Pros and Cons of Drag and Drop Website Builders

When you’re looking to build a website you have a couple of options. If you are a coding wiz, building a well-designed site from scratch might be the way you want to go. If you are not a programmer, though, you could hire someone else to develop your site. Or you may prefer the somewhat easier and more independent route of using a drag and drop editor to create a website.

Drag and drop editors let you build a website using premade templates and content blocks where you literally drag and drop your own content in. With drag and drop website builders, constructing a website becomes more accessible to anyone who wants a site for their brand. Even those who haven’t learned how to program can still set up shop online and start selling to a global audience.

While drag and drop sounds like a good option for creating digital content, sometimes it’s not always as great as it may seem. The question you need to ask yourself is, what is the best solution for you and your business?

We can’t make that decision for you, but we can give you some pros and cons of using a drag and drop text editor for you to consider before you choose how you will create your website.

Pros of Drag and Drop Website Builders

Many popular ecommerce platforms offer their users these drag and drop templates or plugins. The draw to these platforms is that they also offer editable ecommerce features like shopping carts, pop-up promotions and customizable checkouts. When you can get all that under the umbrella of a drag and drop editor’s appealing features, it’s hard to pass up.

Here are just a few of those positive features:

Launch Sooner

No business owner wants to miss out on greater online visibility and brand exposure waiting forever on developing their site. Drag and drop editors make creating a website a much faster process than coding every single page.

With some text editors you can get your site up in minutes, depending on much you want to personalize your site. That can be huge when you need to set up an online presence as quick as you can. Many shops are now solely found online. If they aren’t up and running quickly, you could miss out on some major visibility and sales.

To be found in today’s market, you need a website, and you need it now. Drag and drop editors make that easier than ever before.

Simple Editing

Another nice thing about drag and drop website builders is your ability to make changes to your site quickly. Let’s say you want to launch your site quickly and create a basic website with all the functions you needed to start selling. Once your store becomes more established, though, giving your website a new look may give it the second wind you need.

Working with a drag and drop website builder can makes those edits simple and quick. Shop owners know that the ability to make quick changes can make your life much easier. Edits need to be made all the time, like price changes for an upcoming sales promotion or new items to keep up with customer demand.

If your site is not up-to-date, customers may begin to lose trust in your brand. But drag and drop editors make it so that you can change content in just a few clicks, and then easily change it again if you need to.

No Coding Experience? No Problem

We’ve mentioned this briefly, but perhaps one of the best pros of a drag and drop system is that even those without much coding experience can make a website in a flash. And not just your run of the mill, mediocre sites. Many website templates, even free ones, offer stunning and innovative designs with great functionality.

You no longer need to be a web developer to create a website. More avenues open every day for business owners to make their mark. Drag and drop makes that possible for everyone, no matter if you’re an expert programmer or not.

Less Expensive

Small business owners are finding that drag and drop editors also are a cost-effective way to build a website. For starters, you don’t have to pay for a programmer to launch your business. Instead you could pay under $20 or even $10 a month depending on your plan and platform. That’s a relatively cheap option, especially for those just about to start a business.

Drag and drop has opened the doors for small shop owners everywhere. They can have that online presence without paying a fortune for it.

Cons of Drag and Drop Website Builders

For all the good that drag and drop editors can do, sometimes they also bring with them more problems than you might have anticipated. Be prepared to encounter some of these cons if you go with a drag and drop website builder:

Limited Customization

If you have a specific vision for your website, the drag and drop editor you choose may not come with everything you need. You may not need coding experience to get your site up and running at first, but that doesn’t mean you won’t need some later down the road to make your site uniquely yours.

For that you may end up hiring a developer after all. Even then it can be hard to convey your vision to a third party. That’s part of what makes drag and drop so enticing: it gives you the freedom to build a website just as you want it. The only problem is that doesn’t always happen right away.

More Money than Expected

In cases like the one above, the original cheaper plan you used to start building a website might not be enough to give you total functionality for your business. You may need to buy additional plugins or upgrade to a more expensive plan to make your site one worth visiting.

On top of that, even though you’re not manually editing HTML in the backend of your site, sometimes glitches happen. If you also experience these glitches, as most do who use drag and drop web editors, you might be paying for a programmer again. The money you saved on not hiring a developer in the first place can quickly dwindle as your store expands and problems arise.

Unresponsive Designs

Developers are especially needed when your site won’t respond on certain screens. Not every website maker provides you with responsive content. Your design may appear great on the desktop screen you built it on, but then may look different on a mobile device. If your site design is not mobile-responsive, your SEO ranking and customer reach will suffer greatly.

This brings up one of the biggest problems with drag and drop editors. They claim that “what you see is what you get.” They let you see the changes you make as they should appear on the site. This is why drag and drop editors are also known as WYSIWYG editors. Yet this isn’t always the case. Too often what you see is not what you end up getting.

Truth be told, drag and drop website builders can be really helpful to get website creation done quicker while still looking good. But even its pros can turn into cons when your site just won’t run the way you want it to.

What’s the Best Solution?

So what should you do? Is it time to take coding classes and give up on that “reliable” drag and drop editor? Or should you spend a ton hiring a developer to fix all the glitches?

There is a solution, one where you get the pros of using drag and drop while not having to deal with the cons. It’s called DragDropr.

DragDropr is an application that lets you easily edit and create a website in the way you want, without needing to hire a programmer. Just like with other drag and drop editors, you place your content where you want it, only now the edits you make stick! What you see is actually what you get.

Customize your site just how you want with over 200 editable content blocks that automatically respond on any screen or device. If you already have a website builder you like, DragDropr can integrate with that ecommerce platform or CMS too. DragDropr’s interface creates a visual overlay on top of the page you are working on. That way you can make edits easily in real time and have all the features of your chosen website builder.

For a simple solution to problems with your drag and drop website builder, use DragDropr. Try it for free and finally enjoy the pros of working with a WYSIWYG editor without the hassle.

Contact us today for more information!