While hosts such as SquareSpace, Wix and Weebly are common options considered for quickly and easily launching a website, I am going to argue that you should choose to build your website with WordPress over a drag-and-drop website builder, even for a very simple site. The reason is because these proprietary platforms have major limitations compared to a self-hosted WordPress setup, which are going to impact your website’s reach and more.
Top Three Limitations
Below are the top three limitations of drag-and-drop website builders that I think you should consider when choosing your platform. I’ve also included how WordPress overcomes these limitations.
#1 Lack of Ownership
You don’t own or control your site’s infrastructure or, in many cases, even your data. You’re a tenant on their platform, subject to pricing changes, feature removals, and service shutdowns. Migrating your site away is notoriously difficult and often requires a full manual recreation of the original site. I have done this for several clients and it’s a time-consuming hassle for sure!
If you instead create a self-hosted WordPress website, you own all of your content. You can move your entire website to any hosting provider in the world within minutes, guaranteeing ultimate sovereignty of your digital property.
#2 Search Ranking
Drag and drop website builders serve millions of sites from shared, generic infrastructure. Your site’s speed is limited by their one-size-fits-all architecture and bloated codebase, which you cannot optimize. This imposes a cap on your website scores that directly and negatively impact your search rankings.
In contrast, a self-hosted WordPress site can be carefully adjusted to achieve a significant advantage in search engine optimization for better search ranking.
#3 Inflexibility
You are confined to the template styles and functionality features the platform offers. For example, if you need a custom members area, a unique checkout or shipping process or integration with another business tool you want to use, you’ll likely hit a wall. You are limited by whichever features the company decides to offer.
Self-hosted WordPress on the other hand, is open source software that anyone can build on. Currently, there are over 13,000 free styling themes and over 60,000 free plugins, plus many excellent paid options. WordPress is endlessly customizable and extensible and you can likely do the work to create your website without hiring anyone almost as easily as a drag-and-drop. If your website has unique needs you need help with, you can hire a developer to build off of the foundation laid by WordPress to write custom code, limited only by your imagination and budget.
My Personal Experience
In my personal experience, each client that I have helped move to WordPress has come up against at least one of these limitations with their previous platform. For example, one client was given about 30 days notice that in order to continue using the features she was using on her site, her hosting cost was going to go up to about $1,600 per year, a four times increase!
Another client wanted to make an online course and wasn’t able to do that with the first platform she chose. Because there was no way to automatically export her website content from that platform, I had to manually recreate her website one page at a time, and make sure to transfer over all the important details like customer reviews on her products. Once all of that was completed, she and her husband were able to take over maintaining their own website and adding the additional features they wanted.
I hope this has helped you see that even though starting with a drag-and-drop builder may seem like a good idea for the novice, in the long run you’re likely going to be much happier with WordPress. Check out my step by step guide to creating a website with WordPress to see how simple it can be to get started on the right foot.