Migrate Your Content from Paid Website Hosts

Do You Have any of these Problems?

Your Content is Hosted on a Platform You Partly Control

You have created a website on WIX, Squarespace, Shopify, Clickfunnels, Hubspot, WordPress.com. They offer you hosting and a free page builder, which produces only mediocre results and an average look, certainly of lower quality than your competition has.

To put it bluntly, your choice of a platform just gives you the hosting and a couple of plugins, nothing more.

• If a platform vendor decides to deprioritise a feature, change how things are structured, or charge money for changes you want – do you really have control? 

 

You Partly Control Your Domain

• Subdomain Restrictions: Free hosting plans usually give you a subdomain—like yoursite.wixsite.com with Wix or yoursite.shopify.com with Shopify. Since the main domain belongs to the hosting provider, it can make your site look less professional and limit your chances to build a strong, unique brand.
• Custom Domains: With custom domains (i.e., www.yoursite.com), subscription to a paid plan is necessary. The ownership of the custom domain remains yours, but it’s an additional cost to consider.

A custom domain (e.g., www.yourwebsite.com) shows up as a more professional option and does good for your branding, than a subdomain provided by free website builders (e.g., yourwebsite.freebuilder.com).

 

You Can Do Only Limited Advertising

• Platform Ads: Most free hosting services put their ads on your site, to which you have no say. This can spoil the site’s user-experience and brand image.
• Monetization Restrictions: Free plans may restrict you from monetizing your site through ads or other ways.

 

You Are Dependent on One Platform

• Service Continuity: Your site’s existence is tied to the hosting platform. If Wix, Shopify and the rest change their terms of service, pricing, or features, you have limited recourse and you are stuck on a poor decision. Never put all eggs into one basket.
• Site Lock-In: Moving your site to another platform can be complex and time-consuming, making you dependent on the host for continued service and features. I consider this a serious limitation and a strike against those “free” platforms.

 

What can you do:

Migrate Your Content to a Website You Fully Control

 

Main Form

 

 

You Can’t Use Common Website Features
and You Can’t Customize

• Feature Limitations: Free plans will usually come with very few features and customization options. To unlock all of them, the user has to pay for a premium plan. Most of the time, you cannot do the simplest things that are routine when hosting your page elsewhere.
• Third-Party Integrations: Depending on paid or free, third-party integration with services and tools (chats-and-support-widgets, pixel tracking, bulk-email solutions, etc.) could be away from grasp. These hold back your site more toward customer engagement and retention, as well as to marketing reach.
• Design Freedom: Paid or self-hosted platforms, such as WordPress.org, can provide comprehensive customization capability. Free builders somehow restrict full control over how the site looks, lays out, or even functions by themselves.
• Can you make advanced plugins and themes available, or can you code them to allow more advanced and specifically required website functionalities?
• Customize the colors, logos, branding, do some simple layout adjustments like the order of columns or sidebars-could it do some simple layout adjustments like changing the order of columns or sidebars?
• Can you add custom CSS for styling-granular control and modular page layout?
• Is there any drag-and-drop interface for designing and re-arranging page elements? Is it possible to develop custom theme and template?
• Can you enable or disable standard features and assign users with roles?
• Can you integrate any kind of third-party tool or plugin?
• Can you build API access for custom functions?
• Can you customize workflows and creating automations?

 

You Don’t Offer the Best Experience to Visitors, and it Hurts Your Conversions and Traffic

• SEO Tools: What a tormenting situation to be in. Search engine performance will be affected in the case an advanced SEO tool or option is needed and is unavailable in the free plan. Accessing core files is the priority for the SEO optimizations. Hence, in the free plan, one will never be allowed to edit the robots.txt file, .htaccess, or the theme scripts and styles. I know they offer editors for styles but that’s not enough. And what about the page speed? The majority of these free builders have terrible speed and you don’t have even the option to do something about it.
• Analytics Access: Access to detailed analytics and visitor data will be limited, making it harder to track and optimize your site’s performance.
• Better Performance: Paid hosting usually provides more potent server resources so that your website loads very fast and is very reliable.
• Scalability: Paid hosting allows you to increase resources when the traffic and content of your site increase.
• Advanced SEO Tools: Paid hosting will give you extra SEO features (you don’t need them BTW) to make your sites more advanced in optimization.
• Marketing Integrations: The paid hosting can integrate with marketing tools such as email campaigns, social media, and analytics for a complete marketing setup.

 

You Trust the Platform for Security and Support When Things Break

• Customer Support: Free plans come with limited customer support. Priority support is usually reserved for paid subscribers. When something breaks you won’t be able to fix it that day and might take up to a week of waiting and talking with support reps that play the same record (irrelevant and scripted answers). On a website you control you can hire a developer within the first day to fix any issue.
• Security Features: Free plans don’t include advanced security features, such as SSL certificates and regular backups, potentially putting your website at risk. You practically delegate your business security to other people who may work tirelessly, or may be lazy and will destroy your business in a blink of an eye. Nobody is safe these days and AI has came to town.

 

You Don’t have Full Ownership over Your Content

• You need to have a paid plan and even so, it is doubtfull you will have full ownership and control over your website’s content and data. That is too lame!!!
• When you migrate to a more flexible platform you will not be locked into a single provider and you will have the freedom to switch hosts or service providers as needed.

 

You have Limited Monetization Opportunities

• Paid platforms support more robust e-commerce functionalities, allowing you to sell products or services directly from your website. But when you accept their TOS (Terms of Service) they can charge you at will and there have been instances (Shopify) when an order is refunded by the seller (You) the platform won’t refund their fees!!!
• You don’t control all aspects of your site’s design and content so you can’t optimize ad revenue streams effectively as you would on a fully-controlled website.

 

Compliance and Backup

• Paid platforms often provide tools and support to help ensure your website complies with legal and regulatory requirements, such as GDPR. On a non-paid platform you will need to comply with actions taken, popups installed, or other ways. Not a huge inconvienience, though.
• Regular Backups: Paid solutions frequently offer automated backups, non-paid plans don’t offer that so your data is not safe and can’t be restored when an issue occurs.

To put it bluntly, your choice of a platform just gives you the hosting and a couple of plugins, nothing more.

What can you do:
Migrate Your Content to a Website You Fully Control