Imagine this scenario - you know you need a website, whether it’s for taking orders for your custom graphic design t-shirt business, or a place to show your art portfolio, or anything simple you’d need a website for. But you have a lot of options. You’ve found yourself Google searching “how to build a website from scratch” and the results give you a headache.
Domain hosting? CMS software? Custom website design? WordPress add-ons? This is too much to handle, you just wanted a simple solution to create a website almost effortlessly, so you can focus on other aspects of your business, like your products and marketing.
In this article, we’re going to highlight 4 signs that what you actually need is a website builder.
You need a website fast
Website builders are the perfect solution for somebody that needed a website yesterday. For example if you’ve been taking orders through a social media page, such as from family and friends, and all of a sudden you have a bunch of people inquiring about your products. You need a website like right now.
A website builder can help you put together a simple shopping cart in less than a day. You just need a store layout template, a payment processing app, and images of your products, and you’re all set to start taking customer orders through your new website. It’s really that easy.
In that sense, a website builder is perfect for a small graphic design t-shirt business, or handmade crafts like you’d find on Etsy. They’re even great for other kinds of professional businesses, like real estate agencies (you can read this article on Follow Up Boss on the best website builders for real estate).
So a website builder is perfect for the business venturist that needs a simple shopping cart as soon as possible, and lets you focus on your business instead of building a website from scratch.
You don’t know CSS and don’t have time to learn
WordPress is the most common website platform globally, and it’s very easy to set up a blog on WordPress. You can set up a WordPress blog in just a few clicks. But a blog is basically an online journal. That’s not what you’re trying to create. Creating a WordPress website takes a bit more effort.
To create a decent-looking WordPress business website, you’ll need to purchase and install custom themes, plug-ins, as well as shop around for domain hosting and installing WordPress on your domain host. And of course, you’ll need a bit of CSS knowledge to tweak and customize little aspects of your WordPres theme, as there’s no “one size fits all” theme, they always require a little bit of code-tweaking to fit your website perfectly.
Learning HTML and CSS is very easy, it can be done in maybe a month with daily practice, but you needed a website yesterday, remember?
You’re on a budget
Custom website design can cost thousands of dollars, at minimum $5,000, even for a small ecommerce site. And the total cost of building a small ecommerce site on WordPress will cost around a minimum $1,000 once you factor in the cost of themes, plug-ins, security add-ons, etc.
Think of it like a vacation package. With a website builder, you’re paying for an all-inclusive package upfront, which might seem to be a little higher upfront, whereas with WordPress you need to pay for your bed and drinks, hotel WiFi access, etc. You can easily rack up a $500/mo bill in plug-in subscriptions and things like that.
With a website builder, you can get a website up and running within a day for maybe a couple hundred dollars upfront, more or less depending on what you need, and then a monthly hosting plan that is usually between $9 - $75 depending on your plan’s features. So overall, a website builder is a much budget-friendlier option than anything else.
You need access to one-click install apps
Similar to WordPress themes, plug-ins for WordPress websites like Yoast SEO and shopping cart plug-ins require a bit of installation and technical know-how to get up and running perfectly, as the plug-in scripts need to be integrated on your website.
There’s also the fact that you may have too many to choose from, I mean typing “shopping cart” into the WordPress plug-in store will show you hundreds of results to consider.
With a website builder, all the add-ons you’d need for your website are right there for you to install in one click, automatically integrating themselves with your website. I like to think of WordPress as a giant puzzle where you need to make all the pieces fit, whereas a website builder is more like a paint-by-numbers, all the hard stuff is already done for you.
