As a firm proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to simplify procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it most definitely caught my interest GoHighLevel Website Hosting.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As a business owner always seeking to streamline and scale my company, it felt like a desire happened on paper. Who would not want a single solution that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and falling short) to change to this prominent new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business requirements, ideally you can gain from my excruciating errors and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I located Keap intuitive to use and it dealt with whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small businesses maintain their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making sure leads and customers obtain the best messages at the correct time. Use site and social networks types to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and boost income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough consumer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing customer relationships with powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly attractive for businesses aiming to combine their tech stack.
Generally, it simply functioned reliably with very little difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without any concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm phone call of “glossy things disorder”. You know the sensation: when every person’s speaking about a new tool that will certainly revolutionize your service … The turf usually looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could minimize friction factors that I would certainly learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, but a couple of even more aggravations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I recognized changing platforms was going to require migrating all my Keap data and essentially restoring my entire technology framework from square one making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s an introduction of just some of the effort called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around again
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– not to mention handling shed productivity throughout the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel offering a better long-term service for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a large mistake. The problems began accumulating promptly, until it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish issues I came across.
Protection Issues & Numerous Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event pointers, taking care of membership expirations and a lot more.
Everything appeared to be working penalty … up until instantly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 completely unnecessary e-mails had been sent to individuals that must NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred three days in a row, with a different batch of 160 individuals daily.
I desperately tried repairing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. Yet the trouble lingered.
When I frantically connected to their support team, they vaguely claimed “server problems” were at fault. But this description really did not make any feeling, given that the mistakes proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was totally undesirable and just really did not benefit my business. I have countless get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unstable, exactly how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and difficult.
Basic tasks like modifying workflows involved digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely different sections. Moving between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to handle general, specific, and item configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product all set for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature imaginable, with poor functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the low price tag came with expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Website Hosting
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the economical cost for access to a lot of features. But I rapidly learned this inexpensive base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic charges for core performance. All of a sudden my credit card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed each time you send out an email with their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to thousands of dollars in unforeseen expenses.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, but simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open prices plunge almost over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending out methods or attempted every fixing trick, I might hardly nudge open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Website Hosting.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had horrible involvement. The only point I can think that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden costs, busted features, and terrible interface, I had actually ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a big blunder. The cons significantly exceeded any advantages.
No software program is ideal, yet the large volume of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to deal with vital features effectively or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing significant time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. But in knowledge, it instructed me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Veterinarian claims completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application typically obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed tools should make your job life much easier, not much more complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness builds trust. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems destroys trust fund.
- Look for objective reviews. Delighted assistance examines imply less if extreme problems imply inadequate total use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single option can completely meet every distinct business demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements typically outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Simply put, I learned to be more unconvinced of “as well great to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the appeal of shiny new items. The devices you use daily must gain trust fund via transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.