the issue, not just the limitations and lack of customization freedom for more complex websites but when you grow your website and require new features, the fact is most likely you will have to build your new website from scratch.
Unfortunately, if you want to migrate your website which you don’t actually own, or particular pages, designs, and other elements, you will not be able to. Website builders make it very difficult to transition out of their platform.
Hence, if you’re looking to grow and expand your website, make sure that the more advanced plans on the website builder that you go for are sufficient when you outgrow your basic plan. And if the advanced plans for that website builder are not sufficient for your needs, then don’t bother going for it as you’ll encounter unnecessary pain later down the track.
2. Extra Ongoing Costs
You must work out the actual cost you’ll be paying monthly. This can be significantly higher than expected. For example, with Shopify, you might decide that the $29 per month Basic Plan is all you need.
However, you might not have calculated the additional apps that you might need such as email marketing, SMS marketing, upscaling, and other apps that increase the performance of your Shopify store. And these can all add up. Before you know it, you would be close to paying $100 per month.
These ongoing costs add up over years. Therefore, make sure you’ve worked out your monthly costs upfront with website builders.
3. SEO Limitations
With website builders, you have search engine optimization (SEO) limitations compared with if you decide to go for a custom, professionally built website. This means ranking your website on search engines like Google is going to be harder with a website builder.
Also, read: BEST Website Builder for Online Store
Who Are Website Builders Best Suited for? (Video Guide)
Website builders are suited for individuals that have a limited budget, want to build their own website, have limited website requirements, not looking into a larger or more complex website, and wanting to quickly and easily launch their online presence with a simple website.
Website builders for small businesses are becoming more viable and innovative for all types and sizes of websites. However, for the time being, it’s important to consider the current limitations.
With this, we end our comprehensive breakdown of the pros and cons of using a website builder followed by a video guide explaining each point to understand the points easily.
Disclosure: Some of these links on this page are affiliate links, meaning we will get a commission if you buy through them, this helps support our education-based platform and we thank you in advance.
