So… You Want to Build Your Own Website? Don’t.
There are a lot of things you might be able to DIY. Furniture. Home renovation. Lawn makeover, etc. A website isn’t one of them.
The importance of having a business website has shot up with the rise of e-commerce and the popularity of search engines like Google for finding businesses.
A strong, well-designed website is your gateway to success in today’s world. It is the cornerstone of all your marketing efforts. Regardless of where you promote your business, online or offline, your target audience will always look for a website to learn more about it.
In this situation, a website plays a crucial role as it influences online lead generation and offers to build trust and credibility, two critical factors for closing sales.
This is why anyone looking to gain some footing in the modern business world knows without a doubt they can’t succeed without a professional-looking website. And once they realize this, most business owners often go the DIY route to get themselves a nice-looking website.
Online website-building tools have made it easier for anyone and everyone to get a website up and running in no time. These cookie-cutter, homemade websites are less expensive and easy to build, even for those who have no coding or web development expertise.
All of these factors make DIYing a website look like the best, most intelligent idea ever. However, a fact less known is that websites generated using these tools aren’t always the most profitable for your business.
Building Your Own Website: Why It Can Be A Bad Idea
When you build a website, you have certain goals in mind. You want this website to do something for you. Reinforce your business’s reputation. Generate leads. Help you close more sales. All of these are some of the very common objectives every business owner is looking to fulfill with their website.
For people wanting to DIY their website, the harsh truth is that homemade websites may not be able to help you accomplish the goal you built your website for.
Building your own website has lots of downsides that limit its performance and make it obvious why DIYing a website may be a bad idea. Some of these limitations are:
Subpar User Experience
A website is your business’s representative in the online world. It hosts your target audience and holds the power to convert them into customers or drive them away from your business with the experience it delivers.
Think about it. You click on an online clothing store’s website. First, it takes a long time to fully load. Next, you find that the website has zero graphical appeal and appears to be an eyesore. And on top of that, it is confusing and difficult to navigate.
Will you stick around and engage with this website? Not really. The website’s poor user experience will drive you away.
This is why user experience has become one of the most important sales factors in the modern business environment.
Building a website that offers a pleasant user experience requires planning. Even if you are using a website builder that can help you build a pretty-looking website in no time, you will still need to work on ensuring that the website loads fast, which is another crucial user experience element.
A slow-loading website pushes prospects away before they have even had the chance to interact with it. This is why optimizing for load speed is critical. Yet, website builder websites are often inherently slow.
Moreover, optimizing for load speed requires technical expertise that most DIYing business owners do not have. So they end up with a slow website that threatens to drive prospects away instead of welcoming and converting them.
Security Risks
A website is where your business lives online. It is like a physical store. And just like a physical store, a website also needs to be secured in the best way possible to avoid property and monetary, or reputational damage.
DIYed websites, even the ones built using website builders may lack the proper security features needed to run a successful and safe website in this day and age. An unsafe website continues to be a threat to your business as long as it is live, posing risks of hacker attacks and data theft.
Moreover, if your DIYed website lacks proper security certificates, it may not be able to gain organic visibility either. That’s because search engines like Google consider security certificates an important ranking factor and rarely rank websites that don’t have them.
This leads to the next reason why DIYing a website may not be the best idea:
Lack of Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization or SEO helps your website rank higher in the search results. This allows your business to gain organic visibility in the online world.
Contrary to popular belief, SEO is more than just including keywords within content. It requires backend optimizations that help the website meet search engine ranking factors and become more eligible for a higher rank.
When you build your own website, you need SEO and technical expertise to make sure your website is optimized for organic visibility. If you don’t have that, you might end up with a website that looks pretty but is not capable of earning organic visibility for your business.
Even if you do have SEO expertise, website builders allow limited margin for optimizations. And despite being an expert yourself, your website may end up with subpar SEO.
Scalability Issues
Your business grows over time. And the business website needs to grow with it.
Your website should be built to accommodate increasing traffic. It should also be capable of allowing additional features and functionalities that your business may need as it grows.
On top of that, templated websites are mostly non-transferable as well. If your business has scaled and the website can’t, you may not even have the option of moving your assets to a different website hosting environment that is more capable and functional. You’ll likely need to start from scratch. And starting from scratch will eventually cost you the money that you had set out to avoid spending.
Time and Focus
Business owners have crazy routines. Meetings, finances, and day-to-day business operations take up a lot of your time and energy. Adding another time and effort-intensive task like website building to your already-crazy schedule is bound to add stress and potentially take your focus away from the more important business tasks.
Building a website is more than just choosing a template, slapping on a couple of graphics, and uploading content.
Every single element that you see on a website requires careful planning. The images, the content, the organization of that content, everything demands time and attention.
Even if you do carve out some time for the website, know that website building never ends. Once you have a website up and running, you have to monitor it constantly to weed out any bugs, errors, or issues that appear frequently. Website is not something you set and forget.
If you decide to give the web building and maintenance all of the time they demand, you might end up with a nice website but may lose your business. Because the time that was meant to be spent on business growth went to web development. And now you are left with a glowing website with a dwindling business.
What you have read so far are just a few of the many reasons why business owners should try and avoid building their own websites. DIYing a website may save money initially, but it might leave you with a semi-functional, unoptimized, unscalable website that may end up costing more in the long run. And all this with no appreciable growth in the business because you got distracted by building the website.
Successful Businesses Choose Professionally Built, Custom-Designed Websites
There’s no denying the fact that a templated, DIYed website might be helpful for businesses that are not looking to do much with their site. However, businesses looking to unlock the true potential of the online searching and shopping trend may benefit more from professionally built custom-designed websites.
Landau Consulting, a small business web design company empowers businesses with custom-built websites that grow with them.
Providing end-to-end web development, Landau Consulting takes care of everything, from web development to content creation and website maintenance once the website goes live.
You can contact us at Landau Consulting. Their website is a testimony to their web development expertise. Take a look!