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9 Reasons you Shouldn’t Build your own ‘Free’ Business Website

by Air Websites Get your website off the ground

If you’re a small business or just getting started, it can be tough. Time is money and you might feel a new professional website will cost the earth, so your only option is a free website builder. However, a free website will always cost you. Here’s nine reasons why a free website isn’t a good website:

1.      User Experience

You can spend your valuable time creating a website that looks great. Bold colours, big photographs and lots of pages, you want your website to leave an impression…But what you don’t realise this might also be everything that’s wrong with free website builders. When you’re making a great website, you want to create a great experience for your users. Websites should be built with the user in mind to create an excellent user journey from when they find your website to the moment they leave. This requires great website structure, unfortunately- free website don’t offer, in fact Cheap Website Leeds is a better choice.

2.      Bad SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the content of your website to increase your position on a search engine results page. There are a lot of aspects to SEO you need to be aware of when you are looking to build a website, but one of the important aspects you need to consider is your on-site SEO. When building your website with a free website builder, you don’t have control over the code, only the design. You won’t be able to use structured data which will several SEO ranking factors.

3.      Not Mobile Friendly

Almost 60% of Google searches are performed on mobile devices. More users than ever are browsing websites on their mobile device. 62% of companies that designed their website to be mobile-friendly saw and increase in sales compared to websites that aren’t. Free Website builders don’t offer responsive design, however Affordable Website Leeds does! So, your website might look great on a desktop, but unfortunately, it isn’t going to look or work the same on a mobile or tablet device, and this is what a lot of your users will be seeing.

4.      Slow Website Speed

User experience is heavily reliant in website speed. A slow website is detrimental to your sales and affects your search rankings. When you use a website builder, your website will be amongst hundreds or thousands of other websites on one server. Free web hosting is also usually low-quality with poor support. 9.6% of your website visitors will leave your website when the page speed is more than 2 seconds.32% of visitors exit the website when a page takes longer than 7 seconds to load. Can you afford that time?

5.      No CMS (Content Management System)

A CMS is a tool that allows you to organise your website, edit and publish your content on your website. Often, you can get CMS’s with built in SEO guides which can guide you to best optimise your content. On a website builder, you create a static HTML pages with no page structure and a bad user experience. Ask more from Small Business Website Leeds!

6.      No Access to Analytics or Reporting

To understand how your website works, look at your website analytics. This gives you the option to:

·         See how many users come to your website

·         Where they come from

·         What pages they visit

·         How long they spend on your site

·         Their location

Free website builders you will be unable to access any reports or analytics data, so you won’t have any idea when it comes to how your website is performing or how you can make it better.

7.      De-Values your Brand

Most website builders you don’t give your own domain name. They will give you your username attached to something like .free-advertisement.co.uk. This looks long, is complicated to type and doesn’t establish trust in your brand. You may also get advertising banners on your header and footer informing your users that your website was free and how they can make their own. You don’t want your users to feel that you don’t care enough to invest in a professional website.

8.      You Don’t own your Website

Your website will never belong to you on a website builder. You won’t be able to migrate your website across to another domain should you choose to invest in your own domain later. Unfortunately, this means that the platform you invested your time into will continue to legally own your website.

9.      No Support

If your website goes down, or there’s an issue with your server or a plugin no longer works, even with the most popular free website builders you will be unable to get the same support you get from a professional website builder. If your site is down for even an hour, who knows how many users or sales you may have missed due to technical issues? You might not even know your website is down and users won’t be unable to contact you. Most free website builders will not take the time to get in touch to let you know their servers or services are unavailable.


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About Air Websites Junior   Get your website off the ground

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Joined APSense since, July 19th, 2018, From Leeds, United Kingdom.

Created on Oct 1st 2018 05:28. Viewed 440 times.

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