As you decide which website builder to use, inevitably you will need to decide if you will go with WordPress or Saas website builder like Wix, Squarespace, Webflow and or another Saas website builder.

Here we will explore one of the downsides for using a Saas.

To explain in more detail, with WordPress, you will own the WordPress software. It is open source and free. With a Saas, the company owns the proprietry software, so you have less control.

The post will explain the issue of the company either dissolving or changing hands.

If the Saas company goes down or their softare is deactivated, you really have no choice but to rebuild you website on an entirely new platform. If it gets bought out, there may be some disruption that you don’t have control over and your site will be moved to a new platform or your site will be deactivated.

The following are 2 examples where this happened:

Geocities

Geocities was started in 1994 and experienced extraordinary growth. It was one of the most popular website on the internet. At one point it was the Internet’s third most visited website. Today that is the equivalent of the popularity of Google, Youtube and Facebook. There were 38 million pages on that platform.

Geocities was bought by Yahoo in 1994.

In 2009, Yahoo ended Geocities. With the exception of the Japanese version continued until 2019. Lucky for them!

All these websites would have needed to be rebuilt from scratch on another platform.

Webs

Webs began as Freewebs in 2001 and changed to Webs in 2008. The company experienced strong growth.

In 2011, Vistaprint, the online printing service bought Webs.

In 2021, Vistaprint moved all websites on a subscription to the Vistaprint website builder. All websites on the free plan were deactivated.

Here are the some of the complaints made on their Facebook page in reponse to their announcement post:

• Accidental erasing of content due to changing themes on Vistaprint (changing themes on Webs didn’t erase the content).
• Members functionality was removed
• Some people missed the notification and those on the free plan lost their content with no way to recover. There was no export option.
• Some reported issues with the automatic migration, that not all pages were moved across.
• Many reported they they lost their old emails as a result of the migration.
• Some reported issues with renewing their domain name around the time of the migration.
• Many reported email forwarding stopped working.
• Many complained that there was no option for upgrading to premium so it could be transfered Vistaprint.

It is possible that some of these complains would have been made directly to the company it may have been resolved, but the majority were likely unresolved due to multiple complaints made about the same issues. It certainly indicates sentiment and that disruption was significant.

In 2022, Wix announced that Wix had partnered with Vistaprint and all websites would be migrated to the Wix platform over the 2022 – 20223 period.

The announcement that the migration would be seemless and automatic, however website owners would have 90 days of view access only. So they wouldn’t be able to make changes to their sites for 3 months.

Here are the some of the complaints made on Facebook about the migration from Vistaprint to Wix:

• In one case, an extremely large number of files were lost.
• Not the most recent version of the website was migrated.
• Not all content migrated, or not migrated correctly.
• Complaints about support.
• Since the billing stayed with Vistaprint, there were issues with getting things resolved as the 2 systems were seperate and going back and forth between the 2 companies were problematic, even though they were partnered.
• Downtime during the migration. Some companies have needed to publicly apologise for the downtime, until the migration is complete.
• Some complained about the price increase.

In this case there was not one, but two major platform changes within 2 years.

Will this happen with Wix, Squarespace or Webflow (or another Saas website builder)?

No one knows. Although many would say that it doesn’t seem likely, due to their popularity. But consider this – Geocities and Webs were also major players in the website builder industry in these previous time periods.

This point here is there is a risk in relying on an external proprietary platform that have no export options in case you need to change platforms in the future.

Generally, companies go into administration all the time and takeovers happen every day.

Could this happen with WordPress? WordPress is an open source platform supported by community. With 43% of the internet using WordPress, you can be confident that the software will be supported and maintained into the future. It is software that you own and is not owned by a company. With WordPress, a company takeover or collapse is not a concern. This is even the case with the WordPress com version that Automattic own, because you can simply export it and move to your own host if you ever need to in the future.

This is a not to say that you should not use a Saas. There are many advantages to using a Saas. But it is one of the important cons that you need to consider.