As a firm proprietor for over a years, I depend on software and automation to improve operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it definitely captured my attention How To Migrate A Website To GoHighLevel.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly seeking to simplify and scale my business, it looked like a desire come to life on paper. Who would not want a single solution that does it all?
But in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this popular new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business needs, ideally you can learn from my painful mistakes and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job administration choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation needs.
I located Keap intuitive to utilize and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help small businesses maintain their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and customers get the ideal messages at the right time. Use site and social networks types to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours per week and boost earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed customer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales procedures and supporting client partnerships via effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically eye-catching for services looking to consolidate their technology pile.
Essentially, it simply functioned dependably with minimal difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny object disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new tool that will change your company … The grass commonly looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could minimize rubbing factors that I ‘d found out to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, 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 take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing considerably more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I understood switching platforms was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my whole technology framework from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an overview of simply some of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– as well as taking care of shed productivity throughout the button.
Yet ultimately, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel offering a far better lasting remedy for my business, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a large error. The issues began accumulating promptly, until it reached a factor I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish problems I experienced.
Protection Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion suggestions, handling subscription expiries and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be working fine … up until instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 completely pointless emails had been sent out to individuals who ought to NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred three days straight, with a various set of 160 people daily.
I anxiously attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from scratch. Yet the issue lingered.
When I frantically connected to their support team, they slightly declared “server concerns” were responsible. Yet this description didn’t make any type of sense, given that the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was entirely unacceptable and just really did not help my organization. I have countless get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unstable, just how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these problems …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complex.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in completely different sections. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage total, private, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the affordable price tag came with expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing How To Migrate A Website To GoHighLevel
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing points is the cost effective rate for accessibility to so many features. But I promptly discovered this cheap base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic charges for core functionality. Suddenly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged every time you send out an e-mail through their servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unexpected expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open rates plunge virtually overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a worthless 9% open price.
No matter how much I optimized my sending out techniques or tried every troubleshooting technique, I could barely nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria How To Migrate A Website To GoHighLevel.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails unexpectedly had horrible interaction. The only thing I might think that would be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden fees, broken features, and dreadful interface, I had actually lastly reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a huge blunder. The cons dramatically outweighed any kind of advantages.
No software is excellent, yet the large quantity of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to take care of essential functions effectively or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing significant time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the difficult call to reverse course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it educated me a few crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software program typically covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is important.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed tools should make your job life simpler, not more complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness builds trust fund. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles destroys depend on.
- Look for honest testimonials. Happy assistance reviews imply much less if too much problems imply inadequate general functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No single service can completely meet every special company demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step improvements typically surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In other words, I learned to be much more skeptical of “also excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less lured by the allure of glossy new things. The devices you utilize daily ought to earn depend on with transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.