Website builders vs. custom websites – which one should you choose?
You’re about to get a new website – should you use a website builder with drag and drop functionality to design your own website, or get a professional team to get one designed and coded for you?
Well, if you choose the builder route, the job will be definitely done quicker and cheaper. But at what cost? No matter how much customization a website builder might provide, the possibilities are always going to be more if you get a professional team to code it from scratch.
Advantages of website builders:
– Cost-effective – it costs much less money than building a professional website with a freelancer or a software house in the beginning. You just need to pay for a subscription plan (there are a few options). It’s usually very affordable.
– Easy to use – building a website with such a tool is very intuitive. You will have a choice of beautiful website templates and you can easily personalize every element you want.
– Time – if your website must be ready ASAP, a website builder is the best choice. You will be able to create your webpage very quickly.
While all of these sound amazing, there are a LOT of disadvantages that you have to keep in mind:
– Poor SEO – when using web builders you’re not able to optimize your website for search engines. The vast majority of these companies doesn’t have SEO tools or if they do these are not good enough. As you can’t edit the code, usually you are not able to add important SEO tags, as for example heading tags and alt tags. This will lead you to lose your potential leads because they will not be able to find you easily in Google Search.
– Slow loading time – as you don’t have much impact on code, you will not be able to optimize your website if it’s slow. No one likes waiting forever for page content.
– Usually you can’t export your site to other platforms. You will not be able to transfer your website because it is hosted on your website builder server. If you put a lot of time and work into developing your web page and you then change your business idea (maybe you want to expand your website with a web developer), you will need to stick to this platform or you will lose everything. It means you will have to recreate your website from scratch.
– You are not the owner of the website. The owner is the company you created the website on. Your website will not work outside the company’s website building software. You even don’t own your website code. Not good…
– Not custom designed – your website will not stand out from the crowd as it will have a rather standard layout, like the other websites made on these platforms. You will not be able to add many personalized features. After some time, there’s a possibility you will start to suffer from the lack of customization.
– Ads – if you choose a free version of the website builder very often you need to agree to display annoying commercials.
So if you take everything into consideration, and if you have a bit of time, we would always recommend going the custom route. Hire a custom development company to design and code your website from scratch, exactly as you want it to be. This is the cool thing with custom websites, everything can be tailored to your needs.
Here are some advantages of taking this route and getting a custom website:
– Professional and unique design – your website will be perfectly tailored to your needs. It can have all kinds of features you may want. What’s more – you won’t have to worry that your website is the same as your competitors.
– Optimized for conversion – a professional developer will create your website in the right way to pull in your potential leads. Most of the templates on website builders are generic – it means they will not help you sell more.
– You are the owner of your website – since you need to buy a domain and hosting, your website belongs to you. You are independent. If you decide to change the server provider, you will take your website with you. When using a website builder you can’t migrate your page to different platforms. If you decide to do this, you are forced to start everything from scratch.
– Better page speed – in web builders you don’t have much impact on your website speed. With a web developer you can improve this very markedly. Remember that the speed of your website is one of the most crucial factors when it comes to how high you rank in Google Search.
– Good SEO – contrary to web builders that have minimal SEO tools, a website developer will help you get a good rank in Google search. He will optimize all the necessary functionalities for your success (sitemap creation, meta description optimization, submission to the major search engines etc.).
– Professional support –A web developer will help you with all that incomprehensible stuff and you will be able to focus on what’s most important to you – your business.
To sum up
As previously mentioned, if you have a bit of time and budget, we would always recommend taking the custom website over one created with a builder. It’s simply the better choice in our view.
Sure, if you are in a rush to have your website live in a couple of days or/and if your budget is super tight, a builder might be great for you, but again, it won’t be too great in the long run.