Online shopping can save time for both the buyer and retailer, reducing phone calls about availability, specifications, hours of operation or other information easily found on company and product pages. These days, the market is flooded with drag and drop products that claim they will help you build a robust e-commerce store or a portfolio website for your business.

While these tools are simple to use and they do have some functionality, they aren’t remotely the same as getting a custom-made website. For example, different magazines will rate different cars as being the best car of the year. This doesn’t mean that the best car of the year according to one publication is the best car for every single person on the planet.  Similarly, while these tools are good, they aren’t the best for every single user.

Here are some of the few unique benefits that you get when you make your own custom website with the help of a professional developer.

Design Flexibility

When working with a website building software, you are essentially limited to a certain framework. You have a certain number of tools and systems at your disposal. The scope of what you’re able to do with those is quite limited. You might be able to do those tools and systems in various ways and use different themes but you are still confined to the framework and its capabilities. When you start a custom website, you have a lot more options available.

Moreover, there are endless combinations in terms of its design and customisations. The way your website looks has a huge impact on how it performs and how easy it is for users to do what they want to do. This leads directly to the next point.

UI/UX

User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) are two of the most important things for any kind of online business. If a person walks into a physical store, doesn’t like how it looks, smells, feels, and can’t even find what they are looking for because nothing is properly organised, chances are they aren’t going to do any business there. It’s exactly the same for online stores and websites. When working with the right app developers, ones who put in an effort to actually understand your brand, you’ll find yourself with a much more refined store, with excellent UI and UX as well.

This way, even if you don’t have the cheapest prices or the broadest range of products, just the fact that your users can easily navigate the website and they actually enjoy being on it, can be enough to motivate them to buy. Even search engines know that UI and UX are critical and they use these factors as SERP ranking metrics.

Performance Gains

Website development might be straightforward but that doesn’t mean it is easy. Cooking food is straightforward but not everyone can make a great meal. It only gets trickier when you want to develop more complex things like e-commerce stores where you need a bunch of different things. The learning curve is quite steep if you want to do it on your own. But more importantly, a poorly configured website can also hurt website performance.

How your website is configured plays a huge role in security. It is not as easy as just putting everything together. Things also need to be optimised to work properly. Even a single faulty plugin or poorly configured setting could compromise the entire website.

SEO

With your website ready, products in stock, and payment systems sorted, you now need customers. For any given search engine query, you will most likely get millions, if not billions of results. The only way to stand out from the competition and get people to actually visit your store is through solid SEO. There are other ways of getting traffic but SEO is a guaranteed approach. Search engines have a lot of different factors that they consider when they rank a website for any given search query.

Among those factors are website optimisation, performance, security, and a few other performance-related factors. With premade builders, there is nothing you can do to change the performance of the website itself. With a custom-made one, you can work on every single detail of the platform. You can even tweak it specifically to rank better on searches.

Hopefully, your e-commerce store will generate a lot of money for you and will thrive as a business for many years to come. Instead of thinking of it in terms of just a website, think of it as just another aspect of your business and one comparable to a physical place of operations. The more you invest in a better location today, the higher the chances of success tomorrow. In any business, location is key. When it comes to e-commerce, that location is your website.