Today, it’s now easier than ever to build websites from scratch. With many unique tools able to help even the most novice of web designers, there’s often no need to pay for premium services and professional developers. One quick search and you’ll find thousands of potential options for building a website in a matter of hours.

Increasingly common for new businesses and brands, site building software offers an easy-to-use interface that is very tempting for those without experience. Simple drag-and-drop designs can be deployed quickly and with little technical knowledge – but there are real downsides to using this method.

Let’s examine why you shouldn’t use basic site builders when constructing your online presence.

Inferior SEO Outcomes

Perhaps one of the most important reasons why you shouldn’t use a website builder solution, you likely will generate a website that is not SEO-friendly. This can be for multiple reasons. The first reason is that drag-and-drop designs are simply not optimized to please search engines. Everything from indexing to keywords will be either more difficult or impossible for search engines to assess.

Another huge element along these lines is that many website builders generate websites using Flash. There is currently no search engine that can read Flash websites, which means that each page of content will not be properly read and assessed by Google and others. Without this vital ability, your pages simply won’t rank in search.

Inferior (or No) Mobile -Friendly Support

When using a site building service, you’re likely risking the success of your site among a crucial audience: mobile users.

While it’s easy enough to start pinging your website to the masses in minutes with a drag-and-drop site builder, there are consequences. One of the biggest is that most do not provide a mobile responsive alternative, meaning that your website will look exactly the same to everybody.

For those on mobile devices (which comprise a majority of search engine traffic), this means tiny links and elements that are not easily navigated. On top of that, search engines penalize websites that do not provide mobile responsive solutions, which will hamper your traffic.

Difficult Customization

One of the biggest advantages of using an easy site building tool also presents a weakness. While it may be easy to build and launch a site with one of these tools, customizing it further in the future often becomes difficult.

Whether it is because the service is no longer around or simply doesn’t allow revisions, you’ll be stuck with static HTML pages that will need to be edited by hand to alter. This, while not necessarily different from the ground-up approach of web development, effectively defeats the purpose of using a simple site builder in the first place.

Slow Loading Times

Finally, it’s important to consider just how much of an effect that page loading speed can have on your website. All too often, site building solutions are designed to be easy and aesthetically-pleasing to the novice user. Unfortunately, hiding underneath the surface are weaknesses in the structural performance.

Page speed is one of these issues. Because the site is designed via Flash or a comparable utility and because it cannot be easily edited later, users will be pinging your website and waiting much longer than usual to access content. This unoptimized and slow design will frustrate visitors and even make search engines unhappy.

These are but a few of the reasons why you shouldn’t utilize a drag-and-drop site builder for your next project. Now that you know what problems can emerge, you will hopefully make the right decision