If your thinking of creating a new website for your business. Make sure you choose the best solution and avoid any potential issues that may arise.

You may have seen advertisements appearing recently about building your business website yourself for FREE.

Free website building companies that offer this type of service is one of the reasons we began providing our own web development and website hosting services all that time ago.

But the difference with our solutions is – you have full control!

To give you solid proof why our hosting platform and web development solutions are a better alternative – we took some time to create our own FREE sites from various providers to test things out and to report our findings.

Below are just a few reasons why we say avoid Free website building providers:

 

1: Forced Advertising:

Free website building companies will force advertising on all free sites created with them. It is also at their discretion to place a banner across the website stating that the website has been created FREE on their platform.

This shows your potential customers that your business isn’t taking things seriously.

One thing we have learnt over the time we have provided web design services to businesses is:

“Those that don’t invest in the initial stages to get things right, will lose to those businesses that do.”

 

2: Restricted Data Access:

Having full access to your website data plays a large factor in disaster recovery when planning a website for business use.

Free website building companies allow you access to the front end of the website to make changes, just like a WordPress/CMS admin area as many of us are familiar with these days.

Many of our clients that have joined us after their experience with a Free website building company, experienced partial or in worst cases complete data loss that could go back many years depending on how much work has been put into the site.

Imagine that. Waking up one morning and all those years of blogging, updates and SEO work are gone. It’s at this stage were businesses realise that they should have taken the other route. Understanding this now will help you avoid this issue.

Our hosting platform uses cPanel as standard. You have full access to the platform to take backups of your website at anytime. We are also here to provide support cost effectively.

 

3: No Professional Domain Name:

If you choose their free package – apart from the above issue’s the URL/Domain to access your website would look like this: www.username.FreeWebsiteBuildingCompany.com/sitename

As we are all too aware. From a marketing point of view this not acceptable in business and reduces the potential in customers trusting the provider and making a purchase.

As for SEO purposes – we will leave that for another blog as there is much to say.

Free website building companies do provide options to add your own domain name, but this is chargeable at the rate of £4 – £10 per month and depending on what option you choose – there is still an element of ad supporting being forced onto your site.

 

4: Are you really in control?

Not many of us actually read terms and conditions, but if you do decide that after reading this blog that a Free website building company is for you – then do take a quick look at what your signing up for.

One thing that stands out on many terms was this:

“Free Website Building Company does not claim any intellectual property rights over the User Submissions. However, under the Free Website Building Company Terms of Use, you grant Free Website Building Company, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such User Submissions.”

Scary stuff. By signing up for a Free website companies services, you are allowing them to modify your site and your site’s content just by agreeing to the Terms of Use.

 

Final Thought:

Speaking as a business. We know that it is far more cost effective and efficient to have your website built and hosted by a trusted web development team.

Placing your sensitive information and your businesses most powerful marketing tool in the hands of Free website building company is a huge gamble and will only set you back in the long run when you have to choose a web development team anyway.

So choose wisely when making that crucial decision. There’s a lot at stake.

DIGITAL CONFIG Team.