Last week I visited the website of a large company. I won't say the name, but it's a company that bills several million dollars a year, has offices in several countries and appears in Mexico's most important business media. Almost all of us have bought something from them. Their website was a generic WordPress theme. With the sample pages still active.
"Hello world". "Sample Page". All there, intact, as if no one had looked at the site since it was installed. It isn't an isolated case. It's the norm. And, with all due respect, I find it an enormous lack of seriousness.
Your website isn't an expense
It's the first impression a potential customer has of your company when they look you up online. It's your virtual office. It's the place visitors arrive at after you've spent money on ads, on events, on business cards.
This isn't my opinion. It's measurable. A Stanford University study found that 75% of users judge an organization's credibility based on the design of its website. Not on its track record. Not on its size. Not on its messaging. On how its site looks and behaves. Read it again: 3 out of 4 people decide whether to trust your company before reading a single word of what you offer.
And if that place is an unconfigured WordPress template, or a Wix site screaming "I made it myself one Sunday afternoon", or a page built with Elementor by an agency that charged you as if it were real work... well, I already know why they aren't finding you. And why the ones who do find you don't believe you. And someone will tell me that, if it's such a big company, then they don't need to invest in a better website. Right — now go tell that to Coca-Cola, Nike or Apple and see what they say.
The three red flags I see all the time
I'm going to be direct about three things. And before the Twitter attack arrives, I'll explain exactly why I think what I think.
Wix isn't for serious companies
I know this is going to upset someone. I'm saying it anyway. Wix isn't a bad tool. It's an excellent tool for what it was designed for: giving an individual without technical resources or budget something online. An amateur photographer, a neighborhood baker, a yoga instructor. For that, Wix works.
The problem starts when an established company, with real revenue and aspirations to grow, uses Wix as its main site. Because Wix has real technical limitations: it generates heavy code, it makes advanced SEO difficult, it doesn't allow fine-grained control over structured data (the famous schema), and if you ever want to migrate elsewhere, you realize your site doesn't really export. If your company bills more than what an average employee earns per month, you have no excuse to be on Wix. Not out of snobbery. Out of concrete technical consequences.
Elementor is the favorite tool of lazy agencies
Again, before complaints arrive: Elementor isn't bad technology. The problem is how it's used. Elementor lets you put together a nice-looking site in a few hours, dragging blocks onto a template. That's useful for someone learning to build their own site. It's problematic when an agency charges you as a professional project for something technically anyone could do with a YouTube tutorial over a weekend.
And it has a real technical cost, not just a symbolic one. Sites built with Elementor tend to generate hundreds of nested divs, heavy code, scripts that load even when not used. Result: slow sites, hard to optimize, that age badly and stumble on Core Web Vitals — the technical criteria Google uses to decide how well to rank your site. If your agency uses Elementor, ask them why. The answer will tell you a lot. If they say "because it's fast for us", you know what's happening: they're prioritizing their time, not yours.
A generic WordPress template with sample pages is negligence
There's no other word. It's like people who buy Three Kings cakes at Costco and think they can sell them at double the price even though the box says where they bought them. If your company's site has a "Hello world" hanging around, a page called "Sample Page" no one deleted, or an "About" section with Latin filler text, it isn't a minor oversight. It's public proof that no one on your team —not your agency, not your internal team, not you— has looked at that site since it was installed. And if no one has looked at it in years, what assurance do you have that it's updated, optimized, or even working as it should?
What actually defines a good website today
Right, I already said what doesn't work. I owe you the other half: what makes a site good? It isn't what most people think. It isn't being pretty. It isn't having spectacular animations. It isn't having a slider with five images on the homepage. A good website today has four non-negotiable characteristics.
First, it loads fast. Seriously fast. Not "reasonably fast". Fast. According to a widely-cited Google study, 53% of mobile users abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. If your site loads in 5 seconds, you lost more than half of your potential traffic before they read the first sentence. No Google Ads ad is going to make up for that.
Second, it's built to be readable by machines. Today your site isn't only read by humans. It's read by Googlebot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot. Each with its own rules. A well-built site is structured so those machines immediately understand what your company does, what it sells, where it is, what authority it has. That's achieved with clean code, well-implemented schema and clear architecture. It isn't achieved with an Elementor template.
Third, it communicates clearly in the first three seconds. A visitor who lands on your site should understand, without effort, three things: what you do, who you do it for, and what to do next. If your homepage forces them to scroll just to understand what you sell, you already lost.
Fourth, it has a technical base that can be maintained. A good site isn't a project you finish and forget. It's a living infrastructure that gets updated, monitored, adjusted. If your site was built with a visual builder no one on your team understands, all you can do when something breaks is pray. None of these four things requires investing hundreds of thousands. But none of them is achieved alone, nor with a template, nor with a cheap visual builder.
How to choose a trustworthy provider
If you're going to look for someone to build your site, here are four questions that separate good providers from lazy ones. Ask them on your first call and you'll see what happens.
What technologies do you use and why? If the answer is "it depends on the project", dig in. A good provider has clear technical opinions and can explain them. A lazy provider only knows two or three tools and uses them for everything.
How are you going to deliver the site? A good provider gives you full access to your code, your domain, your hosting and your database. A lazy provider gives you a username and password to a tool where you're a hostage.
How are you going to measure the success of the project? If the answer is "that you like how it looks", keep looking. The right answer involves metrics: load speed, indexation, conversion, ranking.
What happens when something breaks six months later? Many providers fall apart here. A good provider explains their maintenance and support process. A lazy provider says "we'll see then".
The beginning of everything
What bothers me most is seeing companies that deserve a serious digital presence paying for something that isn't, or worse, paying nothing and settling for what they have. The website isn't the only problem. After it come SEO, GEO, AEO, everything else I've been writing about. But it's the beginning of everything. If the base is bad, everything else is built on sand.
You don't need to invest hundreds of thousands, nor learn to code. You can have a very simple but well-built website that's ready for your business to show up. Sometimes, you just need to know how to ask the provider for it. Or how to choose a trustworthy provider. And sometimes, you just need to give yourself permission to look at your current site through a stranger's eyes and accept what you see.
An honest technical diagnosis
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