Full Transcript
[0:00]
Welcome to the 805 Web Minute. And today we're talking about why the website builder you chose for speed might be secretly costing your central coast business credibility and customers. Yeah, it's a huge topic. And that initial choice, you know, for speed and for simplicity, it makes perfect sense. Of course. I mean, you see companies like GoDaddy and their massive, very reliable, third biggest in the world. They spend a fortune marketing how easy it is to get started. But that easy start can sometimes be a bit of a trap. It's often a trap door. Yeah, especially for any business that actually wants to grow. Okay. So let's be fair first. Let's talk about the good side. I mean, if you're a total beginner and all you need is an online business card, you know, your hours, location, phone number, these platforms are actually pretty great for that. Oh, absolutely. They're affordable, like 10, maybe 12 bucks a month for a basic plan. Right. They serve that that starter stage perfectly. You pick a theme, you pop in your details and you can be live in what an afternoon. Yeah. But the second, the very second, you want that website to do something for you, like generate leads or sell things. That's when you hit the wall. You hit the growth wall. Exactly. And we're not talking about it being too complicated. It's more about a lack of control, right? You're just hemmed in completely. The basic limitation is that it's just so rigid. You're not really building a website. You're just filling in these little pre-made boxes inside sections. That are already built for you. So you can move a whole section up or down, but you can't move say a picture to be right next to a specific piece of text inside that section. I got it. So let's say you're a local winery here in SLO and you want this beautiful contact form right next to a gallery of your vineyard with a little customer of you just underneath. Mm-hmm. I can picture that with these builders. You can maybe turn the testimonial section on or off, but you can't just pick it up and place it exactly where your vision demands. You're stuck in their box. I get the creative frustration there, but does that actually hurt the business?
[2:00]
It's a huge tie-wayster. And what's really wild is that this rigidity often comes with a lack of basic tools you'd expect. Like a lot of these editors literally have no undo button. Wait, really? No, control plus Z. None. So you accidentally delete a paragraph you just wrote or clicked the wrong setting and it's gone. You have to rebuild it from memory. The quick and simple editor just turned a two second mistake into a 20 minute headache. And that rigidity that brings us to the credibility problem because if I'm forced into these pre-built boxes, doesn't my website end up looking like will everyone else's? It does. A lot of these builders only have maybe 20 something templates to choose from and they all have the same basic layout. Big image at the top headline button. Big image headline button. You nailed it. So instead of standing out, you just blend in. So, okay, I'm a small business in AG. Why is it so bad if my website looks like a template? I'm trying to build trust here because people are smart. They can spot a template a mile away. And the data on this is pretty shocking. Something like 75% of consumers will judge your company's credibility based only on your website's design. 75% wow. Yeah. So if your site looks cheap or generic, you're basically telling three out of every four potential customers, maybe you're not that professional or that you don't invest in your own business. That is a massive opportunity cost. But let's talk about something that's not just blending in, but actively killing a sale. The e-commerce trust killer. If I sell something online with one of these builders, what happens when my customer clicks check out? This is a huge one. So the customer is ready to buy. They're feeling good. And then at that critical moment, they get redirected off your website off of say, your S a little business.com. And on to where? Onto some generic third party payment page. Yeah. Often with the URL like my simple store.com. Oh, no. So as a customer, I'm thinking, wait a minute, where am I? The address just changed. That feels really insecure. Exactly. It creates this huge psychological friction right when they're about to type in their credit card number.
[4:05]
Their brain just hits the brakes. Do I trust this weird new URL? And a lot of them don't. You get a ton of abandoned carts right there. It's a totally unnecessary barrier. So beyond the design and the trust issues, you also mentioned that this whole rigid structure, it cripples your marketing. And this gets back to what you call the plumbing. Yeah, the plumbing. Look, modern marketing is all about data. It's about tracking what works to do that. You need to be able to inject little bits of code into your site's structure, like a Facebook pixel or Google tracking codes. Exactly. These little snippets let you see which ads are working, who's visiting your site. And you can even add advanced tools like a live chat or a special booking system. So it's stopping me on a DIY builder. They lock you out of the plumbing. They hide the core code of the page. So you can only use their basic pre-approved tools. When I do something more advanced, want to really dial in your Facebook ad tracking. Can't do it. You can't your marketing strategy is basically dead on arrival. Okay. So the immediate problems are being stuck in a generic design, but the bigger long term problem, the one that can really cost a business, thousands. That's vendor lock in, right? I assume I can just export my site if I want to leave. And that's the hidden land mine. Most of these DIY builders, the big popular ones have absolutely no export function. So you're building on rented land. You are. And when you decide to move, the landlord keeps the blueprints. That sounds like a hassle, but why is it a multi thousand dollar hassle? Can I just, you know, poppy and paste the text, download my images? You can copy this stuff. You can see, but you lose everything you can't see. All the invisible plumbing, all the SEO work you've done. For years, the page titles, the descriptions, the image tags that you carefully set up to rank on Google. So when I move, I'm not just moving the furniture. I'm tearing out the foundation and the wiring perfectly put. You have to start from scratch. And that means hiring someone to manually rebuild every single page, every link, all that metadata.
[6:06]
What started cheap forces you into a really expensive time, consuming rebuild later on. That's technical debt. And that debt, it doesn't just show up when you try to leave, right? It builds up over time. You said it can affect site speed. It does. These DIY sites often have bloated code to make their drag and drop editors work. As you add more pages, more images, they just get slower and slower. Why does a one second delay matter to a business here in AG? Because people have no patience. They'll just leave. And even worse, Google knows your site is slow. And it's algorithm will actively push you down in the search results. You'd be coming to visible. You also made a point about mobile responsive versus mobile optimized. All these templates look okay on my phone. So what's the difference? Responsive just means the layout shrinks to fit the screen. Optimize means it's actually built to work well for a mobile user. So bigger buttons, bigger buttons. Yeah. Making sure tap targets are easy for fingers. But also things like making sure images are sized correctly. So they load fast on a mobile connection. A site can look fine, but be super frustrating to use on a phone. And you lose all those mobile customers, which is most of them. So we've got generic design, vendor lock in, slow performance. But now let's get to the most serious risk, especially here in California, the legal risk, website accessibility. This is the one every business owner on the central coast really needs to hear. The law, the Americans at Disabilities Act says your website has to be usable by people with disabilities. People using screen readers, for example. And this isn't some theoretical thing. This is happening right here right now. He's incredibly active. California was third in the whole country for ADA website lawsuits in the first half of 2025. Thousands of them filed and they often target small businesses that just don't know any better. And because the DIY builders lock you out of that plumbing, you can't actually make sure your site follows the rules. You can't true accessibility depends on the underlying code being structured correctly. Things a screen reader needs to make sense of the page. A template just can't guarantee that.
[8:06]
If the foundation is flawed, you're legally exposed. OK, but I see these little widgets you can add to your site. These accessibility overlays. Is that an easy fix? This is a critical warning. Absolutely not. The legal experts are very clear in this. Those overlay widgets do not fix the fundamental problems in the code. So they're like a coat of paint on a crumbling wall. Exactly. And sites with those widgets are still getting sued successfully. You might pay for one thinking you're safe, but you're still sitting on a legal time bomb. Accessibility has to be built in from the very beginning. You can't just bolt it on later for a business here trying to save 10 bucks a month on a builder could expose you to a five figure legal bill. So let's bring this all together. If you're listening and you realize your quick fix site is holding you back, what's the alternative? Well, you could just take the four big problems we talked about. The inflexibility, the trust issues, the lock in and the legal risk, and you flip them around. That's your checklist for a real solution. So you need something that gives you a custom design that's built on a solid fast foundation that lets you own your content and is accessible from day one. That's it. You have to start seeing your website as a real business asset, not just another monthly bill. It's about finding a partner who handles all that complicated hidden plumbing for you. So you can just focus on running your business, whether that's here in SLO or down in Pismo Beach. Precisely. Without worrying about the next Google update or getting a scary letter from a lawyer. That's the quick tip for today. We hope that breakdown helps you weigh the true long term cost of those seemingly simple web builders. If you want a professional website without the agency price tag or the DIY headache, here is the better way. At ugrow.pro we build it, we manage it, and we handle every update forever for just 79 dollars a month. There is zero setup fee, no contract lock-in, and it is strictly month to month, so there is zero risk. Yeah, we're local here in AG and we can have you live in days, not months. Want to see what your site could look like? Go to ugrow.pro right now and we'll design three custom mock-ups for your business,
[10:11]
completely free, no strings attached. Thanks for listening and keep growing.