I am not a fan of small contracting businesses using Square Space and Wix for DIY website production for a number of reasons that are very similar in nature to the same reasons contractors are not fans of homeowners that do DIY kitchen & bath projects.
While Square Space and Wix provide the user fairly automatically with a responsive website (who doesn’t these days) the design templates for the most part are cookie cutter and it’s often easy to identify a Square Space or Wix website and while it’s not Square Space or Wix’s fault contractors doing a DIY website project often ignore the basic of good web site design that help or are really essential to good SEO such as the placement of headers every 200-300 words and using a hierarchal heading structure. I have seen some great web design executions using Square Space & Wix but they always seemed to be done by professional website designers.
But in Spenser Powells book The Remodeler Marketing Blueprint: How to Attract Quality Leads, Increase Sales, and Dominate Your Competition on pages 25-26 he writes (the emphasis is mine):
——“…You should have full control of your domain, your hosting, and your CMS.
Another thing website companies like to do is help you buy your domain. However, when they do this, they often retain control of it in their account. If you ever decide to part ways, you have to go through the hassle of getting them to transfer the domain to you. If they play nice, this process is only a minor pain, but if they are difficult, it will be a huge time suck.
One time, I was working with a client to take their website live on a new marketing platform, and we needed access to the domain in order to do this. The company that had control of the domain didn’t respond to emails or phone calls for weeks. When I finally got a response, they started playing hardball and told me it would be $500 to release control of the domain. Because I know how the transfer process works, I knew this was a complete BS charge. At the end of the day, my client had to pay the $500 just to get out of the situation. I share this story in hopes that it saves you time and money. You should always have control over your domain, even if you need someone else to manage it.”——
As a web designer I’ve experienced that myself and have seen the process of re-gaining control over clients website domain add a couple of weeks and inconvenience to their projects while waiting for the transfer process to take place.
The big website hosting companies offer registration too (like GoDaddy Siteground, HostGator etc. and while I haven’t experienced the problems working around their handling and controlling the registration I think why take the chance.
Get control of your website domain registration or registrations by using a company like Hover.com or Google Domains. Hover (my preferred registrar) is great for beginners who want to purchase a domain easily and those people who want to keep their registration information private from the public with domain name privacy. Yeah you can often get a free domain registration your first time around with a domain name registration from your web hosting company but is spending something around $14-15 dollars really going to kill your budget?
And stay away from giving up control of your domain name to companies like Square Space and Wix.
