What they don’t tell you when it comes to free website building platforms.
Are free website builders as good as they seem? Here’s what they don’t tell you.
Starting a new business is expensive. You have a lot of initial costs and little (if any) turnover to cover them. It can be tempting to choose free options to get yourself out of the starting blocks quickly and cheaply, but will those saved dollars cost you in the long run?
There’s no denying that free website builders serve the purpose. With little or no knowledge, you can DIY something that looks decent and gets you online quickly. However, they come with a lot of compromises that aren’t always immediately apparent. Let’s take a look at some of the drawbacks of a free website builder.
You don’t own your website
When you use a free website builder, everything that’s required to make it and display it online is owned by the site provider – all you do is customise one of their templates – which makes it very hard to move your site elsewhere at a later date. It also means they’re free to place their own advertising on your site.
Limited customisation
On a free plan, you’ll have access to a small range of templates where you can change the layout and the colours – to a degree. But at the end of the day, your site is going to look much like all the others who have used the same service.
You use their domain name
Most free website builders will give you a URL that is a subdomain of their own, which means that your business website address will be something like “yourbusiness.freewebsitebuilder.com”. Not only does this look unprofessional, but customers might be less likely to trust the legitimacy of your business. Also, if your website provider decides to shut down, your URL goes with them, along with all of your inbound website traffic links.
Poor site performance
Free web hosting tends to come with restrictions on bandwidth and storage, which can make your pages slow to load, limit the amount of content you can store and publish, and adversely affect the scalability of your site. The SEO tools included in free site builders are often rudimentary and do little to help your website’s Google searchability.
Hidden costs and expensive upgrades
The way many free website services make their money is by offering premium upgrades. They’ll charge you to use your own domain name and a bit more to remove their advertising from your site, plus more to increase your data storage, and more again for eCommerce services. While these may all add up to more than you’d pay for an independently hosted site, the hassle of moving to a new host can make it tempting just to stay and pay.
Minimal customer support
If something goes technically wrong, as a non-paying customer, you’re unlikely to get much in the way of support from your free web host. They’ll probably have a self-service knowledge base that you can browse, and perhaps an online user forum where you can ask other customers for advice, but you’ll be at the back of the queue if there’s any email or telephone support.
So, while free web builders might look attractive at first, it’s much better to start on the right foot with a website that can grow with your business. Moreweb can get you underway with an affordable, custom, SEO-optimised site.
