Do you own your website?
Do you own your website? If you work with a professional web developer, it is a very safe assumption that you do in fact own your website. After all, your website is very likely a significant portion of your marketing plan, so it would only make sense to own your website. There are other platforms and providers available where you do not actually own your own website. While that might sound like an intriguing option, there are several reasons as to why owning your website is a far better choice.
Customization and Branding
If you own your own car or house or boat or plane, you can customize it to fit whatever you need or want. The same should be true of your website. As your business grows and evolves, new pieces of info or features will need to be added to your site. If you do not own your website, being able to login and quickly and easily be able to add those new features might not be as easy as you would like – and sometimes not even possible at all. As time goes on, your company will likely go through some rebranding with new colors and a new logo. Once again, if you do not own your website, updating things like this might not be as easy or even an option.
This is one of the many strengths of WordPress. You can easily update colors and logos and images to fit whatever your business or brand needs. By owning your own website, you will be able to have control over design, layout, wording, and more, allowing you to create a website and marketing strategy that is perfect for your business.
Control Over Content and Updates
One of the biggest issues with most of the platforms and providers where you don’t own your website is related to the content. The content is the words, images, visuals, videos, and icons that are used on your site. With many of these platforms, you do not own the content that is on your site. Even though you have paid the platform or provider for writing and preparing that content, you still do not own it.
Many times, with not owning the content, you can also then run into issues with getting simple updates made to that content. Updating text and images isn’t the only limitation with these platforms. If you want a particular element to be a slightly darker shade, that might not be an option for you. And if a feature doesn’t work exactly how you’d like, there’s few options available to fix that problem. Whereas WordPress has thousands of plugins and resources (such as Advanced Custom Fields), many of these other platforms and providers do not offer such customization.
SEO Flexibility
Having a great website is merely a first step in online marketing success. Without effective search engine optimization (SEO) you won’t be able to draw nearly as many needed users to your site. By owning your website, you will have considerably greater flexibility in implementing many SEO techniques. With a WordPress website, you can install the Yoast plugin for SEO and utilize all the strength and precision that the plugin provides. Resources like that are not always available on the other platforms where you don’t own the site.
By owning your website, we can customize an SEO strategy to focus on any keyword or keyphrase that can bring users and success to your website. With the other platforms where you don’t own your website, you will likely be stuck in their often-dated SEO implementations and limited to the keywords they see fit.
Scalability and Expansion
Successful businesses grow and evolve and expand into new services and products. By owning your website, you can ensure you will always be able to add on new features and functionality to your site. This scalability could be as simple as adding in an online store or a blog or a photo gallery. More so, it could be a store or blog or gallery with a customized twist to it to make it uniquely yours.
This customization is again rarely an option with the platforms where you don’t own the site. Your store, blog, photo gallery, or any other feature you want to add in will need to be the exact one or two that they have available. The scalability aspect of a website is one of the key features that separates modern marketing from magazine ad based marketing of the past.
Technical Support and Expertise
When you work with a custom web design studio, such as Full Scope Creative, one of the many benefits is the ability to easily get in touch with the experts who built your website. When reaching out to a company like Full Scope, there’s no waiting on hold or searching for a 1-800 number. There’s no reading through countless less-than-helpful whitepapers that don’t answer your question. With many of the platforms where you don’t own your site, your support can be limited to those options.
By owning your website, you can even control which professionals and technical support and marketing experts you work with. You can have one company build the site of your dreams, and another company who specializes in SEO for your industry run the marketing for your website. If you don’t own the website, however, you won’t have those options as readily available. Oftentimes, those are the options that can help bring the greatest of success to your website.
Owning Far Outweighs The Alternative
While there are plenty of platforms and providers available on the web that will set you up with a website you don’t own, this is not your best course of action for most businesses. The autonomy, control, customization, and marketing impact you can make with a website you own far outweighs the limited (if any) benefits of having a website you don’t own. If you’re not sure if the site you currently use is owned by you or the provider, get in touch with Full Scope Creative today and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.