Free Website Builder Pros and Cons

 Fortunately, there are enough website platforms that can help sort through the confusion and let you build a new website that will influence your visitors. Computers and the Internet have facilitated an enormous change in how we can live our lives.  Our daily activates of lives somehow dependent on the internet. When talking about business, the internet provides people with the convenience to broaden up their access to customers. Also, it’s cheaper and quicker than setting up a workplace. Even with people having a physical place to operate their businesses, it allows them to make sure that their word reaches a large number of people around the world or their targeted place.

When setting up a website for their new brand, people often tend to choose the cheapest option available, subsequently minimizing the investment cost as much as possible. Charging web developers hundreds of dollars to build a complete professional website, online website building tools come in handy. These tools allow you to form your website by using pre-built templates and drag-drop facility for extra controls. Having a website made free of cost for you is probably a really exciting idea for anyone, but all glitters are not gold. Here, we will take a look at the various pros, as well as cons of building a free website with the help of online tools.

PROS:

No Professional Skills Required

The most important reason people choose to make websites by these tools are that they do not require any kind of coding or designing knowledge. With the help of pre-built themes and templates, they provide you the facility of choosing the view of your future website.

Minimal Time and Cost

The approximated time needed to build a website by a developer is not measured in days or even hours. A normal-sized website can be built within as little as 30 minutes. These tools help you through a number of stages of the website development process, which is similar to filling in forms. After you have confirmed all the basic information, they provide you with a library of attractive templates relevant to your business type.  With the drag and drop feature, you can add some additional controls and elements that you want to be available on your webpages. All these facilities can be gained for free, or for some minimal cost.

Easy Setup

Online website builders provide you with an all-in-one package compulsory for a website to operate. Put another way, you don’t need to install the third-party services, such as database, in order to complete your website building process as storage space is made available to you as soon as your webpages are developed. These tools also don’t require any other verifications. Once you have completed your design and content, you can publish it online directly.

CONS:

No Unique Domain

Getting a domain that describes your business name always requires money. You are not provided with your own domain when getting the free services of a website builder. Alternately, your website’s URL also has their name before or after. This not only seems unprofessional but is not easily rememberable by the users too. Also, without a personal domain, Google finds it difficult to search your website.

Limited Number of Pages

An unfortunate problem of building your website through a website builder is that they do not allow you to create the number of pages that you would have with a developer –made website. In some cases, you are allowed to build not more than 5 or 6 webpages for free. Increasing the content on your website needs more pages thus requires to buy a paid pal. You cannot get the traffic or audience with less content.

Company Branding and Advertisements

Although the online website builders help you build a website for free, in return, they always require you to somehow advertise them through your web pages. Mainly their brandings are to be displayed somewhere on each of the pages, usually in header or footer, or their logo appears instead of your favicon. These divert the users from your website content and no matter what you do, you cannot remove them. Moreover, they use your web place to display advertisements for other brands from which they earn.

Limited storage

Because of having an insufficient number of pages, it also provides you with least storage of only a few megabytes. This not only lemmatize you from adding an acceptable amount of good content but also averts you from adding high-quality media, like images and videos.

Lack of Customer Support

Another major disadvantage of using the free assistance of a website building tool is that you don’t get the facility of professional support in any manner. Any kind of problem or issue with your website, you have to resolve it on your own or rely on other user's help or advice.

Not Customizable

In order to get the target audience, your website should be attractive and tailored according to the services you deliver. Unluckily, this is not possible with a free website builder. They do provide you with large number templates that are good-looking and have a generic functionality, but other than the design and elements pre-built in them, there is not much that you can add to your website. The most that these tools allow you, is to remove a control, alter its alignment, or change the overall color scheme. For further alterations, they ask you to buy other payment plan options, which are often costly.

Restricted Features

Along with constrain on bringing changes in the design, free website builders also don’t provide other important features needed to run a successful website with a strong, reliable community. These include SSL certificate, e-commerce facility, website analytics, plugins, and other appropriate add-ons. You can also not add any additional elements other than the ones provided, such as event calendars, memberships, and survey forms.

Weak SEO

Choosing a free website builder, you cannot optimize your web content by using Search Engine Optimization tools and therefore you are not ranked by the search engines. These builders also fail to build the website using clean and structured code, which results in the incapacity of the search engine to crawl within the hierarchy of your website.

Low Speed

The speed of the website plays a very important role in gaining noticeable traffic for it. The slow speed of a website causes the users to get disappointed and leave it before making any significant and meaningful interaction. But free websites built with the help of online tools tend to take more loading time as compared to other professionally made websites.

Conclusion:

Like with every other product, the free price tag comes with a fair share of advantages as well as disadvantages.

Ocanalytica.com is one of the best companies that make professional websites for professional companies, and those who own large to medium businesses, providing unique and high-quality design, fast loading speed, proper functionality and is search engine optimized. Only then you can thrive in attracting your audience, increasing their engagement and therefore, getting more users.