People look for ways to cut corners and save money. That’s understandable and in most cases, totally practical.
The same goes when it comes to building websites.
With the proliferation of DIY, create-your-own-for-free websites, many businesses are tempted to build their own sites themselves or put up a cheap one either because they want to save money or do not have a lot of capital.
That may be a good idea if you want to test a business idea or what you actually need is just a simple, brochure-like type of website—one, that only displays information and nothing else. However, it’s a very dangerous idea for established businesses.
How A Cheap Website Can Hurt Your Brand
Admittedly, putting up a high quality website comes with a price. However, resorting to building a free or cheap one will just hurt your business. In what ways will it negatively affect your brand?
Lack Of Option To Customize
Most free, build-it-yourself or cheap websites have very limited capabilities. You won’t have the choice to, say, change the color scheme or layout of the template and pages. This means your website will look like the thousands of other websites who chose the same template: generic and run-off-the-mill.
Great websites must stand out from its competitors or it will just melt in the background. It must look professional and should reflect the character of the company it represents.
No Room For Growth
Improvements are needed for websites as it grows. But you won’t be ready for such a growth if you will use a cheap website. Most DIY sites will only allow you to have a certain number of pages or links—which isn’t a lot. To counter this, pages are often loaded with way too much information and verbiage. This is not a good web design practice because it turns users off and increases bounce rate.
In the long run, the website of a growing business will need ecommerce capabilities—things like cart processing, ordering and shipping. It may eventually need an event calendar or a video gallery all of which can’t be done or are not included in cheap websites.
Cheap Websites Are Slow
Another major turn-off for users is a slow-loading site—a setback most of these inexpensive websites have. That’s because these sites mostly run on a slow server and have not been primed at all to load at competitive speeds. A slow-loading site is another big factor in high bounce rates.
Cheap Websites Will Have Bugs
Yes, all sites get bugs from time to time. But quality ones run by professional developers are regularly checked and maintained to avoid or fix such bugs. That is not the case with cheap or DIY websites.
Because such sites are cheap, they haven’t been tested if they will work on all browsers, including mobile. Take note that over half of web visitors use a mobile device to go online. It’s predicted to go up to as high as 70% in the next coming years. If the website is not mobile-friendly, 50% of potential customers are already considered lost.
Cheap Websites Can’t Easily Be Found On Search Engines
Top caliber sites run by professional developers have SEO built into the site. It has been created with proper coding and alt tags, given meta tags, title among others, with every aspect in optimization looked into to produce better search engine results. This allows their site to rank higher so people can find them more quickly. The same well-thought consideration and treatment can’t be expected from cheap websites.
Running Your Own Site Will Cost You Time
It’s a bad idea to run the website yourself if you don’t have the experience, know-how or time to do it. This is especially true if the work takes you away from other activities that generate revenues.
The mathematics of it is simple if you really think about it: if the cost of hiring a developer to build your site is $100 per hour but you can make $200 in sales per hour, then it’s more practical to give the job to someone else than lose what you could have earned.
A Great Website Is A Powerful Marketing Tool
Businesses that know the importance of digital marketing think of their website as a valuable investment. And it is. Why is it an investment?
A well-designed website built with all the critical elements (a home page with proper messaging, landing pages and strong calls-to-action throughout the website) is appealing to first time visitors. Once web users had a pleasant experience visiting your site, they will most likely be converted and buy from you.
A good website also focuses on better search engine results, not just how pretty it looks like. That’s because ranking high means the site will have a stronger online presence. A strong online presence means greater exposure and wider market reach which ultimately means more brand recognition for your business.
When a website has regular fresh and useful content, users will tend to come back to your site for more. All these factors encourage sales and more customers loyal to your brand. Thus, websites are seen by businesses as a powerful, effective and useful tool to reach their target market.
The Payback Of Investing In A Good Website Is Greater Than The Cost It Takes To Build It
There will always be demand for cheap work so there will always be people who will offer it. But the bottom line is this: you get what you pay for.
It takes an intimate knowledge of web development and skills to build a brand strategy, design a site that guides to better lead conversion rates, fix broken links and codes, update content, compatibility and software and overall manage a truly outstanding website. For these reasons, a cheap website simply doesn’t measure up.
Have you been burned by developers who overcharge for every simple update or work that must be done on your website? Do you need someone reliable who can help you build and manage your site? We can help. Email us at [email protected] and let’s talk.
