The True Cost of a Cheap Website
That bargain website might be costing you more than you think. Here's what you need to know.
What You'll Learn:
- ✓The hidden costs that turn a £500 website into a bill for thousands
- ✓Why a cheap website can lose you money rather than save it
- ✓The warning signs that your current website is costing you customers
- ✓How to work out the real return on a proper website, not just its price
A free guide from LogicLeap - SME News Best Web Design 2025, trusted by Raymond Blanc OBE
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Why a cheap quote is so easy to say yes to
"£500 for a complete website. 5 pages. Logo included. Delivered in 2 weeks." For a small business watching every outgoing, that is an easy yes. The price is clear, the wait is short, and nothing in the quote tells you what a dearer one would buy you.
The problem is not the number. It is what the number is for. A cheap quote prices the building of pages. It does not price whether those pages turn visitors into enquiries, whether anyone finds them without paid ads, who keeps the site patched, or what a change costs once the two weeks are up. Six months in, that gap is what owners regret.
The costs that turn up after the invoice
The full breakdown behind this guide sorts the after-costs into five kinds: revenue lost because the site converts poorly, search invisibility that leaves you paying for every visitor through ads, security weaknesses, the drip of small fixes charged one at a time, and the rebuild that eventually replaces the lot.
Each is easy to write off on its own. A quiet month. An ad budget that crept up. An invoice to change your opening hours. None of them arrive labelled as the cost of the original decision, which is why they are rarely added together. Added together across a first year, they are the reason a cheap website can end up the most expensive thing you bought.
How to tell whether it applies to your site
You do not need a developer to work out whether this is your situation. Six questions get you most of the way. Can you say how many enquiries your website produced last month? Do you appear in search for what you actually sell, or only for your own business name? If you stopped paying for ads tomorrow, would anyone still arrive? When you last asked for a small change, were you quoted for it? Do you know who applies security updates, and when they last ran? Has this site already been rebuilt once?
If you cannot answer several of those, that is the finding. A website that produces no numbers you can see is a website nobody can tell is working. A site can look fine on screen and still be losing you customers, because the problem sits with the visitors who leave rather than the design they left behind.
What the guide covers
The guide is written for someone with a quote in front of them. It covers what a cheap quote includes and what it leaves for later, the five kinds of hidden cost, the warning signs worth checking on a site you already own, and a method for judging what a website returns rather than only what it costs.
It does not argue that dear is automatically better. Plenty of businesses are well served by a modest site. The argument is narrower: price the whole first year rather than the build, before you put two quotes side by side, because they are rarely being priced on the same basis.