A website builder is the logical choice when you're creating your first personal or commercial website.

There's a lot to like about their simplicity, intuitiveness, and the fact that you can have a website up and running in just a few minutes without any coding skills. What could be better?

When you need your website to start ranking, the issues begin.

I'm not trying to offend anyone. There's no guarantee that using a website builder will harm your SEO. Because of this, open-source systems have the advantage of being able to adapt to a wide range of needs.

Why is it the case?

Well. For starters, you're not allowed to mess about with the HTML.

Allowing you to create sections, widgets, and media with a single click is the WYSIWYG approach. As soon as the ideas start pouring, you can make them happen in a matter of seconds. You may experiment with alternative layouts, shift things about, and add features that you didn't even realise you wanted.

These sections, features, and widgets are all developed using a tonne of lines of code that you won't ever use, and even if you turn them all off, they will stay in the code. You can't change them or get rid of unnecessary pieces. So you're left with a website that takes longer to load because of all the lines of code you've crammed into it.

The complexity of a website (or business strategy) is not the only issue to be concerned about.

Are there any advantages to using a website builder?

Definitely not. Because of this, they are still quite popular. For the casual blogger, affiliate marketers, and small company owners just getting started in the online world, these tools are ideal.

Developers, on the other hand, have a nagging question. Is Google's indexing method inclusive of website builders?

My understanding was that most website builders performed an adequate job of indexing their sites until lately, and that they would help your website rank higher if you used their services. In the absence of hard evidence, our best judgments were all we could do.

There was a research last month comparing the performance of websites built with popular website builders like Wix, Weebly, and Weebly against those built with WordPress and custom code. They all had the same structure and layout, hence platform performance was used as the primary metric.

To be honest, I was expecting the findings to favour self-coded and WordPress-based sites. However, it appears that Google ranks websites based on their content, not their platform. However, all of the website builders fared equally well when it came to ranking for a made-up phrase.

Take a look at what they accomplished:

a tool for creating websites Is a Website Builder Superior to a Self-Coded Site in Many Ways? Experiment in SEO that goes over the top. Search engine optimisation (SEO) may be achieved by using site builders.

We're a bunch of geeks, so this study sparked some of us to explore a little more.

To learn more about the experiment's methodology, or if you want to duplicate it and verify the results, go here.