Believe it or not, business owners hate increasing their expenses, and creating a brand new website from scratch isn’t cheap. Heck, even redesigning an old website can cost a pretty penny.
With these hard facts in the back of business owners’ heads, it’s no wonder why they seek less-expensive, alternative website design services. But from what we’ve heard and seen, the age-old adage remains true: “You get what you pay for.”
Enter: Fiverr
What is Fiverr?
Fiverr is an online platform that allows buyers and sellers to connect so they can buy and sell digital services. It gets its name from the starting price of services, which is $5.
Fiverr is an online marketplace for freelance services with low-cost providers from all over the world.
The idea behind their brand is to streamline the process of hiring or getting hired as a freelancer. The online marketplace cuts out the middleman of hiring, firing and HR departments. Smaller businesses can get things done on a more case by case basis and freelancers have the freedom of selling their services at any time to any company.
Fiverr lets clients pay in advance for Gigs, which constitute any digital service ranging from WordPress design, logo design, writing services, transcriptions, to even voiceover work. Although all services were priced at $5 when the site initially launched, freelancers can now set their price to whatever they choose and can offer package deals, or Gig Packages.
Should You Use Fiverr for Website Design?
No.
The answer is simple for us because we’ve actually tested the quality of these “SIMPLE $100 WORDPRESS WEBSITE DESIGN!!!” vendors on Fiverr and did the hard work so you don’t have to. The same holds true for the e-commerce website design service vendors.
Here were the main issues we found as we went with a Fiverr vendor for one of these incredible yet simple website designs.
Reasons why you shouldn’t buy a website from Fiverr
1. The buyer does all the work
That’s right – if you’re looking for a cheap web design service from Fiverr, be prepared to do all the copywriting, image sourcing, theme selecting, link-building, navigation menus; the list goes on and on.
We have found that business owners don’t have time to sit down and handle all of these tedious website tasks while simultaneously juggling their own business operations. If that’s the case for you, Fiverr may not be a good choice for building your website.
2. Language barriers
A vast majority of Fiverr website design vendors are not native to the United States and this can cause some miscommunications in an otherwise very important project. In fact, we had an experience with a Fiverr vendor and it took five (pun intended?) different messages to ensure we got the Google Analytics snippet inserted in the appropriate area. Keep in mind, this task should take about 3 minutes – not 2-days of correspondence on Fiverr’s platform.
You want your website to represent your brand as you see fit, and working with a website design freelancer who cannot interpret your vision may leave you in an endless cycle of revisions that soaks up far more than $100 of your time.
3. You need to know what you want
Which plugins do you want to install? Do you have website analytics setup? How many landing pages do you need, and what will those pages look like?
These are just a small handful of questions that you must know the answer to going into even the most luxurious Fiverr website designs. Is it worth doing all the research yourself, or is it better to hire a website design firm to handle all of this for you?
Hopefully the answer is becoming more clear.
4. Lackluster Website Security
Another thing that these Fiverr gigsters are unlikely to understand is GPL and Security.
As a result of not understanding the world of Plugins and the security risk that some practices can pose, they could be exposing your site to long term pain.
Without going into too much detail, there are “cracked plugins” that get shared around many of these “Fiverr” gig circles. That way, you, the purchaser think you’re getting an even better deal as you get all these “Premium” paid plugins for free when you get your site built by this guy on Fiverr.
The big problem is that these Plugins are a cesspool of crap. They harbour viruses and all sorts of malicious code.
Not to mention the fact that in many cases these people are breaking trademark law by taking a free plugin and “Cracking” it so it’s “free”.
The cost of “Free” is far too high for any worthy website builder – which these guys on Fiverr are NOT.
5. The “Sold it 50 times” issue
Many of these gigs will sell you a website for DIRT cheap – and that should raise suspicion in itself.
The reason the site can be sold for “Dirt cheap” is because they’ve created 1 site, and then they’re literally just replicating the website in it’s entirety and selling it on.
That means there are a bunch of other websites out there that look EXACTLY the same
6. Custom Website Code Issues
Then you have the Fiverr Guy who recently took a PHP or HTML course they stole from someone and is keen to use it on this project. Instead of finding a legitimate way to make the website do what they want it to do using the provided settings in the Theme and the WordPress CMS, instead he decides to edit the code manually.
*Face-palm-slap*
Now you’ve got non-standard code in your site which, at best, gets replaced at the next theme update, or at worst isn’t coded well and breaks the theme when viewing on different devices (very common!).
7. Endless SEO Issues
As Michal points out in this Podcast interview with Jaryd Krause over at buyingonlinebusinesses.com, it’s pretty common for website builders to be mis-used. If you don’t use a great tool correctly, you’re not going to get great results – and it’s NOTHING to do with the quality of the tool.
One great example of this is the use of Tags and Category pages on WordPress, if not configured correctly, these pages can be a real pain in the but as they start fighting and competing with other pages on your site for space in the SERPs.
Also, when it comes to crawl budget, these pages you’re not even trying to rank in Google are eating up your crawl budget.
We’ve worked on sites that have more category and tag pages than they do content pages (in excess of 1,500 pages)! What a huge mess, and what a way to just waste all of the site’s potential and chew through Google’s crawl budget hampering the speed at which changes in rank can be reflected in the SERPs for your site.
Conclusion: Do it Right the First Time.
The cost of a website is an investment, not an expense. A website is typically the first impression your future customers have of you before even reaching out.
We could continue bashing these Fiverr guys and gals, but honestly, none of this is their fault. A vast majority of these Fiverr website design vendors are in their early-to-mid-20s and are looking to build a portfolio to present to the next customer.
But as website design aficionados, it is our responsibility to be diligent buyers and help our clients make the most intelligent, best-practices website decisions for their comment.
Get off on the right foot, don’t cause yourself more cost and pain down the line in having to hire us here at Frascadigital.com to fix the website issues created by the poorly paid “amateur” (being kind even calling them that, cowboy is probably more appropriate).
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