One of the physicians who had previously built a website with us hired a well-known medical marketing company solely for the purpose of managing his reviews. Instead, the company made him switch over to their proprietary platform and buy a new website from them. Now he wants to leave that company. But because his website is on the company’s proprietary platform, he is going to lose his website after he leaves their platform. The doctor came back to us asking for help, and we have successfully restored the original website that we had initially built for him.
Another client reached out to us with a similar problem. After we built his website and set up his web hosting with one of the leading hosting providers, he hired a renowned dental marketing company for marketing and SEO. The company moved his website to their own servers for hosting. He eventually became unhappy with their service, so he decided to fire the company and move the website back to his old hosting that we initially recommended. He came back to us and we helped restore his original website that we had built.
However, switching hosting back and forth is a hassle and a waste of money that can be completely avoided. As we tell clients, if you already have a good, professionally designed new WordPress website that you are happy with, keep it! It will last many years. We always warn clients that marketing companies they hire should not insist on moving and rebuilding the website on their proprietary platform or servers. Other than the company trying to make money off of doctors, this is absolutely unnecessary and creates additional problems for the doctor, such as higher monthly fees for hosting and vendor lock-in (which means that you will lose your website if you leave the company). We assure clients that review management and marketing can be done using their original website that we have built for them on WordPress.
WordPress is a very versatile platform with many options, plugins, and extensions that a marketing company can easily use to do what they need. If you are happy with your website and only want content changes, design updates, or integrations of features such as reviews and online widgets, these can be implemented in your current WordPress website easily and cost-effectively. Rather than wasting money on frequently rebuilding your website, invest in enhancing and improving your current WordPress website and find a marketing company that supports this approach. WordPress is the most popular website platform so you can easily find a good marketing company that can work with your current WordPress website.
When you hire a marketing or SEO firm, they might ask for access to your website and server in order to do their work on the website. You can add them to your website as a user with restricted access privileges and you can grant them access to your hosting account through user management tools that your hosting vendor makes available. That should be enough. There is absolutely no need to move your website to the marketing company’s own servers. SEO and marketing firms should be perfectly capable of working with a website without having to host it.
A WordPress website can be hosted by any hosting provider on the market, so you or your web designer can choose the best vendor for your budget and needs. Most hosting plans include routine technical maintenance for your website and server, so you can get quality hosting at an affordable price and have all the technical maintenance performed for you by the hosting vendor. It seems that the only reason why a marketing company would insist on moving a website to their servers is to simplify their process and charge you a monthly fee for hosting. Most marketing companies resell hosting, so their fees are usually higher than common market prices. Instead of paying a lower monthly fee to a hosting company that you or your web designer select based on their quality, price or reputation, you will be paying a higher monthly fee to the marketing company for a hosting service that may be the same or worse. And, it will be a hassle to move the website to another hosting should you decide to stop working with your marketing company.
Bottom line: Find a marketing company that will not insist on moving your WordPress website to their own servers or platform. In most scenarios, they can easily work with your current website.