On the surface, do-it-yourself website builders like Wix seem like a great bargain. They tout drag and drop builders, and free hosting. But underneath all the bells and whistles on the surface there are some major drawbacks.
1. Bad SEO
This is so important that I felt compelled to list it as the #1 reason. Builders like Wix are absolutely not SEO friendly. A multitude of problems exists from the naming of urls, to even the way the page loads and renders content. Overall, optimization to get yourself ranking well on the search engines is extremely difficult.
2. Web Design Experience
It takes years of education and experience to become a good web designer. Companies like Wix suggest you can create a “stunning” design without that experience. Without now knowing and understanding best practices for page design and element placement, you’re shooting in the dark.
3. WordPress is just better
WordPress, the preferred CMS framework I use, is an open source project contributed to by a massive community of designers and developers. Without a doubt, no website content management system can compete with WordPress.
4. Hidden Costs
What they don’t tell you is that your “free” site is very limited. You’ll have to display ads for them on your site unless you’re willing to pay them a monthly fee. Unless you want your online presence to look like a nascar driver’s uniform, that free website you wanted is going to cost you monthly.
5. You’re stuck with them
That’s right, you’re stuck. If you want to go somewhere else, you’re going to have to recreate your entire site from scratch.
In conclusion, these are just a few reasons as to why I would recommend choosing a web developer over using a service like Wix. You will fair far better in the battle for Google rankings, have a professional design using a proven CMS, pay no hidden fees and own the rights to your content so you can move to whatever host you want, whenever you want. All-in-all, it’s a much better option for a small business looking to build an online presence to hire a web developer.