In recent years, website builders have carved out a specific niche and gained demand due to their simplicity, beautiful design templates, and availability of necessary functionality. But is everything as good as it seems? To understand whether these websites work effectively and how they compare to the classic option of having your own site on hosting, we will examine this in the article.
If creating a website previously required substantial costs, now it can be done in a few hours or days using a builder - this is how some argue the difference in progress. However, this comparison and conclusion are entirely incorrect, and here's why:
In the past, when a company created a website, it already had a market presence and its own clientele. Having a website increased sales, thereby compensating for the costs of outdated advertising expenses. The company had sufficient resources and experience in its field, plus an existing customer base.
When discussing website costs, it is implied that they will constitute 10% of the allocated budget for this direction, while 90% will go toward promotion. Promotion implies medium-term activities: writing and publishing articles on your own site, as well as paid placement of press releases on popular thematic portals, among other things.
For example: website creation 300,000 rubles, promotion 2,500,000 rubles.
Creating a website for a company can be compared to renovating an apartment for individuals - you already have a base, but you are making updates.
Based on the example above, one would not want to spend such amounts on promoting a website that initially has significant limitations. The savings on creation do not appear substantial enough to bother with a builder.
Other significant drawbacks of builders include the inability to make precise adjustments to the functionality, as well as a lack of scalability. When a website grows, it is usually migrated to a virtual server; subsequently, load can be distributed by adding more virtual servers over time.
Conclusion: When calculated correctly, the savings in time and money do not appear significant. Attractive template designs are now common, and the time when people judged by the wrapper has passed. But the most important point is that after creating a website, no one except you will visit it, and writing content will take time. For the website to work for you, it needs to be filled, developed - made useful for the internet audience so that people come from search engines, bookmarks - for example, by adding online tools for calculating the cost of goods and services, etc.
Simply having a website will yield nothing, and over time you will forget about it, just as it will turn out for its owner - why is it needed if there is no benefit?
Only one point remains - the firmness of the decision. If you have decided to create a website and develop it for the long term, then it is better to start with virtual hosting, for example, by installing a popular CMS (WordPress, Joomla, Bitrix). You can always change both the CMS and the hosting provider, which is impossible in the case of a builder.
P.S. We all use search engines. While AI has taken over some queries now, still, try to recall even one time when a search engine returned a website created on a builder in its search results. Most likely, this has never happened. All traffic to this type of site comes only through advertising, typically for a short-term project (for example, selling Christmas trees for the New Year).