Is A Free Website Really A Good Idea?
When someone offers you “free” anything, it’s hard to resist—especially when it comes to helping you to build your business. A website is a must-have these days if you want your business to become successful, and many Web hosting sites make it very enticing by luring you in when they offer a free website to you. Well, as hard as it is to say this, free still comes at a cost.
Yes, you can get a free website on WordPress.com or other popular Web hosting sites; however, you will not be able to have access to a premium domain name and you will have to operate with an unprofessional looking domain name such as the following: www.isellwidgets.onfreetoyouwebsite.com. For a premium domain name, you will have to pay the going rate that the hosting site charges. The cost is usually not that much, but you were promised it would be free from the get-go. If you want to be taken seriously, then you must present yourself as such, and it will cost more.
Have you ever been to website that took its time to populate all the content and pictures and links on it? This is what you get with a free website. You will be sharing a server with many other free websites under the same provider and this will cause the connection to be s-l-o-w. This is bad for search engine optimization and your website may not get picked up during a web search. Not good. The few people that do happen to find your site will quickly leave if it is not up to speed and you stand to lose valuable potential customers.
Advertising is a necessity, but you have to put up with it on most social media applications. Do you want to put up with it on your own website as well? You will if you opt for a free website. In addition, if you decide to upgrade to a premium site and try to merge your existing free site onto your new site, it’s nearly impossible. It will take a professional to help you with this process. You will also have to merge your nearly invisible free “domain” www.isellwidgets.onfreetoyouwebsite.com over to www.isellwidgets.com, a premium name, and this can also be tricky and very time consuming.
This also applies to the free trial period: After the free trial period, then what? Chances are, since you had a free website and no one found you, you most likely won’t want to pursue going further at this point, and all that time would have been wasted. It’s not easy to build a website. Your time is money to you. Had you gone with a professional from the beginning, you would have been well on your way to seeing money starting to roll in by the time the free trial period was up and you could have been working on building your brand.
A free website will have limited site building tools. Have you ever been to a website that ‘wowed” you with the intro graphics and changing banners? You won’t have that with a free site. It will be boring, and unappealing. Your site can also go “down” at any given time due to a high saturation point of bandwidth use and can crash at any time. Worse case scenario, all of your data is subject to complete loss and you can’t get it back without starting over.
Don’t let this happen to you. A reliable web designer like Houmanity.com can take this entire burden off of you and they will create a beautiful, functional website for you while ensuring you can be found on the Internet by people who need to find you. A reputable company such as this will work within your budget to keep costs to a minimum, and will only provide you with exactly what you need the most to get you started. As your business grows, you can then seek to have a good web design company monitor your site, apply search engine optimization, and keep it looking vibrant and inviting at all times.
So you see, free will actually cost you much more money down the road, along with frustration and set-backs. Don’t fall into the free trap. Find yourself a good web designer from the start and you will begin to see progress before you know it.