Do You Own Your Website?
Dr. Gary Leung
| Updated March 8, 2022
if you use a website builder such as wix, weebly, squarespace, godaddy, or google to create and host your small business website, you likely won’t be able to move your website if you ever decide to cancel your service with them. this means that you do not really own your website since it only works on that service’s platform. if you stop using the service, your website goes away too. owning your website means having full control and the ability to move it whenever you want.
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Website builders usually have pre-made templates that you can choose with a drag-and-drop interface.
If you stop using the website builder’s service and stop paying their monthly fees, your website goes away.
Owning the files of your website gives you flexibility as you won’t be tied to a specific website builder service.
Find professionals that focus on small businesses, have many clients and can leverage economies of scale.
Most website builders like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, GoDaddy or Google promise a small business website can be launched on their service in “just a few clicks” using a pre-made template and drag-and-drop builder. While these services make it easy to create and host a small business website, they also come with some major drawbacks.
One of the biggest concerns is that you don’t really own your website if you use a website builder service. Since the files (code) associated with your website only works when hosted on the website builder’s system, if you ever decide to cancel your service with the website builder, your website will go away too!
What is a website builder and how does it work?
A website builder is a platform that allows you to create, edit, and publish a website without having to write any code. These are typically online, proprietary tools provided by web hosting companies that promise easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interfaces to launch a new website in a matter of a few hours.
Website builders usually have pre-made templates that you can choose from and they also provide a drag-and-drop interface for adding content to your website. This promises a quicker learning curve, especially if the user does not deviate too far from a chosen template. The goal of these tools is to simplify your site management by combining domain registration, hosting, and site design into one platform.
The relatively low monthly price of these services can be appealing to small business owners. However, note that the user is responsible for all aspects of maintaining and updating their website.
Who Owns Your Website?
With website builder services, your website is strictly tied to the service. This means that you do not really “own” your website since it only works on your service provider’s platform. If you stop using the service and stop paying their monthly fee, your website disappears.
So, once you make a decision to use a website builder for your small business website, you’ll be stuck with that service unless you decide to rebuild your website from scratch on another platform.
Make Sure You Own Your Website
The best way to make sure you own your website is to self-host it. This means that you’ll need to find a web hosting company and pay a monthly fee to host your website on their servers. Once you’ve done this, you can then create your small business website using a platform of your choice, such as WordPress (a free software platform for website creation).
When self-hosting your website, you’ll be able to move your website to another host if you’re ever unhappy with your current provider. This gives you the flexibility to change hosts if you encounter any problems or if you simply want to switch to a different provider for any reason.
This means that you own your website and all of the data on it – you never have to pay WordPress. So if you’re looking for a platform to build your small business website that gives you true ownership of your website, WordPress is a better option than most of the other website builders out there.
When choosing a website builder for your small business, be sure to ask about whether or not you’ll own your website if you decide to cancel their service. If the answer is no, then look for another builder that gives you more ownership over your site.
Get Help With Your Small Business Website
Let’s face it, running and growing a small business is hard! There are lot of things to juggle including business plans, financials, taxes, office, marketing, internal processes and, most importantly, delivering great customer service. Your small business website shouldn’t be one of these things.
Small business owners should hire a professional to build their website. The key is to find professionals that focus on small businesses, have many small business owners as clients and can leverage economies of scale to cost-effectively provide all of the different elements for hosting, design, website security, and, most important, backup and support.