Why You Should Never Work With Vistaprint Web Builder And Hosting

Recently we had a client contact us, panicking about his tanking ranking on Google SERP’s.  As he described it, everything started when Vistaprint bought his old web hosting, ‘Webs’.

For those of you who are not familiar with the latest trend in the hosting market, the market is going through a consolidation phase, where many small web hosting and web developing companies are being bought up or merged with bigger corporations. The most common example for this happening in NZ is the purchase of ‘Openhost’ by Crazy Domains.

This is entirely normal, and given the current market and the high risks investors are willing to take, the owners are usually tempted with big money they can’t resist.

Let’s go back to our story about Vistaprint and Webs.

After Vistaprint integrated Webs’ clients into their system, they took the liberty to play with the URLs when they felt it was needed. So, our client who had powerful page name: ‘website.com/deliverymiami ‘ had their page name changed to ‘website.com/delivery-miami’

How bad was it? Very bad! It was done in nearly 200 pages, and by the time the client found out about the changes, he had already lost a massive market share.

And that wasn’t all, what we found out about Vistaprint was shocking in this day and age – We couldn’t set 301 redirects. At all. We even sent it to the Vistaprint customer support with old URLs and new URLs, and asked them politely to set 301 redirects – but all to no avail.

Okay, we thought, than maybe sending the sitemap to Google will minimize the impact

Instead of a valid sitemap.xml file, we received the URLs with a small addition ‘.webs.’ to remind us where it came from.

Again, approaching to the support lead to this response:

Okay, so we can’t set any 301 redirects, and we can’t edit the sitemap.

What about the 404 page the user is encounter when Google pick up the old URLS? Will that be beneficial to the user?

No. The 404 page is a disaster. Were we able to change it?

“Your satisfaction is our priority and as such, the ticket was further escalated to be resolved by the team. I am truly sorry that we have not been able to resolve the issue that you are experiencing but I know the team will continue to work on getting the fix. “

And if you thought that was over, apparently, they created two versions of the site www. and non-www. When we asked for an access to fix it, or if they can do it for us, we got this repeatable message:

“Sadly this is not an option we currently offer. 
Truly sorry for the unfavourable response. Please feel free to contact us at any time for any additional queries or request you may have; I am always happy to assist.”

After 2 months of checking, nothing has been changed yet. Vistaprint is incapable of creating a good web developing experience and falling way short compared with others like Wix and WordPress.

It’s almost like they are hoping to see clients leave in droves, or that they almost bought Webs by accident (or mainly for their database), hoping that the clients won’t notice their poor system.

Overall, Vistaprint is a huge disappointment. You’ll be pleased to know the client had enough and is currently looking to move their site elsewhere. If it’s impossible to control the site and instead of helping with SEO the platform is dragging him down, there’s no point staying there.

And to think that it all started after some clueless migration team changed the URLs during the migration because they ‘thought it would look better’, which is the most unprofessional service you can expect from a printing company that’s pretending to be a hosting company.

Avoid Vistaprint at all costs. If your site is currently with Vistaprint, and you need help fixing it, or want to know what your best call might be going forward, please contact us using the form at the bottom.