Author: Malcolm Porter
18/07/2023
Article

How to Move Your Website Away from Yell

Once best known for their publishing of the Yellow pages, a telephone directory of UK businesses, Yell are today an established digital marketing organisation with clients across the UK.

However, with questions over dubious practices such as high-pressure selling and misleading contract terms, alongside a growing number of unhappy clients, many businesses are now looking for alternative options.

5 Reasons You Should Move Your Website from Yell

While Yell might once have been a reputable destination for businesses big and small, many quickly came up against issues once a paying customer. Below are five reasons you should move your website from Yell to avoid the problems plaguing many of their current clients.

1. Poor Quality Web Design

Websites offered up by Yell are famously limited. Rather than use a quality website builder like WordPress, Yell use Wix, a programme known for its basic templates, resulting in most websites looking similar to one another. Wix built websites also lack basic functionality, with simple additions often not readily available.

2. Slow and Impersonal Support

You only need a quick look on any review site to see Yell’s unimpressive score alongside multiple poor reviews. There are clearly several reasons for this, but slow and impersonal support seems a constant, recurring argument. The issue of ineffective support is likely due to the lack of the personal touch commonly lost within big businesses like Yell, with customers being passed around rather than dealing with a single individual.

3. You Don’t Own the Website

Unlike with an agency, when Yell build you a website, you don’t actually own it or the domain name outright after paying. So, if you plan to no longer use their hosting services, you can’t simply move your website across to another host.

4. Poor Value for Money

As mentioned above, paying to build a website you will not own is a waste of money when you can pay an agency and outright own the website. A freelancer or agency are also more likely to offer a more bespoke service and for less cost than Yell.

5. Not Generating the Leads You Deserve

It is not just terrible support that seems to have upset a lot of Yell’s customers across review sites; poor performance and not achieving the results expected are also routinely mentioned in bad reviews.

How to Check the Performance of Your Yell Website

If you want to know how your Yell website is performing, you can check a number of key metrics in your Yell account.

First select the ‘Analytics’ tab on your account home page.

This action will lead you to an overview page, giving you several high-level metrics regarding your website’s performance. Click on the ‘Website’ tab to delve deeper into the statistics.

On the left-hand side of the ‘Website’ tab, you can find additional reports that will help you understand the performance of your Yell website.

Some statistics to consider include:

Number of site visits and page views
Time spent on the page
Origin of traffic
Location of traffic

When it comes to your website, the first question you might ask is what constitutes a good performance? Essentially, the answer is whether the results meet your expectations, and you are happy with the ROI. If not, you should consider a different approach to building and maintaining your online presence.

How to Move Your Website Away from Yell

Trying to understand how to move your website away from Yell? Despite Yell stating in their terms and conditions that you can’t move your website to a third party, there are several steps you can take to help make creating a new website easier.

Download Content

First, make sure you have all content, including copy and images, downloaded. Software tools, such as HTTrack, can download all content from a website with ease.

Cancel Contract

Cancelling your Yell contract is essential to avoid continuing to pay over the odds for their services.

A rolling contract is typically straightforward to cancel, though the same is far from true if still within your contracted period.

If you are still within the contracted period, you may be able to cancel on the grounds that the contract was mis-sold or Yell is in breach of contract for not sufficiently performing the services they offered.

Demand Data

Remember to request all relevant data regarding your website and account as part of the cancellation process.

Migrate Domain

Thankfully, moving the domain name away from Yell is relatively straightforward. Simply contact the organisation to request a name transfer to another platform or, if the domain name ends in .UK, fill in a form via Nominet to re-establish the name.

Alternatives to Yell Websites

Thankfully, there are a variety of alternatives to Yell websites to ensure your business can still have a digital presence. Options include:

Do it Yourself

Creating a new website yourself will likely work out as the cheapest option by some distance, but if you lack the knowledge, you are unlikely to see much in the way of results. Building a website without experience is often complicated, while implementing SEO can also present plenty of challenges.

Hire a Freelance Designer

Hiring a freelance designer will likely result in an impressive looking website for a competitive price. However, while they might know how to build a website, they might not be so clued up on issues of SEO and are unlikely to offer ongoing support.

Hire an Agency

An agency will typically provide you with everything necessary for building a great-looking website that meets your business requirements.

What’s more, the level of ongoing support provided by the agency, including a named point of contact backed by a team of specialists with industry insight, rather than a call centre in another part of the world, will always be the better option. As previously highlighted, once your website is built, you own it outright, even if you move to a different hosting plan, which provides a level of flexibility not available with Yell.

How to Move Your Website Away from Yell: Final Thoughts

If you are looking for how to move your website away from Yell, we can help. Here at Advance Online, we are a digital marketing and web design agency providing businesses with the services they need to grow and reach new customers.

Get in touch with us today to find out how we can support you.