The Dangers Of Free Software: Invest In Your Business Website!

Thousands of Wix customers have been left disgruntled this week.

If your business website was built using Wix – an online website builder tool – you may be among the thousands of customers who are less than impressed with the platform this week. Sites have seen a huge nosedive in user activity as a recent issue caused thousands of Wix-based sites to drop off the Google Index.

Online forums have been inundated with frustrated Wix customers for whom the issue can mean a great loss in revenue. Downtime costs money, and sites which don’t show up in Google’s index are about as useful as sites during an outage: they are pretty hard to find. Although Google has now issued an apology for the fault and promises to reindex all the dropped websites, there are a few lessons in website construction that can be learned here.

Firstly, it is not always good practice to build something as vitally important as your business website using free software. While Wix offers hundreds of free templates and free software, businesses should be aware that ‘free’ often comes with a substitute pricetag, and some customers are losing out in their search engine rankings for the ease of a free platform. ‘Free’ in this case is costing many businesses valuable revenue, and some could see a dip in reputation if their website is not reliable and consistently available.

While it is a popular platform – indeed there are many like it offering a free website builder service – because it is used by 60 million people worldwide, the load of all these shared resources can take its toll on the platform. Much like with a shared hosting environment, if something goes awry for one customer it can cause myriad problems for the other customers who house their data in the same environment, the issue with indexing being an example of this. If the Wix sites had been hosted and built in a separate environment they wouldn’t have been affected by Google’s mistake.

For companies and organisations who have been affected by this, it’s time to think about investing more heavily in your website. These days websites act as the storefront for your business, and you’re not likely to find any retail space on the highstreet for free, are you?

Content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress can provide a great environment for you to build your business website. It’s no coincidence that WordPress have the most popular CMS worldwide; the community dedicated to creating and developing the software contains some of the most talented web developers around.

Here at UK2 we have been hosting and managing WordPress websites for over a decade, ever since they launched. While WordPress is a great platform, its popularity makes it more vulnerable to attack, and all websites built on WordPress should be actively monitored and secured against threats. That’s where we come in. As experts in all things WordPress, our Managed WordPress Hosting option gives you the seclusion you need for added security: your environment is not shared by any noisy neighbours. We’ll keep on top of all security updates and respond actively to any server management issues, all you need to do is make sure the site looks as inviting as possible for your customers.

Don’t lose out on valuable revenue through the flaw of a shared – and free – system. Invest in your platform and provide a reliable service for your website visitors. Visit our website for pricing and plans of WordPress Hosting.