Designing your own website can be a tempting proposition. You get to showcase your creative flair, become DIY tech-savvy and save some money.

Unfortunately, it’s not always the best decision for your business. Whether you’re building a personal blog or an online store, there are several downsides to designing your site yourself that may cost you in time, performance, or even security.

Some companies need professional help to create a website. They may not be aware of all the nitty-gritty details that will take their site to success – or even basic best practices that maximize functionality.

In this article, we will dive into some of the downsides of designing your site yourself to help you make an informed decision as you embark on your website-building journey.

6 Downsides of Designing Your Site Yourself

Sure, some platforms claim to help you set up a site in minutes – but there are a few risks involved with that choice.

Lack of professional touch

Designing a website is about more than just creating pretty graphics and pictures. A well-designed site needs strategic construction that considers factors like:

• Content hierarchy
• Readability
• Accessibility

Without this knowledge and experience of web design principles, you may produce an inferior solution that can negatively impact engagement and conversions.

Time-Consuming Learning Curve

Contrary to popular belief, designing a website does take time—especially if it’s your first go-round. Unless you’re already familiar with HTML (or other web languages) and standard design principles, acquiring the necessary skills will require considerable investment.

From selecting colours to developing your site’s overall structure, it could take weeks or months to complete your project.

Lack of Technical Support

When something goes wrong, like misconfigured settings leading to unfavourable search ranking results, no technical support will be available if you’re building your own website.

This can result in hours of wasted effort trying random guesses until something works.

SEO Challenges

Search engine optimization (SEO) is critical for getting found online. If you build your own site without any help from a professional, chances are you’ll have problems optimizing it in such a manner that increases visibility and engagement in the organic search engine rankings.

This could lead to limited business growth, as most people will be unaware of your online existence at all!

Mobile Responsiveness Issues

Mobile responsiveness is critical when designing a website, as many users prefer using their phone or tablet to visit. However, this requires special coding knowledge and implementations available only to those who know coding languages such as HTML5 or CSS3.

Without appropriate implementation, Google’s algorithm will poorly rate websites, decreasing organic ranking results and decreasing overall SEO score points. 

Security Risks

Staying up-to-date on proper security protocols, updates, and changes to protect from malicious activity can be difficult when designing sites. You don’t want to leave vulnerabilities that hackers can abuse, meaning as much attention should go into preventing malicious activity as when creating a website with a professional.

Wrap Up

Above anything else, assigning the task of web design to a professional can ensure you save valuable business resources like time and money.

There are many other benefits from outsourcing your website design project, such as improved SEO rankings for increased visibility online.

If you want to learn more about web design, check out our blog. We can help you make the right decision for you and your business.