ClickFunnels vs Your Website: 5 Reasons You NEED ClickFunnels to Make $10,000+/Month!

If you have ever tried to build a website and given up halfway through, you are not alone. Most business owners spend weeks wrestling with WordPress themes, broken plugins, and confusing settings, and end up with a site that does not convert visitors into buyers. That is time you could have spent serving customers and growing your income.

Alston breaks down the core problem in this video: a traditional website is built for information, not for sales. ClickFunnels, on the other hand, is built from the ground up to guide visitors toward a single action — entering an email, clicking a button, or buying a product. Below you will find all five reasons Alston lays out, expanded with the specific details that matter if you are trying to hit that $10,000-per-month mark.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A clear understanding of why traditional websites fight against your conversion goals
The specific drag-and-drop features that let non-coders build a full sales funnel in under 30 minutes
Why page load speed (the 2.5-second rule) can make or break your Google rankings and your sales
How built-in analytics in ClickFunnels tells you exactly what is working versus what needs to change
The plumber email example that shows how any service business can turn one-time clients into repeat revenue
How to decide whether ClickFunnels or a hybrid setup makes sense for your business right now
Not sure which online income model fits your skills and situation? Answer three questions at finder.platformproof.com and get a personalized match.

Reason 1: Websites Are Difficult to Maintain Without Coding Experience

Alston is direct on this point: if you are not a professional coder, managing a WordPress site can take time away from doing what you do best, which is running your business. WordPress gives you enormous control, but that control comes at a cost. There are plugins to update, themes to troubleshoot, and small changes that can cascade into broken pages.

If you have ever accidentally broken your site trying to change a font size, you know the anxiety that follows. You either spend the next two hours searching forums for a fix, or you call a developer and hand over money you did not plan to spend. For a business owner who is not technical, this becomes a recurring tax on your attention and your budget. Alston also notes that some business owners end up paying someone monthly or annually just to keep the site current, which adds a vendor relationship on top of the cost.

ClickFunnels removes that problem entirely. Every page you build is drag and drop. Want to add your logo? Click on the widget, hit settings, upload the file. Alston points out that you can build an entire sales funnel in less than half an hour. That same funnel can then drive traffic and generate sales while you focus on fulfilling orders or serving customers. There is no code to break, no plugin conflicts to diagnose, and no outside vendor to manage for routine updates.

For small business owners and solo entrepreneurs, this shift in how you spend your time is worth more than the platform’s monthly cost. Every hour you get back from fighting your website is an hour you can reinvest in the part of your business that actually generates revenue. The drag-and-drop builder is not just a convenience feature — it is what lets non-technical people build something that actually works without needing to hire anyone.

Reason 2: Traditional Websites Waste Space and Kill Conversions

A traditional website is built to inform. It has an About page, a Services page, a Blog, a Contact page, and a footer packed with links to social media profiles. All of that is useful for building credibility, but it is a conversion problem waiting to happen.

Alston explains that websites hold a lot of text and information, and that if your goal is to increase conversions and make sales, that information-heavy format works against you. When a visitor lands on a page and sees ten different things competing for their attention, they have to make a decision about where to go. Most of the time, the decision they make is to leave without doing anything.

ClickFunnels solves this by design. Every page in a ClickFunnels funnel has one job. If the job is to collect an email address, the page has a headline, a brief description of what the visitor gets, and an email field with a submit button. There is nothing else to click. No main menu bar across the top. No sidebar with recent posts. No related products carousel at the bottom. The visitor either enters their email or they leave.

That single-purpose design is what makes funnels convert at a higher rate than multi-purpose websites in the first place. Alston points out that ClickFunnels designs all of their page templates with this principle baked in — there are clear directional indicators showing the visitor exactly what they are supposed to do. The customer is not left wondering where to click or what happens next.

If you sell a service or a product online and you have been frustrated by low conversion rates on your existing site, the root cause is almost always this: your site is giving visitors too many choices. When people have too many choices, they often choose nothing. ClickFunnels removes the extra choices and points the visitor toward the one action you actually want them to take.

Reason 3: Too Many Competing Calls to Action Confuse Buyers

This reason builds on the previous one but deserves its own section because it is one of the most damaging and common mistakes business owners make on their websites. Alston describes the scenario clearly: a website can scroll down forever, and along the way there are multiple different calls to action. One button says “Click here to call now.” Another links to a contact form. Another takes the visitor to a product page. Another links to a blog post. Each of those calls to action competes with the others.

A visitor who is ready to act but not sure which button to click is a visitor who is about to leave your site without taking any action. Worse, if they click the wrong button and end up somewhere they did not expect, they feel frustrated. Frustrated visitors do not convert into customers. Alston notes that some of them will pick up the phone and call a competitor instead, not because your offer was worse, but because your site was harder to use.

Alston is specific about what goes wrong on websites that are not built correctly: too many pictures, too many links, and those links go to different places. The customer ends up taking actions the business owner did not intend, or they get confused and abandon the site entirely. None of those outcomes produce revenue.

ClickFunnels page builders address this with a single, prominent call-to-action button that stands out from the rest of the page. The button’s color is consistent with your logo and branding, it is easy to spot, and it is the only interactive element on the page that the visitor is supposed to click. Alston also notes that color-matching your button to your existing brand assets sounds simple but can take hours to get right on a custom WordPress build. ClickFunnels makes it straightforward.

The result is a page where the visitor’s path is obvious. They read the headline, they understand the offer, they click the button. No confusion, no dead ends, no accidental navigation that takes them somewhere unexpected. This is not a design preference — it is a conversion principle that applies whether you are selling a physical product, a digital course, or a local service.

Reason 4: Non-Developers Pay a Hidden Cost in Time, Money, and Page Speed

Alston is transparent about his own background here: he is a web designer and a web developer, so he can build a WordPress site relatively quickly. But he is honest that most business owners do not have that background, and for those people, building and maintaining a website is not just slow — it is expensive in ways that are easy to underestimate until you are already in the middle of it.

He uses the example of a plumber. A plumber is technical, hands-on, and excellent at their craft. But expertise in plumbing does not transfer into expertise in web development. For a plumber trying to build their own site from scratch, it can take hours, days, or even months to fully build out the site — even using WordPress, which is supposed to make things easier. Every small decision — which theme to pick, how to format a contact page, how to make the mobile version look right — takes time away from billable work.

ClickFunnels collapses that timeline. A plumber who has never built a website can pick a pre-built funnel template, swap in their business name and service description, and have a working opt-in page live in the same day. The comparison Alston suggests is specific: try changing the background color on a ClickFunnels page, then try doing the same thing across individual pages in a WordPress install. The difference in how long it takes is significant.

Beyond the time cost, Alston raises a technical issue that most business owners do not consider until it is too late: page speed. The number of images on a page, the size of those images, and the overall weight of the page all affect how fast the site loads. And load speed matters for two distinct reasons.

The first reason is search rankings. Google factors page speed into how it ranks sites in search results. A slow site is a site that fewer people find organically. If you are paying for ads to drive traffic to a slow page, you are paying for visitors who leave before they ever see your offer. The second reason is direct visitor behavior. Alston cites the standard figure: most people will only wait about 2.5 seconds for a page to load. If the page does not fully render in that window, they click the back button and go to the next result in Google.

ClickFunnels addresses page speed by design. Alston tested multiple ClickFunnels landing pages and found that all the assets loaded within milliseconds. You do not need to install a caching plugin, compress your images manually, or set up a content delivery network. The platform handles performance so you can focus on the offer itself.

Reason 5: Email Collection Is Built In — and That Is Where the Real Money Lives

This is the reason Alston spends the most time on in the video, and it is the one with the most direct and sustained impact on long-term revenue. If you run any kind of business and you are not collecting email addresses from your visitors and customers, you are giving up a significant amount of future income.

With a traditional website, email collection is an add-on that requires extra work. You have to install a plugin, connect it to an email marketing service, design an opt-in form, embed it in the right place on the site, test that it works correctly, and make sure it does not break when you update your theme or your WordPress version. Each of those steps costs time, and connecting two separate services often means paying for both of them independently.

ClickFunnels has email list management built directly into the platform. You build a landing page. You build an email list. You link them together. When visitors arrive at your funnel page, they can enter their email with a single click. The data goes directly into your list without any third-party connection to set up. Once they are on your list, you have a direct line to that customer for as long as they choose to stay subscribed.

Alston returns to the plumber example here, and it is worth walking through in detail because the principle applies to any service business. Say a plumber fixes a customer’s stopped-up sink. With an email list, that plumber can send a follow-up a day later asking for a five-star review if the sink is working as it should. Two weeks later, with winter approaching, the plumber sends another email reminding the customer to have their pipes checked before temperatures drop.

The customer opens that email, remembers the plumber did good work, and books a visit. Alston notes that the plumber might not have much practical work to do on PVC pipes in the fall — the point is not the specific service, it is the relationship. By staying in regular contact through email, the plumber becomes the first person that customer calls whenever something goes wrong. And by maintaining that relationship, the plumber can stay fully booked, charge more because clients already trust them, and grow the business without spending money to find new customers from scratch every time.

Alston makes the case directly: collecting emails equals more money. He suggests checking your own inbox right now as proof. You almost certainly have emails from Walmart, Amazon, and other retailers you bought from once or twice. Those companies are not emailing you because they enjoy writing newsletters — they are emailing you because those campaigns drive repeat purchases. The same principle applies at any business size, from a national retailer to a one-person plumbing operation.

The mechanics of building that email list are what ClickFunnels simplifies. You do not need to be a marketer or a developer to get it running. You build the page, you set up the list, you link them, and the system handles the rest. Every subscriber who joins your list is a future revenue opportunity that costs you nothing beyond the time it takes to write the occasional email.

Not sure which online income path fits your skills and situation right now?

Answer three quick questions and get a personalized match at finder.platformproof.com.

Honest Drawbacks: What ClickFunnels Does Not Do Well

Alston’s video makes the case for ClickFunnels, but a complete comparison requires acknowledging where traditional websites still have a real advantage.

SEO and long-form content. If your growth strategy depends on ranking for search terms and building an audience through blog posts, a traditional website with a content management system like WordPress is the stronger tool. ClickFunnels pages are built for conversions, not for content discovery. A funnel-only web presence will rank for far fewer keywords than a content site, and organic traffic from search engines is one of the cheapest ways to get visitors over the long term.

Monthly cost. ClickFunnels charges a subscription fee. For a business just getting started, that cost is worth comparing against free and low-cost WordPress hosting options. If you or someone on your team can manage the technical side of a WordPress site, the total cost of running your own site can be lower than a ClickFunnels subscription, at least in the early stages.

Ownership and control. When you build your funnels inside ClickFunnels, they live on ClickFunnels’ platform. If the company changes its pricing structure or discontinues a feature you rely on, your options are limited. A self-hosted WordPress site gives you more long-term control over your content and your data, since everything lives on your own hosting account.

The practical answer for most small business owners is a setup that uses both: ClickFunnels or a similar funnel builder for your conversion-focused pages and lead collection, and a WordPress blog or content site to build organic search traffic over time. That approach lets you get the conversion benefits Alston describes without giving up the SEO and content advantages of a traditional site. You do not have to choose one or the other from day one.

When to Use ClickFunnels vs. a Traditional Website: A Quick Decision Guide

You are a solo operator or small team with no technical staff: ClickFunnels. The time you save not managing a website is worth more than the subscription cost at this stage.
Your primary goal is email collection and direct sales from a specific offer: ClickFunnels. Built-in email integration and single-CTA pages are built for exactly this.
You rely heavily on organic search traffic for most of your leads: Traditional website (WordPress or similar), with ClickFunnels landing pages added for specific campaigns.
You are testing a new offer or launching a new product: ClickFunnels. You can build and go live in under 30 minutes and use split testing to find what converts before committing more time and money.
You have an existing site that is not converting visitors into leads or buyers: Add a ClickFunnels funnel for your primary offer. You do not have to replace the entire site — just give your best offer its own conversion-focused page.

Find Your X

Whether you end up using ClickFunnels, a traditional website, or a combination of both, the bigger question is what you are selling and who you are selling it to. The best funnel tool available does not help if you are not clear on your offer and your audience. If you are still figuring out which path matches your skills and your current situation, start there first. finder.platformproof.com walks you through three questions and gives you a personalized recommendation based on where you actually are right now.

Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly is ClickFunnels and how is it different from a website builder like Squarespace or Wix?

ClickFunnels is a sales funnel builder, not a general-purpose website builder. Squarespace and Wix give you a full multi-page site. ClickFunnels is designed to build sequences of single-purpose pages — an opt-in page, a sales page, an order confirmation page — where each page has one job and leads the visitor toward the next step. The entire focus is on guiding visitors to a buying decision rather than presenting general information about your business.

Do I need to cancel my existing website to start using ClickFunnels?

No. Many business owners run both at the same time. Their main website handles brand presence, blog content, and informational pages, while ClickFunnels handles sales funnels and lead collection campaigns. You can run ClickFunnels on a subdomain of your existing domain or send ad traffic directly to your funnel pages without touching your main site at all.

How fast can someone with no technical background build a working funnel?

Alston says less than 30 minutes for a basic funnel. ClickFunnels provides pre-built templates for common funnel types — opt-in funnels, sales funnels, webinar funnels — so you are not starting from a blank page. You pick a template, replace the placeholder text and images with your own content, connect your email list, and you are live. The drag-and-drop editor means no code is required at any step.

What is split testing and why does it matter for conversions?

Split testing, sometimes called A/B testing, means running two versions of the same page at the same time to find out which one converts better. You might test one headline against a different headline, or a blue button against an orange one. ClickFunnels has split testing built in, so you can send half your traffic to version A and half to version B, then look at the data after a few weeks and keep whichever version produced more sign-ups or sales. This is how you improve your conversion rate over time using real data rather than assumptions.

Why does page load speed matter so much, and how does ClickFunnels address it?

Most people abandon a page that takes longer than about 2.5 seconds to load, which means a slow site costs you visitors before they ever see your offer. Slow pages also hurt your Google search rankings, which reduces the organic traffic you receive over time. ClickFunnels hosts its pages on infrastructure designed for fast delivery, and Alston tested multiple ClickFunnels landing pages and found all assets loaded within milliseconds. You do not need to install caching plugins or manually compress image files — the platform handles performance so you can focus on your offer.

Can ClickFunnels handle email marketing, or do I still need a separate service?

ClickFunnels has built-in email list management, so you can collect addresses and organize your list inside the platform. For basic follow-up sequences, many users run everything from ClickFunnels directly. For more advanced automation — complex behavioral sequences, detailed segmentation, large broadcast campaigns — many businesses also connect ClickFunnels to a dedicated email marketing platform. The core point Alston makes is that collecting the email address is the critical first step, and ClickFunnels makes that step as simple as possible for both you and the visitor.

What kinds of businesses get the most value out of ClickFunnels?

Alston’s examples in the video include affiliate marketers, service businesses like plumbers and electricians, and online entrepreneurs. The common thread is businesses that want to convert visitors into leads or buyers, rather than businesses that primarily need to publish content. Consultants, coaches, course creators, local service businesses, and e-commerce stores have all used funnel builders effectively. If your goal is to get someone to take a specific action — entering an email, booking a call, buying a product — a dedicated funnel page will usually outperform a traditional website page for that purpose.

Is ClickFunnels the only funnel builder worth considering?

ClickFunnels is one of the most widely known tools and has been around since 2014, which gives it a large user community and a broad library of tutorials and examples. Other funnel builders that serve a similar purpose include Kartra, GoHighLevel, and Systeme.io. Some offer lower monthly starting costs for businesses in early stages. The principles Alston describes — single-purpose pages, clear calls to action, built-in email collection, and easy-to-read conversion analytics — apply across all of these platforms. Choose the one whose price and feature set match where your business is right now.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “ClickFunnels vs Your Website: 5 Reasons You NEED ClickFunnels to Make $10,000+/Month!” — YouTube, youtu.be/CR54ZiNE7-0
ClickFunnels official site — clickfunnels.com
Google PageSpeed Insights — pagespeed.web.dev