I think you already know the answer to that question. Any legitimate web developer would not use Weebly, Wix, Webs, Yola, or any of these other oddly-named free website builders.  And that should tell you something about the disadvantages to using these services.

Loss of Control

Since you are tied into some home-brewed website building tool, you won’t be able to take complete control over your website with these services. The design possibilities are limited, the feature capabilities are limited, and you might not be able to move your site away from them.

In contrast, The Website Creator is built with WordPress—something that professionals do use. The customization options are virtually limitless and you can move your site to another server at anytime.

Poor Code Quality (Including Search Engine Optimization)

If you’re not a web developer, you probably don’t think about all of the code that is used to build a website. If you saw it, you would have no idea what it all does and if it is up to quality standards. But a lot of these free website builders spit out some horrendous code that can negatively impact site performance and performance in search engines.

Remember that when Google’s program goes around the Web indexing websites for its search engine, it doesn’t see how pretty your website is. It only sees the code and the text. The underlying code that builds the site is so very important to search engine ranking and performance. With WordPress, you know that everything is up to standards and has been reviewed by professionals for quality. And you can also install search engine optimization (seo) plugins that will help make your site perform better in search engines.

Limited Features

With these free online web builders, you are dependent on them to offer website features to you. If you want a slideshow, image gallery, contact form, or other features—they have to build a feature that makes that possible.

Most offer the basic stuff, but what if you wanted to do something a little different? How about invoicing your customers from your website? Do you think a free online website builder offers that capability? Well…with WordPress, there’s a plugin for that. With The Website Creator, there are thousands of free plugins available that offer almost any kind of feature you can think of.

Nothing is really free

There’s always a catch.  The goal for most of these free website builder companies is to move you up to a “premium” package. The free service usually provides very little and they know that eventually you’ll have to upgrade to do what you want.

Others put advertisements on your site that you can’t remove.  If you’re creating a website for your business, it would look awfully tacky to have ads plastered about your page. And you probably would have no control over which ads are shown on your website.

At The Website Creator, we tell you upfront what it will cost to have all of the features: $40/year. And there are no other fees if you want to add new features. Let me repeat that: There are no other fees!

And, obviously, we would never put ads on your website. It’s your website. Not ours.

Customer Support

How great do you think the customer support will be for a free product? Will you ever get answers to your questions? Or will they just tell you to upgrade to their super duper premium customer support package? As we said, nothing is free. And a company is not going to be able to offer quality customer support to people that are not paying them money.

You might have luck getting hold of a sales person. But, customer support? Not likely.

And you probably know what I’m going to say next: At The Website Creator, we offer awesome customer support. But, it really is true. We don’t just provide customer support, we like to think that we are more like partners in your success.

Anytime you have questions about how to do something on your website, just email us and we’ll provide an answer. We’ll even give you advice about getting more people to your website, solving email issues, or any other web-related areas.

Our goal is to make it as easy and affordable as possible for people to create a professional website. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

Tags: free website builders