Why PDFs Hurt Your Business: 6 Big Drawbacks You Shouldn’t Ignore

Are you still using PDFs to distribute and share your content online? Doubtful if they are serving your business best, and if there are any alternatives?

Well, there are, and better. But before we get to that, let us look at some numbers:

• 96% customers will leave your brand if they don’t get a seamless and effortless experience.
• 52% customers are less likely to engage with businesses after a bad mobile experience.
• Audiences spent 73% more time engaging with digital content experiences compared to static PDFs

The message is clear. Customers do not have the time or inclination for friction in knowing about and experiencing your business – one of the biggest reasons why you shouldn’t use PDFs in your business.

Now, let us examine in detail how PDFs are causing friction in your customer experience and the other drawbacks that are negatively impacting your business.

Here we go!

What Are the Disadvantages of Using PDF for Business Content?

PDF, or Portable Document Format, was introduced by Adobe in the early 90s. They were the first format to allow readers to exchange documents across different operating systems and to provide the certainty of a fixed layout.

Although PDFs have been around for almost three decades, they have several drawbacks that hinder optimal content distribution, negatively impacting current businesses.

Especially with new cutting-edge technologies available that are more suitable for today’s digital-first environment, it is time you re-evaluate your documentation needs and formats.

Let us break down these disadvantages of PDFs in more detail, so you truly understand how the outdated documentation methods, in this case, PDFs, are holding your business back.

# Drawback 1: Difficult to Update and Maintain

Imagine spending hours preparing a document, only to know that once you convert it to PDF, you cannot edit it then and there. You must reinvent the wheel every time a minor or major edit is required, and then go back and edit in its original format.

In case you’ve ever tried editing a PDF, you know how frustrating it can be. First, you cannot edit it directly; you need a special tool, and the good ones are costly to use properly. Even after using the tools, editing a PDF is not the most intuitive process

If you simply want to add comments when you receive a PDF or send it out to someone, you cannot do it unless you have some special features or tools downloaded that work with PDFs.

Business Impact: Your business is either stuck with outdated information or lost productivity and operational costs as the content team keeps doing the same work again and again. On top of that, since PDFs cannot be edited directly, chances are that your team is working in Word and converting it to PDF every time, wasting their hours and creativity on something entirely manual.

Additionally, if your business is dynamic, with new products, updated versions, and pricing changes, it is likely suffering even more due to the static nature of your PDF documentation.

# Drawback 2: Limited Control Over Distribution and Circulation

Once you hit send on a PDF file, you have zero control over it. There are multiple reasons why you don’t want this to happen.

Most likely, the PDF contains dynamic information, and once it is gone, there is no way to change it. It could be anything from your pricing model to finer details about the product in an E-book or user manual you have shared as a PDF. There is even a possibility that you made a mistake in the PDF, but since it is a static piece of information, there is no way to change it.

Suppose you have sent confidential business information, such as special pricing for a client, or curated information as a giveaway to get business. In that case, people can share it without your permission or consent. And there is always a chance that it may just lie lifeless in someone’s inbox. In both cases, you cannot do anything about it.

Business Impact: People can have a poor or wrong impression of your business. You can lose opportunities due to the lack of flexibility in how you distribute your information.

You are essentially giving away knowledge for free that took you years to acquire, and your competitors have access to your confidential information.

# Drawback 3: Poor Accessibility for All Users

How many times did you let go of information simply because it needed you to download a PDF? We all know the answer! The only way to access information provided on PDFs is to download them. Desktop users may still do so reluctantly, if they need the information badly, but for mobile users, it is almost always a no.

Additionally, PDFs are often stored locally, occupying storage space on the system, which discourages both downloading and sharing.

Another major drawback in terms of accessibility is when you use PDFs as your choice of file for a user manual or troubleshooting guide. The customer must download it to their mobile device or desktop, locate it, and then access it. Additionally, it takes up space on their device. This process is awfully long and in contrast with the fast world we live in.

Business Impact: Due to the friction your content is causing, you are losing opportunities to be seen and considered, ultimately resulting in lost business.

Your business is looking outdated.

Stop spending hours updating PDFs. Build flexible, searchable documentation that grows with your business. Try Document360!

GET STARTED

# Drawback 4: Can’t Track Reader Engagement

The primary goal of creating great content is to attract and engage the relevant audience, establish trust and authority, and ultimately drive leads and sales through it. However, one of the problems with PDF files is that you cannot fulfill this fundamental goal.

That is because PDFs cannot collect data, and you also cannot measure how the PDF performed.  The only data you can track with a PDF file is how many times it was downloaded, and that is it.

It doesn’t tell you if people actually read it, for how long, or how they engaged with it.

On the flipside, there is a real possibility that your customers are getting disengaged because you are using PDFs. It is a format that involves a lot of work before being consumed, has its risks when downloading, and isn’t the easiest to read on any device.

Business Impact: You have no idea if your content is achieving its intended purpose – engaging your clients and ultimately building a long-term business. Because you do not know how your content is performing, analyzing, personalizing, or improving it for a better impact is out of the question. Additionally, it can give your business an unprofessional appearance.

# Drawback 5: Security and Version Control Issues

Downloading PDFs carries risks, as they may contain viruses, malware, and can even facilitate phishing attempts. Hackers can use PDFs to harm the user’s computer or even steal their information, so unless your business has already established authority, users can avoid downloading PDFs from you for security reasons, too.

As we discussed earlier, sending confidential information in PDFs poses its own security issues, as they can be easily distributed to anyone without your permission.

Version control is also a drawback of PDF for content distribution. Since they cannot be edited once they are prepared, every time there is a change, you have to create a new version of the existing document, making it easy to lose track of which version is the latest.

Business Impact: The credibility of your business is compromised. Your competitors get inside information, and you may lose time and business because of outdated document versions.

# Drawback 6: PDFs Aren’t Mobile-Friendly

We live in a mobile-first world, as more than 50% of web traffic has come from mobile users for almost 10 years. So, if your business isn’t aligned with this fact, you haven’t built a winning business.

And here’s why using PDFs, especially for marketing, onboarding, and other customer-facing activities, is a problem: they are inherently not designed to be responsive or mobile-friendly.

Simply because the Portable Document Format (PDF) was created in the early 90s with the primary goal of “portability”, so each file would look the same on different computer platforms (e.g., Windows, Mac, Unix) and printers.

This is why, from downloading to reading, PDFs are a nightmare on mobile.

It usually takes multiple steps to access/download a PDF, and once downloaded, you have to zoom in or pan around the PDF to read it properly. Even PDFs designed to be accessible don’t work properly on all mobile devices.

Last but surely not least, any content you publish on a PDF is a hit on your SEO rank. That is because, like any smart business, Google takes a mobile-first approach to indexing, meaning it uses the mobile version of your site to index and rank your content.

Business Impact: You are scaring customers away even before they get to know you. Since PDFs are inherently non-responsive, your SEO ranking is suffering, negatively affecting your authority and credibility.

So, why suffer all these PDF limitations when you have cutting-edge solutions for content creation, management, and distribution that are made for the present times?

Document360 as an Alternative to Your Business Requirement PDFs

Document360 is a state-of-the-art knowledge base software that is highly dynamic, making it the perfect tool for today’s content creation, content marketing, and all documentation needs.

It provides a centralized repository for all your content and knowledge, where you can create, manage, and share content easily, including technical documentation. Also, it is not just an internal knowledge base software for your teams; you can build mixed and external knowledge bases on it for your customers.

You can organize all your content into a structured repository of knowledge, making it easy to maintain. It is a breeze to update as all changes reflect globally, and anyone with permission can access it on all kinds of devices, including mobile.

It also works perfectly as a software documentation tool if version control is one of your biggest concerns. With Document360, multiple users can work on the same document while its built-in version control system tracks all changes, allows users to compare different versions, and enables reverting to previous versions.

Whether it is a website or an app, you choose how you want to distribute and circulate the information sitting in your knowledge base. You can also keep your confidential data secure with various strategies, such as user authentication, role-based access, and multi-factor sign-on.

Document360 also comes with advanced analytics that tell you how readers are consuming your knowledge across geographies, so you can track engagement and spot trends in your reader data. This helps you improve your knowledge continuously and provide only the best to your readers.

Conclusion: Move Beyond PDFs with Document360

PDFs did well and served their purpose once, but they are not suitable for modern business content needs. They slow businesses down with static content, unnecessary manual work, and poor accessibility.

Modern teams need documentation that’s easy to update, accessible on any device, secure, and measurable. Document360 gives you precisely that — an AI-powered, flexible, searchable, analytics-driven knowledge base that evolves with your business.

Now is the time to move past the limits of PDFs, and Document360 makes the shift simple and future-proof.