The Disadvantages of Free Site Builders
Free site builders
Online content publishers can be appealing to individuals and businesses without a large budget for online exposure. Although financially attractive, these online site editors (such as Pages Jaunes, Orange, Free, Wix, etc.) hide many disadvantages. A brief overview of the pros and cons of these major platforms.
1. The free argument
Let’s face it: a free site might be your solution, if:
- You have no budget.
- Spending time in front of a screen learning how it works doesn’t scare you.
- You do not plan to work on SEO for this site in the future.
- You are not afraid of having a “cheap”, “low-cost” rendering, because of the various ads, more or less aggressive, which will appear on the screen of your visitors.
You tick all the boxes above: launch yourself into the free adventure without further delay. However, what is the use of your website if it must remain in the shadows, unreferenced and unvisited, and above all not credible?
“Free” or inexpensive always sounds too good to be true. The problem with “premade” sites is that you become the product of those companies. Due to the low financial contribution, these site publishers use the sites created on their platform to: both redirect traffic to the “mother site” and thus offer their services to your visitors, but of course also display advertisements.
2. Total dependence
These (almost) free sites are locked. In every way.
First, they are not programmed from code open source publicly accessible and allowing the reliability and neutrality of the system to be independently confirmed.
Open source solutions such as WordPress or Joomla allow developers to become familiar with the system and to design compatible plugins or applications, often free, which contribute enormously to the improvement of user experience. In the case of “low-cost web creators”, the code remains private and the tools are only developed 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 attached to this same company and will be very often not compatible with any other platform. If the company goes out of business or you want to change supplier, you will have to start all over again.
3. A serious obstacle to your SEO
As far as natural referencing is concerned, new pages created using free online tools (particularly with “solocal”) are considered as sites in their own right by Google. However, the site editor retains control over how the sections will be organized, how search engines will “read” your site.
the site models offered are generally few (or even very few), which poses a problem – besides the lack of originality – at the level of duplicate content on Google: The search engine notes the similarities in the code of all these pages and the domain ranking is degraded, because although 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 client will give some referencing to the site of the service provider by being obliged to keep links pointing to it. Since the reverse does not exist, the service provider does not offer “naturally good” referencing to the site created on its platform, contrary to the arguments of many salespeople. This article testifies to this.
4. The impossibility of making an identity and evolving
It is also obvious that you will not be able to build your identity image of your company due to the standardization of the model used and the limited nature of the functionalities. Remember that a Yellow Pages (Solocal), Wix, Jimdo Orange, Free or other site does not belong to you!
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