Creating a new website is extremely important for your future business. The necessity of saving costs on this activity is crucial as the paid website platform might be expensive, long-term, and not necessarily effective in the nearest future. While the free website builders have basic tools to make your job done, some of them lack rather crucial and highly cooperative parts necessary for your website promotion, further market research, and other findings to make your business flourish while you get your daily number of visitors on your website. The following material can help your choice of free or paid website builders along with several recommendations to keep in mind prior to your choice.
Is “Inexpensive” Bad?
The majority of users definitely think: if it is free, it should be bad. It cannot be anything good for free, right? Well, not really. As your business is currently small and you have no far-reaching plans you may need to reconsider how much money you wish to invest in the making of the website. If such points as an unprofessional web address or irrelevant commercials do not scare you, the free site builder can be precisely what you are looking for. Still, you have certain risks you need to consider while making a choice in favor of “not expensive” or, in particular, free site-makers:
- Bad SEO results. The free websites hosting providers do not have a limit of site sharing on the same hosting. Be sure that this will directly impact the speed of download on your website while you can find it rather difficult to reach it at any time and place. What is more, Google ranks such sites rather low in its search results, so you will need a lot of link-building work to boost site contents. Overall, this point might be costly due to the additional effort you need to put into your site to keep it interesting and relevant. Additionally, marketing tools are mostly available for the payable web builders and platforms.
- Hidden charges are real. If you think that you will not pay a single dollar for the free-of-charge website, you are definitely wrong. If the price is the only caution that prevents you from going into the paid web-builder, remember that email accounts, FTP accesses, and website transfers are usually not free as well. Therefore, a partially costing site might be much better than a fully free-of-charge one as you will already know what you pay for.
- You can lose your site at any time. This is the third but not least of the three factors so that your site might be taken down at any time. While you may invest much effort or money in your site’s content, remember, that free sites are prone to be shut without any notification. If your site is not temporary and you have long-standing plans for it, think again on if you should take a laissez-faire approach to its existence. Overall, these are all possible dangers for your free-of-charge site. If they do not concern you and the site is only an additional matter of advertising your product, you can freely go with this option for its creation.
Free vs Paid
Still, if your site is a matter of serious concern, you should be able to compare free and paid web-building platforms so you can estimate their pros and cons. Only after you see the possible advantages of the paid-builders or the issues of “free trials” you can continue creating the site that will boost your popularity. The following points are highly crucial for the business you wish to build with the available online tools:
- Round-the-clock support is available for the paid web-builders only. As the free-of-charge servers are usually crowded and unable to provide round-the-clock support, you may lose your loyal customers due to the glitches and issues in the system. Such web builders as Wix provide several types of customer support for their paid websites such as email, online chat, and phone connection. If you are interested you can learn more on this site on the paid platforms and their ranking in accordance with user choice and preferences. Still, think if customer support is required for your business so your website so it will be like a clock-work.
- The use of your own domain. In most cases, free-of-charge site builders provide their own subdomain to your URLs. On the surface, they are not a big trouble for your site functioning. On the other, it is comparatively bad for your site advertising, as its name might look wordy, unprofessional, or difficult to remember. This is where you should consider going with your own customized domain that might sound like a part of your company’s brand or any other necessary word.
- Optimization for gadgets. If your business aims at the busy and overworking people, they will fairly stay at their computers round-the-clock. The majority of them check the websites from their gadgets and as soon as they see it is not optimized they will definitely find it hard to read the text or get into the potentially profitable deals. Therefore, if you heavily count on those interested in your site at any time and date, you should consider payable options as it will be optimized to any tablet PC or a smartphone. In this case, cheaper is a lost cause while you will definitely lose time.
- User-friendly interface. Are you a newbie to website creation? If you are not, maybe the free-of-charge website builder is easier to go with. If yes, you will value the user-friendly interface over those with numerous complicated tools like customizing templates, comparison charts, interface design, and others. If your site should look appropriately to attract your potential buyer and overview is a key to success, consider payable options over the free ones, so you will not have to pay your web-designer after all. Keep in mind, that numerous free site platforms have no building tools whatsoever that are definitely not the possibility for the new person in this business.
Conclusively, prior to making up your mind on creating a website, think about how it should like and who it should attract. As you decide on the option, know that you can only go with cheap or qualitative at a time, while you may lose money on improving the free-of-charge site due to the effort of SEO, web designer, hosting owner, etc. Select the most appropriate site-making tools and show your brand to the world with the most optimized and low-cost variant in comparison. While the latter option is possible, do not go with the free-of-charge option, as it will definitely live a short life.
