A well-designed website is a big asset to any company looking to make big sales especially at an age characterized by increased internet connectivity, a higher proliferation of internet-powered devices, and an ever-increasing need for an online presence.

With a perfectly designed website, businesses can showcase their products and services in the easiest way possible. Luckily, building and launching a website is very easy these days thanks to website builders.

What is a website builder?

A website Builder is simply an internet-based website designing app that allows users to create a professional-looking website quickly and easily. Some of the most popular website builders include Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly.

With a website builder, everything has been made simple for you. As such, you don’t need to have any prior knowledge in web design or coding.

So, what do you need to know before using website builders? Below we have outlined the advantages and disadvantages of working with website builders.

Advantages of Working with Website Builders

Easy to Use:

The primary goal of website builders is to provide a platform where people can effortlessly design a functional website without having any prior coding or design knowledge.

This is why the drag and drop feature of website builders has gained a lot of popularity ever since introduction. One can simply create an image gallery on the site by dragging a gallery tool over the workspace, then later adding the required pictures.

Cheaper Alternative to a Designer:

Now more than ever, there is an increasing demand for businesses to improve their online presence. Thus, business owners need to invest in professional website designs.

Unfortunately hiring a professional website developer can be a costly affair. Luckily, you can use website builders to display your products and services if you lack sufficient capital to hire a professional designer.

These DIY platforms can help you design a good website to launch your business, then later use the returns from your venture to hire a designer when you are looking to upgrade. Website builders also help reduce startup costs as well as the time spent for one to make a profit.

Saves Time:

Whether you choose to hire a professional website developer or you choose to design the site yourself with services as Bluehost instead of Wix or other Website Builders, you are bound to experience the same drawback – the time factor. Developing a fully functional website tends to consume a lot of time.

Professional designers most often have other clients on their schedules, meaning you’ll have to wait your turn. Similarly, doing it yourself will also cost you some time. For instance, you still have to spend time writing some codes, setting up a virtual environment, and ultimately doing a test run to ensure that your site works properly.

Fortunately, with website builders, you can make swift changes on a website with just a few clicks. This greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to finish a website.

No coding Skills Required

One of the biggest hurdles when in website development is learning how to code. However, perfecting your coding skills takes a considerable amount of time that could have otherwise been used to run the daily affairs of your business.

It is even worse if you lack sufficient capital to hire someone with the skill. With a website builder, however, you do not need to learn any programing language like HTML or CSS. Website builder tools cut coding entirely out of the web development process.

All you need to do is simply choose any of the available professionally designed templates that blends perfectly with your business model and incorporate it into your site. Many website builders allow one to customize the template to a design that caters to your needs.

Offers Better Website maintenance features

As a business owner, you need to regularly maintain your website if you want your business to be successful in terms of ROI. With Website builder platforms, it is much easier for one to perform regular maintenance on their website.

Remember that your visitors are always looking for new information, news, features, and products. Hence, you have to ensure that the information on your website is always up to date.

The platforms drag and drop features and an easy to use interface, make it easy for one to update or make changes to the website.

 Disadvantages of Working with Website Builders

Unsuitable for Professional Business

According to research, many consumers never visit a website twice if it has a cheap and lackluster design. So for a business website to succeed in today’s modern world, it needs to incorporate a quality design, Search Engine Optimization coding as well as have some professional features.

The design of a website is not only important for aesthetic purposes, but it is also important in determining the credibility of a business. So, if your website is supposed to attract more consumers to your business, ensure that you hire a professional web designer for better quality and visual aesthetics.

Not Custom Designed

Website builders offer limited customization options. As such, most websites made with website builders tend to look the same because most are made using the same pre-designed templates.

At times, these templates fail to work on a variety of mobile devices and lack additional SEO features. They also limit one from adding extra features to improve the website’s effectiveness. This makes a website look bland and inadequate especially if it is targeting a more professional audience.

Poor SEO

When working with website builders, you are bound to deal with messy and unstructured codes. These codes are harmful to a website, as they tend to damage the on-page SEO, which helps a website rank higher on search engines like Google.

Building websites with these platforms only gives you control over the design of a site and not the SEO code. This tends to make a website disorganized, which search engines like Google frown upon.

If you want, to rank higher on search engines you need to create a site that follows a certain hierarchy or category and this is only possible if you program your SEO codes.

Limited Pages

Many website builder platforms offer both a free and a premium account. While both can help, you build a worthwhile website, free website builder accounts can limit you on the number of pages that you can create on a site.

Some of these platforms can allow you to make up to five pages while others only offer one or two pages. Fewer pages tend to limit the content, which in turn translates to fewer keywords and thus less website traffic and fewer searches. Today’s consumer wants to visit sites that are frequently updated are constantly growing

Conclusion

Website builder platforms are some of the most sophisticated tools on the internet. They may be complicated to use, however they are great if your purpose is to build a temporary or simple personal site for your hobby.

However, if you intend to build a larger website with a more complicated site Architecture, consider using CMS platforms like WordPress or build a custom website on your personal hosting.