Why hire a real web design firm?

Self provisioning website solutions like Squarespace, WIX, or GoDaddy Aero are bad for your business on several levels.  The first is ownership of your asset.  With these “solutions” you cannot migrate to a different “host” or server and this is a problem.  These servers are inherently slow (more on that later) and meter out resources leaving you needing more with an ever increasing bill .  Furthermore, when you want to leave you need to start from scratch.  Oftentimes unhappy users just keep investing time and money after frustrating results. (can you say sunk cost fallacy?) 

Just google “why is a squarespace website bad for seo” and read the AI overview

Furthermore, since you don’t “own” the website, when you do finally decide to rebuild, if you copy and paste the content is not “original” in a search engine’s eyes.  Google thinks you are plagiarizing a squarespace site.  Oh man… 

Looking deeper at server solutions that are tied to webbuilders, like Squarespace, you cannot change server architecture and the underlying environment will struggle resulting in lower “Time to First Byte” (TTFB) and page speed scores compared to optimized independent architectures like LiteSpeed (which we use) or Nginx servers.   

This limited technical control also has rigid schema markup, URL structures that are inflexible,  and missing category level SEO settings, all of which negatively affect your ability to be found on the internet.  

Want to accept payment on your site, no problem, Squarespace has you covered, in fact you have to use them. They are really just a merchant processor in disguise.  So much for getting a competitive rate.  

As if this isn’t enough to send you running to a real web developer, you would often be paying twice as much ($139 a month for the “advanced”)  No thanks.  You don’t have to be Elon Musk, this isn’t rocket science, it’s just professional web marketing.  Pro Web Marketing.