Today more than ever there are a massive amount of options when you decide to plant your stake on the Internet with a website. With so many free options it seems counter intuitive to ever think about paying for a domain, hosting, or even to have your website built. If you are currently working through this decision the two biggest questions you have to ask are one, if the free options are just as good then why are the companies building websites not out of business and two what happens if something changes with the free platform I am currently using?

To address the first point of are the free platforms as good as an actual custom website? This really depends on what you need your website to accomplish. If you want an actual piece of online real estate for a business then nothing can beat an actual website regardless of what platform is it built on. Major companies understand this and that is why they are not trading in their websites to get a free Weebly blog on their site. If all you want is a blog and you don’t care about all the bells and whistles then the free options are probably perfect for you, outside of the following point.

The second question, what happens if something changes, is a much scarier prospect. The recent example of Google de-indexing all Wix sites is a perfect example of what can go wrong when you don’t own your digital footprint. Overnight thousands of businesses disappeared from the Google search results, which will impact their bottom lines in the millions of dollars.   We have been telling our clients this for years but this
is a perfect real life example of the theoretical risk coming to fruition.

If you currently have your business presence on a free platform take a look at the various options available such as WordPress that give you complete control and ownership. If you need help we would advise you to contact the Alan Morgan Group to get a no obligation
quote on a new website.