3 important reasons why you should never use Wix, Weebly or Squarespace to build your business website.
3 important reasons why you should never use Wix, Weebly or Squarespace to build your business website.
This article is geared towards those who are looking to build their website themselves vs hiring a professional to build the website for them (a professional web developer should never use Wix, Weebly or Squarespace to build your website). With that being said, here are the three primary reasons why you should think twice before investing any time or money into the Wix, Weebly or Squarespace platforms (even when advertised as free).
Reason #1 (you will not own your website): When using Wix, Weebly or Sqaurespace, you are essentially leasing your website. In other-words, your business will never own your website. This is due to Wix, Weebly and Sqaurespace being proprietary website builders (closed source). This means your website will only exist as long as your service remains active with Wix, Weebly or Sqarespace (not good for your business). Owning your website and content (where you always have control) should always be of the utmost importance, do not lease your website.
Reason #2 (you cant move your website): When using Wix, Weebly or Sqaurespace, you have zero control over your web hosting platform. Although this might seem irrelevant to most beginners. Having control over your web hosting platform is crucial as your web hosting platform is how the rest of the world is able to access your web pages. If your web host is slow, encounters significant amounts of downtime or becomes unreliable (or best case scenario, you will need to scale into a more dedicated platform due to high traffic), you will want to change web hosts (or upgrade). With that being said, if you build your website with Wix, Weebly or Squarespace, you are stuck using their web hosting service (which only services the lower tier shared web hosting platform). If anything ever goes wrong (or you need to upgrade to a more dedicate platform), there will be nothing you can do about it (unless you want to lose your website and start over). The main point behind reason#2, plan ahead and do not restrict your web hosting options by building your website with Wix, Weebly or Squarespace. Learning this lesson the hard way can be very detrimental to your business.
Reason #3 (Your website is not fully customizable): Although initially this might not pose much of a problem (for most beginners). Once you get farther into the development and marketing of your website, being able to hire a professional web developer/programmer to add features or functions (or even being able to build/add some of these features yourself) is going to be essential. In otherwords, when using a proprietary website builder (closed source) like Wix, Weebly or Sqaurespace. You will be stuck using the tools provided by Wix, Weebly and Squarespace (which is not always ideal for your business). Once again, its always important to think ahead as using a closed source platform like Wix, Weebly or Sqaurespace will limit your ability to expand your website later on down the road (at least not without having to start over with a new platform).
In closing, at Forward Web we realize services like Wix, Weebly and Sqarespace can come off as attractive because they are easy to use (especially for the do it yourself-er). However if you are looking to dive into website development or do not want to spend money on hiring a professional, there are simply better (open source) options. Example: We recommend WordPress, the software is free (you own, not lease your website). There are thousands of attractive, mobile ready (responsive) free themes/templates for you to choose from (browse some of them here). You can host your website anywhere (Forward Web for example) and WordPress is fully customizable so you can expand on your websites functionality down the road (everything you need in a website builder).
Start building your website today with Forward Web using WordPress for only $79.95 per year! (includes your domain name, enterprise grade web hosting, courtesy email @yourdomain.com and courtesy WordPress support). Once you have installed WordPress (after setting up your web hosting account), your next step is finding a theme/template for your new website (a good starting point is browsing through the 2,000+ free templates WordPress currently has available for you to use). Remember, if you need help installing wordpress or your WordPress theme, simply let Forward Web know and we will help at no additional cost.