Limitations of Drag-and-Drop Website Builders

Consumer-oriented Drag-and-drop Website Builders May Limit Optimization.

We’re talking about Wix, Weebly, iPage, WordPress.com, Bluehost, Jimdo, Go Daddy, Virb and others. Every website builder is different. Please contact them directly for support.

For our purposes, these are the limitations to look out for:

• HTML Editing. This is the biggie. Look for an options like Code Block, Embed HTML, Custom HTML, or just HTML. If your website builder doesn’t allow access to the underlying HTML code, there’s no way to optimize your site properly. It’s time to upgrade to a better solution.
• CSS Editing. You or your team might want CSS to tweak the appearance of our code.  Many site builders don’t allow it. But there is a workaround. If you know a bit of CSS, first tweak the file in a text editor, run it through an inliner tool, then paste it into your page. A bit awkward, but it works.
• Functionality. For example, Wix breaks our review links code because of the non-standard way it’s designed. There’s nothing we can do about it, it’s a limitation of the platform. Upgrade to a better solution.
• Root Directory Access. No website builder we know of provides root access, meaning you can’t upload a KML file. Not a big deal, but something you’ll want later.
• Exporting. There’s often no export function. Leaving your provider means building a new site. This doesn’t affect optimization, just something to keep in mind.  Squarespace is an exception — it exports to WordPress ;-)