June 21, 2019
If you don’t need a fully customised corporate website, you might consider using an online site builder with ready-to-use templates. These platforms (SaaS) offer “simple” turnkey solutions that involve several important considerations:
These cost-effective solutions follow a B2B model with free and premium features requiring minimal effort and resources, but they can ultimately “trap” customers.
Many users aren’t aware that these platforms often don’t offer corporate email creation or related services directly through their portal, instead subcontracting these services to companies like Google.
SIGNIFICANT DISADVANTAGES OF THESE BUSINESS MODELS
- Your website belongs to a company whose real identity you may barely know
- Your website is limited to the options and functionalities the platform offers
- You’re restricted by their available themes and templates:
- No transparency
- No direct contact person
- Your site looks like everyone else’s
- You become dependent on a single business model
- You spend excessive time creating pages with only online guidelines
For Swiss and EU companies, these solutions are frequently hosted in the USA or other countries with different legislation that may not comply with GDPR and LPD requirements. Instead, they use your data to advertise themselves and profile your products and services.
The problem is that your site won’t reflect your style or brand, but primarily the brand of the company hosting your website (especially for SEO). It will be impersonal and not scalable.
When you want to optimize your website’s ergonomics or hire a web designer for further development, you’ll discover it’s simply impossible.
You cannot modify or customize the source code!
When creating a site with a site builder, you cannot easily choose or change your web hosting provider.
Your site will be hosted on the site builder’s servers, and if they don’t allow you to transfer templates or designs elsewhere, you’ll be locked into their hosting service.
If this provider is unstable, limits your website traffic, or doesn’t offer support in your language, you’ll need to navigate through chatbots and FAQs.
Migrating a site designed with a site builder always involves many manual adjustments (front-end, back-end, and database).
Finally, remember that companies supplying site builders may get acquired, change pricing policies, or alter terms of service without advance notice.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO) CONCERNS
Search engines constantly evolve their algorithms. While a site’s ranking depends primarily on content and organic structure, using site builders can be risky if your content generates revenue and you can’t quickly make necessary changes.
Search engines will prioritize the company offering your service (if free or cheap, you must accept their publicity on your pages, like with Wix). When someone searches for your company, hidden meta-tags that cannot be removed will always promote their business instead of yours!
Similar to Booking or TripAdvisor, your site won’t be front and center but will appear behind the company hosting your website or providing the site builder service and hidden advertising.
Many site builders offer little flexibility for optimization. For example, they might not allow you to control the responsive version of your website, file compression, or title and description tags for pages and articles that search engines use.
THE TIME FACTOR
Creating a website isn’t what takes the most time with online site builders.
What’s time-consuming is developing the content for your site: text, articles, blog posts, videos, images, and everything that brings value to your visitors.
A site builder won’t write your content. You’ll also need to invest time understanding how it works and its limitations to exploit its full potential.
If you use AI for content generation, message quality isn’t guaranteed and will likely be impersonal and standardized. It’s important to deliver your personal message to attract thoughtful readers.
CONCLUSION
Registering a domain name and creating a website with these site builders offers advantages only in the short term but is a poor long-term choice, especially for corporate websites. While they allow you to quickly design attractive websites without technical knowledge, they prevent you from controlling your data and important technical aspects needed for proper SEO, content, and brand optimization.
One of the best alternatives to site builders is WordPress, which has evolved substantially since 2003, particularly its “Back-Office” CMS functionalities, which are elegant, well-structured, highly customizable, and user-friendly. It can be used for blogs, business websites, and e-commerce. WordPress is open-source software delivered under GPLv2+. The new Infomaniak Site Builder is another good alternative.
At first glance, site builders allow you to quickly design attractive websites without technical knowledge, but they won’t let you control your data and important technical aspects needed for proper website optimization (including back-end coding).
If your website isn’t just a showcase but is critical to your core business, prioritize a powerful and scalable solution with hosting that can evolve with your website’s growing success and adapt to new technologies.
PM/CTO @DIGITALABS, June 21, 2019