As an agency proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software application and automation to streamline procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my interest GoHighLevel Outage.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always seeking to streamline and scale my company, it appeared like a dream come true on paper. That would not desire a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and failing) to change to this prominent new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company requirements, with any luck you can learn from my excruciating mistakes and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job administration option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation needs.
I found Keap instinctive to utilize and it took care of every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small companies keep their clients while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making certain leads and clients get the ideal messages at the correct time. Use website and social media sites types to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and increase revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a thorough customer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and nurturing customer partnerships with powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly appealing for companies aiming to combine their technology pile.
Generally, it just functioned dependably with minimal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm phone call of “glossy object disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s discussing a brand-new tool that will reinvent your business … The turf typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could reduce friction points that I would certainly learned to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, yet a couple of even more disappointments led me to believe possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I knew switching over platforms was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my entire tech facilities from square one making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s a summary of just a few of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– not to mention taking care of shed efficiency during the switch.
However ultimately, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel providing a much better lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a huge error. The concerns started accumulating promptly, until it reached a factor I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I came across.
Protection Issues & Many Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event reminders, taking care of membership expirations and a lot more.
Every little thing appeared to be functioning penalty … until instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 entirely unnecessary emails had been sent out to individuals that need to NOT have received them. This took place three days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously attempted fixing and restoring the automation from square one. However the issue lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance group, they vaguely declared “server concerns” were at fault. Yet this description didn’t make any type of sense, because the errors proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was totally unacceptable and just didn’t work for my company. I have thousands of contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unstable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these problems …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and challenging.
Easy tasks like modifying workflows included excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in completely different areas. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage general, private, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the affordable price tag featured costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Outage
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the budget friendly price for accessibility to so many features. But I swiftly learned this affordable base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic costs for core capability. Unexpectedly my bank card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed every time you send an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel membership ended up costing considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, yet just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured e-mail open rates drop practically overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement constantly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a useless 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending techniques or attempted every repairing technique, I might hardly nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Outage.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had horrible interaction. The only thing I might think that would certainly be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed costs, broken features, and dreadful interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a huge blunder. The cons significantly surpassed any advantages.
No software program is perfect, but the sheer volume of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to handle crucial functions competently or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing considerable time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey misadventure. But in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of key lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet claims extensively. Marketing buzz around new software often obscures larger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed devices ought to make your job life less complicated, not extra complex and messy.
- Transparency builds count on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles destroys depend on.
- Seek honest reviews. Happy support examines mean much less if excessive problems imply inadequate overall usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single remedy can perfectly fulfill every special company requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Incremental improvements typically outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In other words, I learned to be much more cynical of “too excellent to be true” marketing claims and less attracted by the attraction of shiny new objects. The tools you use daily need to make count on through openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.