Don’t Use Drag and Drop Website Builders for Your Business

Drag and drop website builders like Wix, Weebly, and SquareSpace are not suitable for your business.

Do we need Sign Guy to hammer home the point?

Sign Guy meme holding a sign that says, "Don't use drag-and-drop website builders - like Wix - for your business.

You shouldn’t use them yourself. And you should make sure you’re not hiring some web design chop shop that uses them either.

These drag and drop web builders have ads everywhere. But, unfortunately, their pitch is misleading and sets improper expectations in the market.

I’m going to pick apart one in detail. It’s not worth it for us to do a deep dive on all of them. You shouldn’t use any of them. Instead, we’ll do a deep dive on one company to prove a point.

Things we’ll discuss:

  • What is the true cost in comparison to hosting
  • Why its fundamentally not meant to be a starter site
  • Is it even yours?
  • Does it work for SEO?

Never Use Wix for Your Business Website

Let’s put Wix in the crosshairs. They’ve spent a ton on advertising in the online entrepreneurial space.

Wix is an okay option if you want to set up a personal blog or brochure-style website quickly.

But that is it. Do not use it for your business.

You’re probably thinking, “but it’s cheap.”

Well…

Pricing — It’s not as it seems

The Wix pricing plans are pretty interesting to pick apart.

You can’t use less than Premium if you want to connect your domain to a Wix site, so there go the cheaper options available.

Now you’re looking at spending at least $27.

That’s the same price as a basic hosting package from a company like WPEngine, HostGator, or the like. Even their most basic packages offer more than Wix’s best offering. And, they provide free templates similar to Wix.

Their VIP package really doesn’t offer anything that you couldn’t attach for free to a WordPress theme on a basic hosting package mentioned before. (Not saying that is all you need, but if the price is the issue, there are better ways to spend your money).

You’re probably thinking, “I just want to launch something quickly. I’ll build a better one later.”

 

You Can’t Export Data — You’re Stuck with It

Wix gets separation anxiety.

So they make it difficult to leave and impossible to go smoothly.

Wix doesn’t allow you to migrate your data to another platform.

“Your Wix site and all of its content is hosted exclusively on Wix’s servers, and cannot be exported elsewhere.

Specifically, it is not possible to export or embed files, pages or sites, created using the Wix Editor or ADI, to another external destination or host.

If you embed a site into an external location, Wix is no longer in control of the way that your site appears or functions, and therefore, cannot provide support. In addition, Google Analytics and search engine crawlers are not able to work properly with an embedded site.”

Yikes.

So, there’s no leveling up once you build a Wix site. Instead of graduating to WordPress or migrating to another template, you need to bulldoze and start from scratch.

That’s not the way web design should work.

That’s not how businesses work.

But it gets worse.

You Don’t Own Your Website on Wix

Thankfully we have a great attorney, so I don’t spend too much time in Ts & Cs anymore. But you should if you’re buying a website.

When creating a Wix website, you don’t actually own your website. You don’t own your design. In actuality, you’re a subscriber on the Wix platform with a revocable license.

Wix makes you agree to this under their Intellectual Property Clause.

3.2. Wix’s Intellectual Property All rights, title and interest in and to the Wix Services, including any and all copyrightable materials or any other content thereof which is or may be subject to any intellectual property rights under any applicable law (including any artwork, graphics, images, website templates and widgets, literary work, source and object code, computer code (including html), applications, audio, music, video and other media, designs, animations, interfaces, documentation, derivatives and versions thereof, the “look and feel” of the Wix Services, methods, products, algorithms, data, interactive features and objects, advertising and acquisition tools and methods, inventions, trade secrets, logos, domains, customized URLs, trademarks, service marks, trade names and other proprietary identifiers, whether or not registered and/or capable of being registered (collectively, “Intellectual Property”), and any derivations thereof, are owned by and/or licensed to Wix. Subject to your full compliance with the Wix Terms and timely payment of all applicable Fees, Wix hereby grants you, upon creating your User Account and for as long as Wix wishes to provide you with the Wix Services, a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, fully revocable, limited license to use the Wix Services and Licensed Content, for the purpose of generating and displaying your User Platform to End Users and offering your User Products (as defined below) therein, solely as expressly permitted under the Wix Terms, and solely within the Wix Services. The Wix Terms do not convey any right or interest in or to Wix’s Intellectual Property (or any part thereof), except only for the limited license expressly granted above. Nothing in the Wix Terms constitutes an assignment or waiver of Wix’s Intellectual Property rights under any law. ​ In addition to the above, certain fonts made available to you within the Wix Services, are licensed to Wix by a third party provider, and are therefore subject to additional license terms of such provider, which are summarized and available for your review at https://www.wix.com/about/mono-terms-of-use.

You’re not in the driver’s seat of your business’s online presence.

If they go bankrupt, you’re back to zero.

If they remove your template or features, or certain functionalities you’ve been accustomed to, you’re out of luck.

It Doesn’t Function Like A Well-Built Website

You don’t need to know the ins and outs of search engines to understand that SEO is essential to a website.

A few years ago, Wix was a complete sham when it came to indexing with search engines and having basic SEO components available for users.

While they have improved, allowing for better tagging and implementation of metadata, they are still years behind on other fundamental functions like site speed and bloated code.

Google and other search engines quantify some site speed parameters around first content paint (FCP). FCP is a user experience metric that measures how fast a web page shows usable content to site visitors.

this is a graph showing where Wix stacks up against WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal in regards to Percentages of Sites with Fast First Content Paint. Wix is at 7% and the next lowest is WordPress at 30%.

Wix came in last by a substantial margin.

When you have a drag and drop builder, the code on the back-end includes a wide array of options despite what you specified. These sites don’t remove the excess coding. A developer needs to go into the back-end and clean up that extra code before launching a website.

That’s not what these drag-and-drop web builders do. Instead, it’s all still there, dramatically increasing the amount of data needed to load a page.

Websites aren’t a passing fad. They’re a serious business tool. If you’re serious about your business, find an expert on web design and digital marketing. You can’t afford to cheap out on your website because it will cost you more down the road.

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