When it comes to building your own professional website, you may be looking for the following objectives: to build the site cost-effectively, to retain full ownership and control over your website assets, and to be able to customize your website in the future. Wix, Weebly, Squarespace and similar proprietary website builders don’t meet any of these objectives – even the first one, as we will see below.
Note: the same issues apply to web design companies that use their own proprietary platforms to design and host their client websites.
Limited Customization Options
With your business site, you likely want the ability to scale the site, to customize and update it, and add various features in the future, as needed. When you build a website using a website builder, you will be offered only limited customization tools, which are good for only basic sites or hobby blogs. It may be difficult or impossible to customize your website beyond the options offered by the platform. If you decide to hire a web designer to get the website to look and function exactly the way you want, let me tell you from my experience that it’s likewise difficult or impossible for a web designer to work with proprietary website builders.
Rather, I recommend WordPress, which is a non-proprietary (open-source) platform. Any open-source platform, especially a popular one like WordPress, offers a much better choice of pricing options, hosting options, and web designers who can work with the platform. When it comes to design, layout, functionality, or SEO, WordPress gives you a much better ability to customize and scale your site. In other words, a WordPress site can be customized to accommodate any needs and dreams.
As mentioned, a commercial website builder may be good for very simple sites, but you can likewise build a very simple site with WordPress just as easily and cost-effectively. You can even do it for free, and only pay a low ongoing hosting fee. The point here is that your basic WordPress site will be much better set up for future customizations and scaling than will your Weebly/Wix/Squarecpace site.
Website Ownership
It can cost your business more money in the long run due to dependence on their technology, because the web technology they use is agency-specific. This means you would have difficulty transferring to a new agency or designer because they will not understand this technology. A website is your business asset and you should own it in full. When your site is on a proprietary platform such as Wix, Weebly, Squarespace – or with any company that builds websites on their own proprietary platform – you don’t own the full site and cannot migrate away from the platform without losing some or all of the site. So, if you ever want to take the site and content to another designer, the migration process can be costly or impossible. The only way to ensure full site ownership is to register the hosting and domain in your name and to build your website on an independent (non-proprietary), standalone platform such as WordPress or Drupal.
Tight Budget?
Even if you are on a very tight budget, I still don’t see a reason to use a site builder. With a commercial site builder, you still have to pay monthly fees for hosting – so, why pay when you don’t own the site? In other words, why rent a site, if you’d rather own it? Again, you can set up a basic free site in WordPress and pay a low hosting fee, but in that case you will fully own your site and can scale and customize it in the future in any way you want, as we have discussed above.
A Note on Hosting
Squarespace, Weeby, Wix and other similar proprietary website builders used to be somewhat popular when hosting vendors (such as GoDaddy) provided only mediocre service for WordPress websites. Back then, the proprietary website builders were sold as a complete solution with excellent hosting and technical maintenance. Now, however, there are very affordable hosting providers (such as WP Engine) that provide top-notch quality technical maintenance, updates, and customer support for WordPress websites, so hosting is no longer an issue when it comes to choosing WordPress. With plenty of affordable prices for top-quality WordPress hosting, I believe that a proprietary site builder is no longer the best or most cost-effective choice for a practice or small business website.
Professional Website? Work with a Professional
If you are building a professional website, it should be designed by a professional designer to look, well, professional. Anyone can learn how to use a cheap web design tool in an hour, but you can’t learn in an hour what a good web designer has learned after years of experience. Learning how to use a website builder won’t teach you how to actually create a site that’s usable, well-organized, tastefully designed, and optimized to increase traffic and conversions. As the saying goes, it takes years of experience to not be a bad designer.
Related post: for a business website, it’s better to use custom design rather than canned templates.