Migrate Your Content from Free and 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.

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• 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 typically provide a subdomain (e.g., yoursite.wixsite.com), which is owned by Wix, yoursite.shopify.com owned by SHopify, etc. This makes your site appear less professional and can limit your branding opportunities.
• Custom Domains: To use a custom domain (e.g., www.yoursite.com), you need to upgrade to a paid plan. 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: Free hosting platforms often display their ads on your site, which you have no control over. This can detract from your site’s user experience and your brand image.
• Monetization Limitations: Your ability to monetize your site through ads or other methods may be restricted on a free plan.

 

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/Transpose Your Content to a Website You Fully Control

 

 

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

• Feature Limitations: Free plans often come with limited features and customization options. To access advanced functionalities, you typically need to upgrade to a paid plan. Most of the time you won’t be able to do basic stuff that are typical when you host your page elsewhere.
• Third-Party Integrations: The ability to integrate with third-party services and tools (chat and support widgets, tracking pixels, bulk email solutions, etc.) will be restricted on free plans, limiting your site’s potential, customer engagement and retention, as well as marketing reach.
• Design Freedom: Paid platforms or self-hosted solutions like WordPress.org offer extensive customization options. You can fully control the design, layout, and functionality of your site without the limitations imposed by free builders.
• Advanced Features: Access to a broader range of plugins, themes, and custom coding options allows for more complex and tailored website functionalities.
• Can you customise the colours, logos, add branding, make simple layout adjustments, change column orders or sidebar placements?
• Can you add custom CSS for finer control over styling and modular page layouts?
• Is there a drag-and-drop interface for designing and re-arranging page elements?
• Do you have the ability to create custom themes and templates?
• Can you enable and disable standard features and assign users to roles?
• Can you integrate third-party tools and plugins?
• Can you create custom functionalities via API access? And customise workflows and create automations?

 

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

• SEO Tools: A painful topic. Advanced SEO tools and settings are not available on free plans, affecting your site’s search engine performance. Access to core files is paramount to optimize for search engines. You won’t have access to edit your robots.txt file, your .htaccess, your 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 solutions often provide better server resources, which can lead to faster loading times and a more reliable website.
• Scalability: As your website grows, you can scale your resources more easily on a paid platform, accommodating increased traffic and content without performance degradation.
• Better SEO Tools: Advanced platforms offer superior SEO tools and capabilities, enabling better optimization of your website for search engines.
• Marketing Integrations: Easier integration with email marketing, social media, and analytics tools helps in creating and executing effective marketing strategies.

 

You Trust the Platform to Run Security and Offer You 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 and data

• 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.
• 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.

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