With the rise of templating systems like Wix, Squarespace and Weebly, these companies have a lot of people convinced that there’s no place for professional web designers and developers. A simple “Do It Yourself” solution is all you need to grow your business.

Unfortunately, web design template ‘solutions’ will not move the needle for your company in the long run. When it comes to growing your online presence, having a custom design is only one piece of the puzzle. Below are a few reasons why you should get a professional to design & build your website.

Custom Design > Templated Design

Do It Yourself website solutions generally offer one “competitive edge” when it comes to their services – a “Make It Beautiful” website (directly from the Squarespace website). The problem is, Squarespace and many other DIY website solutions offer templates that look very, very similar to each other. Why does this hurt your online image?

Simple. It looks cheap. It looks like every other website. This tells me (and more importantly your customers), that you didn’t care enough to invest in bettering your business’ online image.

It’s a sloppy practice – and who wants to spend their hard earned money on or with a company’s product or service, when you’ve illustrated you don’t care about your own?

A professional web design and development agency will take the time to research your target market, and cater the design around exactly what your customers need. Strong content, call to actions and a properly targeted design are some of most important elements in converting more of your traffic into paying customers.

SEO Is Better

Do It Yourself website platforms are riddled with bloated, irrelevant code that slows down the performance of your website. Since page speed is one of the top ranking factors in Google search, you must have your website built on a system that’s lightning fast and is built with minimal / semantic code. The problem with using one of these DIY platforms is that they don’t care whether your website is optimized for search engines. They care simply about aesthetics, not what’s going on under the hood. And arguably, the most important thing in a website is exactly what’s going on under the hood.

Catering To Functionality

This is one of the bigger or more advantageous benefits about using a professional web designer & developer – functionality. DIY solutions simply offer what is commonly known as a brochure, static website. A solution that simply displays information, and that’s about it. What happens if you need a membership management system? A complex e-commerce store? A contact form system that feeds into a CRM? With a DIY solution, you can’t.

With a custom solution, you absolutely can do all of those things, and more. The sky is the limit, which makes a custom solution much more robust.

Customization Is Far More Robust

Ever try customizing the look and feel of a Squarespace, Wix or Weebly website?

You can’t.

You’re locked into whichever theme you chose from the get go, and that’s that. Even hiring a developer won’t fix the issue, because they’re also unable to modify those templated systems code.

With a custom solution, it’s the complete opposite. You’re able to edit the content at anytime, with no extra cost. Which leads us into our next point..

Stellar Customer Service

Customer service on a DIY web provider is powered by something called Live Chat. This means that you log into your website, hit “Live Chat”, and you’re connected with a “web professional”. You then proceed trying to explain your problem over typing text. More often than not, this can be a very difficult process trying to explain something you may not understand.

With an agency, you can call and speak with a human – directly. It’s a much more efficient process to speak with someone over the phone about a problem, then spending minutes (or hours) speaking through a text box to try and solve your web problems.

Robust Analytics

Analytics on a website are a very important factor on any website. How long your users spent on any given page, where they exited, why they got to your shop’s checkout page and left.. these are all critical components of why or why not your website is succeeding. With a templated solution, advanced analytics simply don’t exist – which does not give you the proper edge when it comes to examining these critical analytics.

In the end, a professional web designer & developer will properly research your market, design your website around your target audience, and ultimately build a robust and functional website with added advanced analytics. This is a very important stepping stone in growing your business. Something that a DIY solution can simply not accomplish.