Online website builders

What running in a browser changes

There is nothing on your computer. No installation, no version, no file that lives on one machine and is missing when you are on another.

Updates happen without you. New features and security fixes arrive continuously rather than as a version you have to decide whether to install.

And the site is always in one place. No question of whether the copy you are editing is the current one, which is the failure that made installed software awkward for small businesses.

Backups move too. The service keeps versions of the site rather than you keeping copies, which is convenient and worth checking, since how far back you can go varies a great deal.

Editing from wherever you are

This matters more for small businesses than the feature lists suggest. An owner who can fix a price from a phone between jobs will fix it; one who has to wait for an evening at a desk will not.

Our page on keeping content current covers why that matters. Stale prices and old hours cost more than most design decisions ever gain.

Test the editing experience on the device you will actually use. Most demonstrations are recorded on a large screen and the phone experience varies enormously between products.

It also shortens the gap between noticing a problem and fixing it. A typo spotted by a customer can be corrected while they are still on the phone, which is a small thing that reads as competence.

The connection question

You need one to edit. That is obvious and it matters for anybody working somewhere with poor coverage, which is a real constraint for some trades.

Visitors are unaffected either way. The published site is served normally regardless of how it was built, so this is an editing constraint rather than a visitor one.

Draft offline if coverage is unreliable. Writing in any text application and pasting in later removes the constraint entirely for the part that takes the longest.

What to check before committing

The list below is what differs between online builders and what actually matters over a few years. None of it is visible in a demonstration.

Check what happens on a phone with a poor signal as well. Editing tools that assume a fast connection become unusable in a van, which is where a good deal of small business admin happens.

• Whether editing works properly on a phone
• What happens to the site if you stop paying
• What an export contains, tested rather than described
• Whether the domain is registered in your name
• How the published pages perform on a slow connection
• Whether more than one person can have access
• What support answers and how quickly

Dependence, stated plainly

The site runs on their systems. If the service closes, changes terms or suspends an account, the site is affected in ways you cannot fix from your side.

That is a real risk and it is smaller than it sounds, because the domain is the part that matters and it should be in your name regardless.

Our page on one business, one domain covers why. With the address under your control, changing service is inconvenient rather than catastrophic.

Access and more than one person

Check whether the plan allows more than one login. A site editable only from one personal account is a problem the first time that person is unavailable.

Never share one login between people. Separate accounts mean access can be removed when somebody leaves without changing everything for everybody else.

Keep a written note of who has access to what. Our page on hiring in house covers why a single point of knowledge is the larger risk in any arrangement.

What it does not change

The site still needs a plan, real content, honest claims and a contact route that works. None of that comes from the browser or from anywhere else.

It also does not change what a search engine or an answer engine expects. Heading order, alt text and page speed matter identically whatever tool produced the pages.

Run your own check after publishing. Our site check reports the structural half across a whole site, whichever builder produced it.