Our Blog Why Custom Website Development is Valuable in a World of Drag and Drop Websites Posted on 06.14.2023 Website When it’s so easy to turn to a drag-and-drop website builder to create your own website, why is custom website development still valuable? Support tops the list, but the problems with drag-and-drop website platforms include a lack of scalability and portability, limited design choices, questionable SEO performance, and lacking tech support. Plus, these web builders are typically not robust enough for ecommerce or large websites—and they’re not well suited to time-crunched entrepreneurs or marketing teams because they require you to figure out any problems. In our previous blog post, we covered four benefits of custom development. Custom websites can be as large—or as small and scalable—as needed. Having a website development team behind the scenes looking at your website and product database allows you to make the additions you need without worrying about fixing code issues. Jump to Section Scalability and Portability Scalability and Portability Limited Design Choices SEO Performance Lacking Website Support Experience Custom Website Development Scalability and Portability When your website is ready to grow, you want to be able to make it happen without a redesign. However, a drag-and-drop website will not make it easy. Sometimes, it is easier to start over when major additions must be made to one of these websites. Proprietary website builders are also unlikely to be portable to WordPress or any other platform. They want you to stay on their platform, so they make it difficult or impossible to take your website with you to another platform and hosting service. For example, a Wix website cannot simply be switched to WordPress. Their proprietary system doesn’t provide you with the code that you can pick up and put on another hosting platform. Custom website developers know the flexibility of WordPress, which is built on industry-standard code. It is relatively easy to apply a new design to existing code using existing content In addition, you can choose another website designer or developer, and they should be able to modify your website. Limited Design Choices While website builders appear to provide a lot of creative design choices, they are primarily for very small businesses with limited ecommerce requirements. If you go with a website builder to launch your first website, you may quickly outgrow the original design. At that time, you will likely need to upgrade to custom website development with robust and varied ecommerce capabilities. If you start with a custom developed website on WordPress, you are set up for success as your business grows. WordPress updates are usually incremental and cause minimal disruption while keeping your website current with technology. SEO Performance Not all website builders are created equally, and SEO performance is one of the questionable areas. Having seen behind the curtain of some of these websites, it is unclear how well the SEO tools they use work. Again, the tools are easy to use, but more limited. The gold standard of SEO is a WordPress website, and we encourage our clients to trust that platform as the foundation of their custom websites. Besides, do you really want to set up and oversee your Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other related tools? Metro Studios can not only rock your custom website design but also maximize your SEO and take your website to the next level. Lacking Website Support Website builders can be easy to use initially, but what happens when a problem occurs? These websites can become difficult to troubleshoot, and even more difficult to connect to a person to resolve the issue. Some have extensive wiki sites online rather than a number to call for assistance, which can make it very frustrating to customize your website or fix it. When choosing a professional website development team, be sure to ask about their support services and what is included in any monthly maintenance fees. The best developers can fix your website quickly and assist you with other website questions. Experienced Custom Website Development The value of custom website development like we provide at Metro Studios comes from our experienced team. We have built and supported everything from nonprofit websites that sell entry tickets to ecommerce ag equipment websites. When you’re looking for a custom website development partner and a digital marketing team to create and implement content, contact us to learn more.