So I was showing my mom a demo build of a site I'm working on that's going live on Friday, and I sent her the old site for comparison. And I found myself trying to explain why I rebuilt the whole thing.
I showed her these two code blocks side by side:
Her response: "Oh, the one on the right is so much code-ier!"
"Mom, that one's the bad one."
She hit the heart of the problem, though. These platforms crank out bloated code behind the scenes. I’m talking thousands of lines of markup, inline styles stacked on inline styles, and JavaScript doing gymnastics just to load a paragraph.
Here's how I explained it to her:
The moment your website goes live, bots start crawling all over it. Think of it like dropping a sandwich on the ground at a picnic. Sooner or later, ants get to it. Some of those are bad ants (we build traps for those), but some of those are good ants. Some of those ants decide where you show up when someone searches for services related to your business. We like those ones.
DIY site-builders market themselves as convenient solutions that put you in control of your online presence. But that bloated mess? It kills your load speed, tanks your SEO, and makes future tweaks a nightmare. The ants get full on crap code crumbs before they reach the part that tells Google who you are.
Custom code (yes I mean mine), on the other hand, is clean, lean, and built for exactly what you need. No more, no less. The good ants get the crumbs you want them to get. The bad ones... well we can talk about what happens to them another time.
I’m not anti-builder because I’m a code snob. I’m anti-bloat because I care about performance, ownership, and making sites that actually work, at an afforable rate, and with an actual human being you can talk to instead of a chatbot.
If this resonates with you, click the button below and let's talk.