Why Your Business Shouldn’t Use A “No-Code” Website Builder and Hosting Company

This also applies to those who don’t care about privacy.

“No-Code” website builder hosts like Squarespace or Zyro can seem like a tempting option when creating a website for your new business. Their provided editors are often so easy to use that you can spin up a new website in less than 24 hours, maybe even less due to the integration of AI tools to generate anything from text to website logos. They can also be cheaper than traditional shared hosting plans. The convenience of these website builder/hosting combos is unmatched. Unfortunately there are many reasons they should be avoided.

For starters these web hosts run on proprietary software, which does have privacy implications for you and your customers, but the privacy aspect isn’t even what we are going to focus on in this article. We know proprietary software is bad for privacy and we talk about this all the time, but on top of being bad for privacy it can also be bad for business. Because the software is propriatary it’s unlikely you’ll be able to move your website elsewhere without recreating it from scratch.

Prior to today the Privacy Systems website was running on one of these platforms because of the convenience factor. With the company just starting up it seemed silly to spend a bunch of time making a website the proper way when we didn’t know if we would be successful. The plan if we became successful was to migrate to an open platform later on. Turns out we had to migrate sooner than expected.

Our “No-Code” web host was ending it’s partnership with the company that was lending them eCommerce software. We weren’t fortunate enough to learn this in an email. We learned during the process of updating our awesome WSL Nextcloud Install Script. After creating the V1.5 update we went to send it to existing customers and discovered we couldn’t without upgrading our store plan. Naturally I called into support and asked them to upgrade the plan. This is when they informed me the partnership was ending and they couldn’t do it. Instead they offered to give me a trial of their in-house built eCommerce software and told me I could switch my store to it without issue just to try it.

I tried it and their new software was so inferior it was unusable for Privacy Systems. Going from 70ish payment processor options down to a mere three options we weren’t signed up for meant we couldn’t take payments on the new store. So after playing around with it for a bit I decided to go back to the old store temporarily until finding a new platform for the site since the eCommerce partnership hadn’t actually ended yet. Unfortunately I couldn’t actually switch back to the old software once trying the new software which is something they made it seem like wouldn’t be an issue. On top of this our products weren’t imported into the new store software for several days so I couldn’t access product details in that time. This all meant the store was down and I had to wait a few days just to transfer product details to a new platform. When the products did get imported into the new platform they were missing all images except the main one.

After this nightmare we could have paid for another propriatary eCommerce system to embed into the existing site but this would have been expensive and come with no guarantees that it wouldn’t happen again. Instead I spent the whole week recreating the entire website on a more open platform. We are now using WordPress + WooCommerce both of which, aside from some paid extensions, are largely open source. WordPress was originally created in 2003 as a tool to publish blogs but has since morphed into the largest open platform to host all kinds of websites. WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that was created in 2011 to make running online stores on WordPress sites easy.

Having been created so long ago WordPress definitely feels somewhat archaic and the new Gutenberg Block editor, which was supposed to address that, still doesn’t feel on par with the editors from the “No-Code” hosts. What WordPress lacks in ease of use it makes up for in customizability and openness. There are thousands of premade plugins you can choose from to help you build your site and if you do happen to know some code you can edit whatever you want due to the open nature of the platform.

If we had the website running on WordPress to begin with then we could have easily migrated our site to another host instead of recreating it from scratch in the case of an issue with our web host. We are still in the process of recovering as we haven’t finished importing old products yet and we still don’t know how well our new email systems will work, but we will send out the script update to existing customers once we make sure the emails will actually arrive so please bear with us.