You needed a website in a hurry, someone - possibly a relative of a friend - offered to do it for £300, maybe less. Or maybe you spent a weekend with a drag-and-drop builder, a free Wordpress theme, and got something live that didn't look...terrible.
Whichever - it's done, it looks reasonable, and you haven't thought much about it since.
The question worth asking isn't what you paid, though - it's what it's costing you every month it isn't working properly.
The invoice you never receive
The upfront cost of a cheap website is visible. Everything after that isn't. The cost of the customers who landed on it and left because it looked untrustworthy don't send you a note explaining why. The cost of the enquiries you didn't get because Google couldn't make sense of the site don't show up anywhere. The cost of the sale that didn't happen because the mobile layout was broken, or the contact form wasn't working, or the page took seven seconds to load - none of that gets logged. It just doesn't happen.
This is what makes cheap websites so persistent. The cost is real, but it's invisible, and invisible costs are easy to ignore.
What "cheap" usually means in practice
It tends to mean a template that was installed but never properly configured. Stock photography that was chosen for availability rather than relevance. Copy lifted from the old site, or written in a hurry, without anyone asking whether it actually says the right things to the right people.
It means no serious thought given to how Google reads the site, how fast it loads, how it behaves on a phone. It means a site built to be finished rather than built to perform. The person who built it moved on when it went live. Nobody has looked at it properly since.
That's not always the fault of whoever built it - the chances are that they did exactly what was asked for, which was a website, done cheap, done quick.
So, the brief was met. The problem is that the brief was just...the wrong brief.
The trust problem
Your website is often the first serious encounter a potential customer has with your business. Before they've spoken to you, before they've seen your work, before any relationship has been established, they're looking at your site and forming a judgment.
That judgment happens fast and it sticks - a site that looks dated, feels generic, or behaves oddly on a phone creates doubt. Not necessarily conscious doubt - as we covered earlier this month, many judgments like this are subconscious - so more a vague sense that something's slightly off.
People can't always articulate why they didn't get in touch with a particular business - all things considered, it just didn't feel...right.
The frustrating part is that this can happen to excellent businesses. A company that does outstanding work, treats its customers well, and knows its industry inside out can still lose enquiries to a competitor who does average work but has a website that inspires more confidence. The website isn't the whole story, but it's often the first chapter, and first chapters matter.
The rebuild tax
A lot of businesses end up paying twice. Once for the cheap site, and then again - usually considerably more - to replace it when they finally decide it isn't doing what it should. The second build also tends to take longer than it would have otherwise, because there's a bad foundation to understand and unpick before anything new can be built properly.
There's also the cost of the time in between. Two years on a website that was quietly turning people away is two years of lost opportunity that doesn't come back. The cheapest website, in the long run, is almost always the one that was done properly the first time.
What "properly" actually means
It doesn't necessarily mean expensive. It means built with a clear understanding of who the site is for and what it needs to do. It means copy that speaks to actual customers rather than describing the business in the abstract. It means a structure that makes sense to both visitors and search engines. It means someone who will still be responsible for it in six months.
A properly built website isn't a cost. It's the thing that makes everything else in your marketing work harder.
Where we come in
If you're not sure whether your current website is working for your business or against it, Status 218 can give you an honest assessment. No jargon, no sales pitch - just a clear, honest, picture of where things stand. If you'd like us to give your current site a once-over, then get in touch with us today for a no-obligation chat.