The drawbacks of free website builders
Certainly economical, free website builders like Wix or Pages Jaunes will quickly impose limits in terms of SEO and customization
Free website builders
Online content builders can be attractive for individuals and businesses that don’t have a big budget for their online visibility. Although financially appealing, these online website builders (such as Pages Jaunes, Orange, Free, Wix, etc.) hide many drawbacks. Here’s a quick overview of the pros and cons of these major platforms.
1. The free-of-charge argument
Let’s not kid ourselves: a free website can be your solution, if:
- You have no budget.
- Spending time in front of a screen learning how it works doesn’t scare you.
- You don’t plan to work on this site’s SEO in the future.
- You’re not afraid of having a «cheap», «low-cost» look, because of the various ads, more or less aggressive, that will appear on your visitors’ screens.
You check all the boxes above: jump right into the free adventure without further delay. However, what is the use of your website if it has to remain in the shadows, not indexed and not visited, and above all not credible?
«Free» or low-cost always sounds too good to be true. The problem with «pre-made» sites is that you become the product of these companies. Because of the low financial contribution, these site builders use the sites created on their platform to: both redirect traffic to the «parent site» and thus offer their services to your visitors, but of course also display ads.
2. Total dependence
These free (or almost free) sites are locked down. In every way.
First, they are not programmed from open-source code publicly accessible and enabling the reliability and neutrality of the system to be independently confirmed.
Open-source solutions such as WordPress or Joomla allow developers to familiarize themselves with the system and design compatible plugins or applications, often free, that contribute greatly to improving the user experience. In the case of «low-cost web builders», the code remains private and the tools are developed only by the company’s teams, which greatly limits the quantity, diversity, and neutrality of what is offered.
You should also know that by being hosted with them and on a non-«open source» system developed by the company, your site becomes tied to that same company and will very often be incompatible with any other platform. If the company shuts down or you want to change providers, you’ll have to start everything over from scratch.
3. A serious hindrance to your SEO
When it comes to organic SEO, new pages created using free online tools (particularly with «solocal») are considered full-fledged sites by Google. However, the site builder retains control over how sections are organized, and how search engines will «read» your site.
the site templates offered are generally few in number (or even very few), which creates a problem—setting aside the lack of originality—at the level of content duplication on Google: The search engine notes the similarities in the code of all these pages and the domain’s ranking is degraded as a result, because even if the text may be different, the code will indeed be byte-for-byte similar to thousands of other websites.
By creating a site on the platform, the customer will give a bit of SEO to the service provider’s site by being forced to keep links pointing to it. Since the reverse does not exist, the provider does not offer «naturally good» SEO to the site created on its platform, contrary to the claims of many salespeople. This article attests to this.
4. The impossibility of establishing an identity and evolving
Due to the exclusive nature of the platform on which you create your page, any attempt to evolve your website will run up against the impossibility of being able to migrate to another system / another platform. Your business is growing, you want to add an online store or simply a module, you want to change your website’s template… All these «basic» features available on open-source platforms will be inaccessible to you due to the incompatibility planned by your providers.
It is also obvious that you will not be able to build the visual identity of your company due to the standardization of the model used and the restricted nature of the features. Don’t forget that a Pages Jaunes (Solocal), Wix, Jimdo Orange, Free, or other site does not belong to you!
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