Why Do Websites Cost So Much?

Written by Jenny Claxton
Posted

For many businesses, their online presence is a vital part of their marketing strategy. Find out how investing in your website can help you succeed.

Two miniature figures of builders wearing high hats and hi vis vests work on a crack in the ground.

I got a phone call the other week from my dad. He helps run a local community group and they’d been having some trouble with their WordPress website. During our conversation, he mentioned that he had seen the prices on our site and was astonished at the cost.

“Do people really pay that much for a website?!”

Well… YES!

For many businesses, charities, public services and community groups a substantial chunk of their marketing and communication budget goes on a website. A good website can help you attract new business, while a bad one might actually push customers away. (Luckily for my dad, once I’d applied a friends and family discount, I was able to fix his site for a cup of tea and unlimited access to his best biscuits.)

Why You Should Invest In Your Website

A hip new restaurant recently opened nearby us with lots of fanfare on social media, but their website doesn’t have their address, opening times or even a sample menu. They obviously spent ages crafting and curating their social media feeds, but the link in bio leads to an absolute disaster zone. Clearly I’m biased here, but a website is your digital shopfront and it’s hard to take someone with a bad website seriously.

Logan Roy from the TV show Succession, with the caption "I love you but you are not serious people'

You wouldn’t spend ages developing your brand and offer, and then settle for selling it from an upturned crate on a street corner. Ideally you’d visit some potential locations, employ an interior designer and fitting team to bring your brand to life, and hire a signwriter and window dresser to make you stand out from your neighbours. What’s more, you’d have budgeted those costs into your business plan from day one. The hip restaurant has several Instagram reels showing them redecorating the dining area, and fitting out the kitchen. Still I’m unlikely to go there and spend money as I don’t know exactly where it is or what they serve.

Websites are extra tricky as they combine technical know-how with design skills, while also taking into account marketing strategy and the target audience. A beautiful website is useless if it doesn’t tell your users what they need to know, but a cluttered page with too much information is just as bad. What are the chances that your nephew with a GCSE in Computing is also incredible at user experience design and knows cookie consent regulations? Cutting corners on your website just means you’ll have to endure having a bad website until you have the budget to do it properly – if you survive that long.

Having a well-built, accessible and user-friendly website is non-negotiable for many businesses these days. If your website is clunky, poorly organised and hard to use (or even worse, non-existent) then you can’t really complain when people give up and go over to a competitor instead.

What’s The Most A Website Can Cost?

Let’s look at this another way. What’s the most money you could reasonably spend to create a website? There are so many factors to think about; where the site is hosted, the amount of traffic it receives, how much content it holds, and who is making, editing and maintaining that content as well as the teams looking after the website code. You also need to consider ancillary costs, like legal services, payroll and an office for all the web team to work at.

For example, it’s thought the BBC website costs around £200 million per year, but the shows on iPlayer aren’t included at full price as they’ve been made for TV and adding them to iPlayer is reusing an existing asset. Wikipedia is edited entirely by volunteers so has almost no staffing or office costs, but estimates hosting alone at $10m per year. No matter which way you look at it, a high-profile international website with lots of content and visitors costs millions to run each year.

What about smaller sites, maybe just covering one country or region? The UK public service tenders currently lists a couple of website jobs. There is a contract for a new website with online ticket sales for a regional museum with a budget of £500k. A council is looking for a rebuild of a group of niche sub-sites for just over £400k. A council’s main website, a university or good-sized national brand would easily need to budget up to £1m to develop and run their website.

While it’s unlikely a small or medium organisation would need a 6 figure budget for their website, these numbers show that if you want to take your online presence seriously, you need to consider your website as an investment and budget accordingly.

The reality is that digital is a major marketing channel, and for increasing numbers of people, it’s the first place they will look for information. Companies and organisations that invest in their websites gain access to a potentially global audience, and have the opportunity to build customer relationships in a way offline businesses don’t.

What’s the Minimum I Should Budget For a Professionally Built Website?

In general, you’ll need at least £1000 to get a professional one-page microsite live. You can find developers offering to get you online for cheaper, but they are often inexperienced or unfamiliar with UK consumer behaviour. Other low cost agencies will give you a blank site to edit yourself or reuse the same basic design for every site. You are also unlikely to get any long-term support or follow-up with these cheaper agencies.

When you work with us, that money also covers our years of expertise and knowledge of the online market. At Red Spark Digital, we spend a significant amount of time with every client discussing their current needs as well as their long-term goals, so we can be sure that we choose the right platform for them and future-proof their investment. We always build in the foundations for a bigger site, meaning it will be easy to expand and develop the site as your business grows. We’ll also consider how to optimise your site for search engines, how to make it accessible and legally compliant, how to adapt the design to work on different devices and connection speeds, and how to make it as easy as possible for you to update the content when needed. If you’ve worked hard to build a great product or service, there’s nothing worse than feeling ashamed or let down by your marketing, so when you invest in a professional website you are also getting the confidence that it will accurately reflect your business.

Ok, But What About Free DIY Website Builders?

I love free websites and the first website I ever built was free – it had to be as I was a teenager without a bank account so couldn’t buy anything online even if I wanted to. The second website I made was also free. The third cost me £10, because now I was old enough to get a debit card so I bought a domain instead of using the default Geocities one. I probably make a free website every 6 months or so for a personal project or testing a certain setup for a client. It is 100% possible to make a serviceable website for almost no money, and if you like tech then it can even be a fun challenge.

However, hosting companies can give away these sites for free because they have massive limitations. You will probably have to use a preset domain, have almost no space for storage, no ability to take online payments, no access to fine-tune SEO meta tags and restrictions on the number of pages. Fonts and colour schemes are almost always limited and you’ll have to put up with the web builder’s branding all over your site. You might not be able to share the site publicly, or it might only be visible for a short period.

It didn’t matter that my Webflow site could only accept 5 form submissions per month, or that my Squarespace site was only viewable for 3 days, because I was testing things out and had found out what I needed to know. However, if the aim of your website is to make you or your company look professional and trustworthy, and to sell your products or services to users, these limitations aren’t acceptable. So even if you do plan to DIY your website, you will need to budget for some costs.

Having a quick look around at hosting, I’ve found a deal that would cost around £35 per year (you have to pay for 4 years upfront though) and includes a free domain for the first year. You’d have to install an open-source CMS on the server and then build the website yourself though.

Screengrabs of James Acaster on Great British Bake Off. He tells the judges "Started making it, had a breakdown, bon appetit"
Is this your experience of DIY website building?

As we saw from the hip new restaurant mentioned earlier, it’s easy to miss really obvious things and make rookie errors if you don’t know what you are doing. It’s also very common to end up massively out of your depth quite quickly. A simple idea to change the headline font leads you to reading up on CSS, which then leads you to inserting code snippets, and before you know it the images aren’t displaying any more and the headline is still in Arial.

For some people, designing and building a DIY website is a fun weekend project, in which case it can be great way to save money when starting a small business. However, if you find tech tricky, aren’t naturally good at design and layout, and don’t know where to begin with information architecture, then you have to question whether the result will be worth the effort and time you will put in. Just as you might attempt to repaint the bathroom wall yourself, most people would admit that installing a new shower, replumbing the toilet and tiling the floor was beyond them and that it was time to get a bathroom fitter in. Building a whole website from scratch is often more complex than you think, so there’s no shame in calling in a professional.

Your Time is Valuable

For small & medium business owners, outsourcing your website is a great way to save yourself a lot of stress, hassle and late nights on YouTube tutorials. Instead of worrying about how to code up structured meta-data, you can spend time fine-tuning your products, or networking with potential clients. You can also give people your website address, confident that they will find finished, useful, well-designed and fully functional pages awaiting them.

If you are interested in finding out more about how we could help with your website, whether it’s still in the planning phases, a half-finished DIY or you’ve just outgrown it, we’d love to chat! You can send us a message or book a free 20 minute intro call so we can explain exactly how we can help you level up online. If you do have a budget in mind, please let us know; we are really happy to work with you to find a solution that fits.

by Jenny Claxton

Jenny specialises in user experience and web design. Her sites balance the user needs against the business goals to make sure everyone gets what they want. Jenny believes that the internet should be accessible to everyone, and that running your website should be an easy part of your general admin. As a result, she has developed the Red Spark Digital training packages to help website owners feel confident and empowered to make basic changes and updates, as well as knowing when the time is right to call in extra help. When not being extremely online, she makes art and writes questions for TV game shows.

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