WHY HAVING A FREE WEBSITE IS NOT GOOD FOR YOUR BUSINESS?

WHY HAVING A FREE WEBSITE IS NOT GOOD FOR YOUR BUSINESS?

It's easy to be enticed by the idea of having a free website as a business owner. Sure, it will highlight your services, look decent, and possibly generate traffic. However, it's critical to educate yourself on the often unseen trade-offs you'll have to make if you choose a free website over a paid web design service.

It's crucial to remember that your website is your brand's online presence! It will be your primary means of making an impression on prospective clients and customers. The disadvantage of using a free website is that this initial impression may be negative.In this article, we'll explain why you should hire a website company rather than risk your website's quality by building it for free:

1. FREE WEBSITES ARE EXTREMELY SLOW

The average user will give your website half a second to load before forming an opinion on its design and usability. Most free website hosting providers host thousands of websites on the same server. 

There should be a good hosting service that loads the site at a faster rate.

As a result, their websites load very slowly. This means that if an impression isn't made in that half-second, your potential customers are unlikely to return to your site.

2. THEY ARE IRRELEVANT

Most free website builders provide outdated designs that don't work on mobile devices. Mobile users account for a sizable portion of all internet traffic. You risk losing all of those users if you don't have a responsive design.

3. AUTOMATIC REDIRECTION IS NOT AVAILABLE.

When you host your own website, you can set up a redirect to keep the benefits of an old domain when you switch to a new one. On free sites, this is not possible! If you move your site, you'll need to include a link for visitors to click to go to your new site manually.

4. CUSTOMER SERVICE IS NOT AVAILABLE

Free websites offer no help or customer service to their non-paying customers. You will have to completely set up your website on your own and solve any problems that may arise by yourself.

5. SEO RESTRICTIONS

Since there is no access to the back end of a free website, any SEO you do will be limited to including keywords in your titles and content. Free website templates are also easily recognized by the search robots, meaning Google will prioritize custom websites before yours.

6. CHARGES THAT ARE NOT DISCLOSED

Nothing worth using, especially in technology, is ever free! Many of these free website services often turn out to be trials. After a certain amount of time, you are asked to pay for their services. Like any other business, these free website companies need to make money too. Some charge their users for additional services like image hosting, email accounts, etc.

7. FREE WEBSITE COMPANIES MAY GO OUT OF BUSINESS

At any given time, a free website company can shut down. They could shut down their servers, and you would lose your website and all of its data. Interestingly enough, their terms of service give them full legal protection to do so.

8. DOMAIN NAME WITHOUT A BRAND

With a free website, you'll most likely get something that sounds similar to your desired website name, plus letters and numbers, as well as the name of the service you used to build it. Simply put, you are not permitted to use www.yourbusiness.com.

Instead, you'll see www.theircompany.com/yourbusiness or www.yoursbusiness.their company.com, which are both unappealing.

On marketing materials, this appears extremely unprofessional, and viewers will not remember it. Google will also penalize your site in its search results because it considers websites with URLs similar to the ones above to be untrustworthy.

9. THEY WILL BE THE OWNER OF YOUR WEBSITE.

All of the content on the site is owned by the free website company that hosts it. Yes, all of your content is included! Your information is saved in their databases and will never be yours.

10. THEY HAVE THE ABILITY TO SELL YOUR INFORMATION 

If you don't have to pay for something, you're probably the product! Companies that provide free websites must also make money, so they supplement their profits by selling your email address and marketing your content.