Let’s take a moment to appreciate just how tough running a business can be. Most of the time your focus is the day-to-day operations: phone calls, emailing, driving, scheduling, providing services, the list goes on…

Depending on what kind of business you operate, your website may be one of the last things you think about each day. For all we know, your website might just be a bottled up source of frustration best avoided. If you’re using one of the big name page builder sites, we don’t blame you… they’re designed to be cookie-cutter and you don’t have much room for customization.

Web Agencies offer assistance in fixing or updating your site for a fee, but this may only be temporary. Alternatively, you could sign up for a long term subscription package. They’d likely rebuild your website using some other page builder, give you some training and hand it back. While they may offer ongoing support, each instance may incur additional costs, leaving you in a similar position as before.

Here’s some of the hidden costs to using website page builders.

The Cost of Abstraction

Dealing with the concept of a website, rather than the website itself.

With a page builder, you have the option of putting images, buttons, inputs, and all kinds of stuff on your website. You don’t have to think about what goes on under the hood, because the page builder abstracts away the underlying code. Computers and smartphones can then read that code in order to display your website.

Sounds great, so what’s the problem?

“The page builder abstracts away the underlying code.”

You’re limited by what’s provided. There’s very little you can do to customize your website beyond the provided templates.

You have little to no influence over the actual code that makes up your website. You won’t have many options when it comes to page speed, performance, search engine optimization, or rankings.

The more it grows, the worse it gets. As you add more images, content, or pages, the more complicated that abstracted code becomes. They typically aren’t designed to scale like that, and even if they can, it’ll likely cost extra to unlock.

The Cost of Bloat

Bloat refers to all the extras you didn’t ask for but you end up paying for anyway.

Website hosting is quite affordable these days, especially if the website's underlying code remains unchanging. We refer to these sites as static websites, while most page builders generate dynamic websites. Dynamic essentially means that the website's underlying code determines what to display after the page loads, usually with a database.

Plugins… There is an entire marketplace of page builder plugins to extend your already abstracted code with even more abstracted code. If that wasn’t bad enough, plugins need to be updated from time to time and may end up breaking your site. Lastly, there are some plugins that are almost essential for some websites to function, and those have their own separate subscription costs.

The Incidental Costs

We’ve encountered quite a few businesses that simply forgot to update their payment information for their domain renewal. Page builders make it easy to get started and forget about it, only to come back years later and find that you don’t own your domain anymore. Then you’re stuck brokering a deal to buy it back or having to buy a brand new one. This is made even worse if your website is listed on merchandise, business cards, or company vehicles.

Security, errors, and bugs are all a concern when it comes to page builders. You have to trust that the businesses that run the page builder make sure that the underlying abstracted code still works as updates are made. Then if you’ve used plugins on top of that, too, you have even more to think about.

Solution - Prospect Five

So, after learning some of the hidden costs of running your business website through a page builder, what do we do with this knowledge?

Well, here’s where Prospect Five comes in. We actively try to avoid page builders for all the reasons provided above and more.

No Abstraction Cost - we hand code everything to make sure what is displayed to your users is what is expected. This also means we have complete flexibility in the design of your website!
No Bloat Cost - since we code everything ourselves, you avoid inadvertently paying for extras you don’t need.
Low Incidental Cost - we encourage our clients to let us to manage their domain, we will ensure it’s always renewed. With our no-abstraction and no-bloat approach, we can almost guarantee no errors.
Low Agency Cost - we want our clients to run their business and leave the websites to us. Our efforts to avoid page builders pays off in the long run by never needing to update plugins or fix random unplanned page errors.

A website by Prospect Five gives you access to an experienced Website Development team with flexible pricing options to suit your business needs.

Is your website using a Page Builder? Has it been a while since it's been updated? Is your website down, broken, or completely gone?

Contact us for a Website Audit today!

TechInsights

The Hidden Costs of Website Page Builders