I wrote an article a while back about how site builders are problematic. This article contained five reasons why providers like Instapage and Weebly were actually not worth the money. Without getting into quite as much detail here, let me briefly explain those reasons – plus a few more that I wish I had included!

A visual site builder might be cheaper now, but it’s going to cost you more than you think.

The Content is Locked Down

You’ll lose your content if you ever switch.

When you build a webpage with something like Wix, you can’t just export that site content if you switch. You’re pretty much stuck with whatever service you decided on, and the only way you’re taking that content with you is if you’re willing to cut-and-paste every single page.

WordPress sites are actually more customizable.

The drag-and-drop editor of some site generators can seem as though you have unlimited possibilities. In reality, you’re pretty limited in what you can drag-and-drop on that page. And most site generators just offer themes anyway, with very limited options to customize them (even if you hire a pro). With a professional WordPress developer, your site is almost infinitely customizable. There are some surprising sites built in WordPress, including Mercedez-Benz.

They Work Against You in SEO, PPC, and Social

Your search rankings will suffer.

These sites simply are not built for SEO. Wix in particular has been (somewhat desperately) making strides towards improving this aspect. They’re still miles off. A WordPress site with a great SEO plugin, such as the popular Yoast plugin, will always outperform site generators. Remember – WordPress is so common that it affected Google’s algorithms.

Social engagement is easier with WordPress.

It comes built with some features that make sharing to social platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, easier and more stylish. It’s intentional. When Facebook released their Instant Articles platform, they released it with a plugin and support specifically for WordPress. 43% market share counts for a lot!

PPC works better.

It sounds crazy, but a lot of tools that PPC techs rely on simply don’t work as well on sites built with these cheap generators. It depends on the product, but some are built in ways that make it really difficult for PPC scripts to accurately report on lead generation.

Also, as I mentioned before, some tools are actually heavily influenced by how WordPress works – since it’s so common.

Higher Cost Than You Think

It seems like it should be really cheap to use these types of tools. Superficially, yeah. If you’re building a personal site, and you’re not worried about creating leads and generating income, then they are definitely cheap. If your time isn’t valuable enough to pay someone else to do it, and you have enough time to put into building them, then you’re fine. But here are some reasons why it might not actually be as cheap as it seems.

Your time is valuable, and visual builders waste it.

You’re going to spend hours upon hours building your own site in Wix – more time than you think. If you’re running a small business, don’t waste it on doing something you don’t even want to do just to save a little money. We’re not talking a couple of hours of set-up. You’re going to spend weeks, if not months, trying to get it right.

The sites don’t convert.

Without a professional designing a site for your business – let alone winging it on your own – you’re simply not going to generate leads. And remember: generating sales is the sole reason your website exists. If it doesn’t do that, then it’s useless. A provider like Weebly isn’t going to understand your business. Their pre-existing themes aren’t going to be designed to generate leads.

You’ll pay more to leave it later.

When you get to the point that your business needs a real website – something that converts and gets leads, you’re going to have to pay for the time it takes to move your site out of the old site generator. I once built a site that had been in Wix. It took weeks to get the content out of Wix and into WordPress. I couldn’t export it, and every page was custom-designed in sort of random ways. They didn’t want to lose their content, but I couldn’t just copy-paste the content out without bringing along a ton of code that broke the new design. So I had to tease out all of the actual content, find ways to display it on the new site without breaking conversions or making it ugly, and then carefully build every page from scratch.

It was rough. We were extremely generous and didn’t bill the client for the 60 additional hours it took to go through this process (there were 200+ pages). If we had billed them, it would’ve been a minimum of $500 per 10 pages, and that’s still being generous to the amount of time it actually took. You can see how that might add up.

A Frustrating Site Build Process

These are a few ways that even just building the site is going to hit some roadblocks.

The interface is more complicated than you think.

I’ve had quite a few clients use site generators like Wix or Shopify, as well as coworkers who tried to make their own edits. They always say that it’s extremely frustrating to build sites this way.

Always.

They only rarely have support for your 3rd party software.

These providers usually only offer plugins or integrations for a handful of systems. WordPress not only has support for thousands of apps and software, professional developers can write custom plugins and integrations. Locked-down site generators simply won’t do that.

The site’s mobile experience will likely be terrible.

Any visual builder, or themes based around a “WYSIWYG” concept, will typically wind up with a miserable mobile experience. Phones don’t come in uniform resolutions, so you have to have a truly responsive design for it to be effective. Imagine using a phone to view your site and finding that content is cut off, you have to scroll horizontally to view it, it’s too zoomed-in, or you just plain can’t click things. That’s a pretty common experience with sites built using these tools.

Hiring a professional to do it for you can reduce these issues, but because visual site builders aren’t built with true responsive HTML/CSS, any solution you come up with will be a workaround at best. And if you’re going to hire a professional anyway, why bother with one of these cheap services?