No-code website builders have become the infomercial darlings of the internet, promising that anyone—yes, even your technophobic aunt—can launch a slick, professional site in a single afternoon.
The pitch is irresistible: forget coding, forget headaches, forget having to actually learn anything. All you have to do is drag, drop, and watch your website appear like magic.
What they conveniently leave out is that this pitch was always a wild shot in the dark. Now, twenty years later, it’s painfully obvious we’re overdue for a reality check.
In this article, you’ll uncover how we got here, how deeply you’ve been misled, and the tremendous consequences of buying into low-code and no-code platforms.
The Birth of Mainstream Drag & Drop Development
The year is 2006. We’re on a sun-soaked beach in Tel Aviv where three friends—Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami, and Giora Kaplan—are hunched over laptops, squinting through the glare, trying to whip up a website for their latest startup idea.
Even with their technical skills, building a decent website feels like navigating a maze blindfolded. It’s slow, frustrating, and full of dead ends.
This frustration leads them to a question: What if anyone, not just the code-literate, could build something beautiful online?
In that moment, Wix as a concept is born.
Wix would be a platform that promises to put the power of web creation into everyone’s hands, no coding required.
In order to do that, a simple, basic, approachable interface must be engineered. If laypeople are to build websites, they’d need to be able to drag and drop and click and toggle their way to the finish line.
It’s a noble mission, but one with major question marks.
Can an extremely technical process be dumbed down enough for a layperson to succeed at it? They didn’t know, but they wanted to try. And little did they know, they were about to kick off an arms race among tech companies to make web development accessible to everyone, regardless of skill.
The Simplest of Impossible Tasks
Anyone with proper technical knowledge of web design and development will tell you that the mission of empowering laypeople with no-code tools was destined to fail from the start.
Make no mistake: web design & development are two insanely technical fields that seem to move at light speed (did you even know they’re two separate fields?).
Exposing this truth can be accomplished by isolating some of the simplest workflow items. Look at any random example and you’ll quickly see that significant prerequisite knowledge is required for what seems like an ultra-basic task.
Let’s dive into some specifics, shall we?
Basic task: The user should be able to swap one image on the page for another.
Can we accomplish that with a simplistic UI? Of course! But that’s not the question. The questions are:
- Can we ensure they do it correctly?
- What are the potential consequences of them not doing it correctly?
Here is the technical list of what must be considered when changing an image on a website:
- Is the new file format a next-gen file format (webp, avif, etc.)? – This is a technical consideration that has website performance implications.
- Has the image file size been optimized for the placement? – This is a technical consideration that has major website performance implications.
- Has SRCSET been correctly implemented and does the image file have enough initial resolution to support it? Is there enough resolution to support retina screens? – This is a technical consideration that has major website performance implications.
- Has the image been properly pre-compressed or has automatic compression been enabled on the site? Is the user aware of the compression requirements or workflow? – This is a technical consideration that has major performance implications. We know that laypeople are notorious for uploading massive file sizes with no understanding of compression.
- Is the aspect ratio compatible with the slot the image is being placed in? – This is a technical consideration based on design balance and layout preservation. We know that laypeople are notorious for using portrait images when they should use landscape images, for example.
- Are there any media or container queries that create layout changes that could affect the display of the image on different devices? – Images with critical content toward the edges of the image (like people’s heads or product details) often get cut off when aspect ratios shift due to responsive development. This is a technical consideration that has major UX implications.
- If the image has transparencies, have those been handled properly? – This is a technical consideration related to UI/UX. We know that laypeople are notorious for not understanding transparencies and using incorrect, non-transparency file formats.
- Does the new image have appropriate alt text? – This is a technical consideration that has SEO and accessibility implications.
- Is the new image free of text overlays? – This is a technical consideration that has major design and accessibility implications. We know that laypeople are notoriously interested in overlaying text on images.
- Is the new image free of baked-in design details, like rounded corners, borders, color overlays, etc.? – This is a major UX/UI consideration that dramatically affects scalability and maintainability of the site.
- Does the new image connect with the visitor and help accomplish the task of the page? – This is a copy and messaging consideration that has major conversion rate implications. We know that laypeople are notoriously bad at choosing good images.
- If the image is not proprietary, is it royalty-free? – This is a licensing and copyright consideration that has legal implications.
And that’s just an image swap!
So, one of the simplest tasks in this field of work has 12 prerequisite technical considerations that have fairly significant consequences across half a dozen checklist areas, including a direct impact on money-related areas like ranking and conversion. Wild.
Think that’s a unique example? We could do this all day with almost any “simple” task you can think of.
Side note: This is also why I’ve always said that you should never advise a layperson client that it’s okay to edit their own website and you certainly shouldn’t encourage it [watch this for more details].
Recognizing this, do you really think it’s possible to make a software interface go clickity-click in such a way that anyone’s Aunt Carol can “build a website?” It’s a laughable concept.
Laypeople can’t build websites and shouldn’t try.
As you just saw in the previous example, laypeople don’t even have the requisite knowledge to perform the simple task of swapping images that already exist on the page.
So, how is it that they’re building entire websites with these platforms?
The answer is: they’re not.
This is a key aspect of the marketing spin and the no-code grift that we must understand and accept, because it highlights the absurdity of designing simplified interfaces for the end user.
When the average person signs up for Wix, they never build a single thing.
They can’t, because even with a completely dumbed down tool, the process is still far too technical.
What we’ve learned over the past 20 years of running the no-code experiment is that it doesn’t matter how simple you make the interface. The list of technical requirements to build something is still far too long.
The most a layperson can do is click a few buttons to add a template (which was designed and developed by an actual professional), swap some content and colors (usually incorrectly), and hit publish.
That’s not building, that’s editing. It’s like saying you “cooked a meal” when all you did was heat up a pre-cooked frozen dinner in the microwave.
And even that simple process of editing takes them hours, if not days and weeks, with incorrect technical results littered throughout their project.
Let’s put away the marketing brochure and check the actual scorecard:
- Websites built: 0.
- Websites edited: 1.
- Websites edited correctly: 0.
Now, to be fair, this does get users to the end of goal of “having a website.”
But this brings me to the second part of my argument for this section, “…they shouldn’t try.”
The Tremendous Cost of DIY
For the types of people who are highlighted in the Wix ad we watched earlier, having a website accomplishes nothing in and of itself. It’s just another URL in an endless sea of URLs. It’s like staking claim to a grain of sand in the Sahara desert.
Getting relevant traffic to this new website introduces an entire new layer of digital know-how: SEO, PPC, digital advertising, social media, and so on.
Capturing that traffic introduces yet another layer: copywriting, landing pages, funnels, opt-in forms, email marketing systems, e-commerce systems, payment processors, carts and checkouts, and more.
Tracking that traffic and those actions presents another: analytics platforms, tracking codes, event tracking, split testing, policies, and legalities.
Laypeople don’t know how to do any of these things. And the only way they can possibly acquire these skills is to dedicate years of time to study and practice (something they’re not going to do).
Now, if their website is of no real consequence to anyone, then none of this is an issue. But if the site is supposed to do something, like generate an ROI or have some sort of real impact on a small business (like we see in all the ads), then this is a massively expensive proposition.
First, there’s the direct cost of all the time spent/wasted by the user. That time could have been spent in more productive areas of the business.
Second, there’s a tremendous lost opportunity cost that comes from not using a professional who could have generated significant results if given the opportunity.
Imagine two businesses:
- Scenario A: Patty Pixels uses Wix to get a simple website online for her local business.
- Scenario B: Simone Savvy hires a professional to build a site with professional copy, SEO-optimize it, and set up PPC campaigns to special offer landing pages.
In Scenario A, Patty’s website is going to do mostly nothing, and any traffic that it does get is unlikely to convert. Why? Because it’s an obvious template with bad images, terrible copy, and tons of UX issues (based on statistical probability).
Scenario B, on the other hand, is highly likely to generate meaningful results that actually grow Simone’s business.
And if you play this out over months and years, the disparity between these two scenarios becomes exponentially larger.
So what’s the practical result?
Patty was “empowered” to build her own website using tools that “democratize web design,” only to find herself with no real results and a missed opportunity that actually puts her business at greater risk of failure.
Simone was smart enough to realize that you can’t pay your bills with emotional empowerment, so she hired a professional to do a highly technical task, knowing the consequences of doing it incorrectly would be far too high and would bring far too much risk to her business.
The point is simple: making it easy for Patty Pixels to spin up a website and haphazardly duct tape widgets, plugins, and patterns together, is a net-negative scenario.
Any real agency owner can confirm this. Client after client after client rings our phones, panicking because they’ve wasted days and weeks trying to create their own website, only to realize that they can’t do it and need to hire a professional.
Or, they call us months and years after creating their own website, saying they’re “ready to get serious,” because they’re tired of the fact that their site just sits there and does nothing.
This is the actual story of DIY web design that you’ll never hear about in a Wix ad.
The No-Code Grift
At some point, companies like Wix, Squarespace, and Elementor came to realize the impossibility of the task at hand.
And unless they’re totally unaware of what actually matters in life and business, they’ve connected the same “end result” dots that I did.
They’ve all figured out that when laypeople try to build their own sites, the outcome is usually a mess. It’s bad for the user, and downright annoying for everyone else on the internet.
Did they stop running the experiment, though? Did they make any attempt at all to shift gears or pivot to a different pitch?
Nope! They doubled down.
They hired more actors and ran more ads with loftier promises. They added more templates and features. They dumbed the interfaces down even further.
What they originally hoped would be a gift to laypeople, became a grift of laypeople.
It turns out that MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) in the layperson web design industry absolutely slaps, as the kids would say. The combined valuation of Wix, Squarespace, and Elementor is somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 billion dollars.
To make matters worse, other platforms have latched onto the lie and moved in the same direction. WordPress, for example, has spent 10 years building a simplified page builder called Gutenberg, designed to democratize web design for every Patty Pixel in your neighborhood.
Gutenberg isn’t a grift, of course, it’s just an example of what happens when out-of-touch leadership designs software for a user avatar that doesn’t actually exist.
“Layperson-who-builds-their-own-website” is a mythical creature. It’s a unicorn avatar that only frolicks in the minds of overly emotional and outlandishly hopeful people who struggle with reason and logic.
Instead of realizing and acknowledging that laypeople just can’t do absurdly technical things, they choose to respond with, “They should be able to, though, because that would just be so absolutely amazing. #democratizewebdesign”
The problem for those of us grounded in reality is that interface design simply can’t serve both ends of the spectrum. If you design your one and only interface based on a user avatar that doesn’t exist, you create software that’s a frustrating, confusing, underpowered mess for the rest of us.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Here is some parting advice for each of the affected groups:
- To Laypeople: If your website is of no real consequence to anyone, then use these platforms to build it. Sure, fine. If your website is of real consequence to yourself or others, hire a professional.
- To Professionals: If you’re a “professional” who relies on these tools to close significant skill gaps, quit using them immediately. They’re holding you back and ensuring that you’ll be the first one replaced by AI in the next two years.
- To Beginners: If you’re a beginner who wants to learn to build websites and work in this industry, shun these dumbed down tools. Choose a tool that speaks the language of professional web development so you can learn the right way, experience true empowerment, and free yourself from the grip of imposter syndrome.
- To Software Developers: If you’re building software, stop dumbing everything down. The way you help end users get good results is by empowering professionals to work more efficiently and effectively, so they can help more end users.
I’m sure that some people will read this and cry “gatekeeping,” but it’s just a simple acknowledgement of what’s required to succeed online.
I’ll also clarify that nobody is suggesting that we physically prevent people from doing any of this. It’s just an explanation of why it’s a bad idea and why it doesn’t work.
The industry and the workflows are both excessively technical. That’s all there is to it. When faced with reality, the best path forward is acceptance.