Buy cheap, buy twice: what a cheap website really costs

A cheap website ends up costing you more than a proper one. You save on the invoice, then you pay for it in customers who never get in touch, and most of the time you’re buying another website within a year.

There are times when cheap is fine, and I’ll get to those. But if you run a business and you need your website to bring in work, the bargain bin is a bad place to shop.

I’ve been building websites since 2010 (over 400 of them now) and a lot of the people who come to us are replacing something cheap that didn’t work out. If you want the full picture on budgets, I’ve written about how much a website costs in the UK. This one’s about what happens after you’ve gone for the cheap option.

What counts as a cheap website?

For a business, I’d call anything around £3,000 or under cheap. That’s the danger zone. Three grand is a lot of money to you, and it’s just about enough for somebody to take it off you without doing much for it.

At that price you nearly always get the same thing. Somebody buys a £50 WordPress theme, swaps the logo and the colours, sticks it on the cheapest hosting going and leaves it to rot. Six months to a year later it’s slow, something’s stopped working, and you’re shopping for another website.

These days there’s a new version of it too. Some TikTok influencer will offer to knock you up a fully AI-generated website for the same money, or less. The same rules apply. You’ll get a website, but nobody will know what it’s built on, and when the contact form stops sending there’s nobody who knows how to fix it.

Down at £500, or a website builder for a few quid a month, you’ve got Ferrari expectations on a £500 budget. What turns up is more like a Ferrari made of cardboard. Looks alright from the end of the street. Get up close and it’s a soggy box with a badge on it.

The cost that never shows up on an invoice

Nobody sends you a bill for the enquiries you didn’t get. That’s why a cheap website can look like a bargain for years.

Somebody lands on your website for the first time. The fonts look a bit off, the photos are stretched, it takes an age to load on their phone, and when they finally press send on the contact form nothing happens. They don’t ring you to tell you any of this. They go back to Google and click on the next business.

You never know they were there. You just notice the phone’s not ringing much and put it down to a quiet month. Then another quiet month.

That’s the real price of a cheap website, and it’s the one people ignore because you can’t put a number on it.

What happens when you run ads to a cheap website?

This is where it gets expensive quickly.

You pay for every click on an ad whether the page loads or not. If your website is slow, or falls to bits on a phone, a big chunk of that money goes on people who gave up before they saw anything.

Wolf Laundry is the best example I’ve got. They were spending £3,000 a month on Google Ads and getting zero leads. Their website took ten seconds to load, and over half the people clicking the ads never saw it. We rebuilt it and it loads in about a second now. They were getting 30 to 60 leads a month within weeks of launch, and it’s 150 to 200 a month now.

That’s what a slow website does to an ad budget, whatever it cost to build. And cheap ones are slow, because nobody built them with speed in mind. A bloated theme with a pile of plugins on bargain hosting will do that to you every time.

And don’t even get me started on AI-generated websites. You’ll have no idea how it’s built, or even whether you’re properly meeting GDPR and PECR. Then when something breaks, you’ll have to go back to your AI and ask it to have a go at fixing something neither of you fully understands.

Cheap setups also make tracking a pain. If you can’t see which ads bring in enquiries, you can’t tell what’s working, so you keep paying for the stuff that isn’t.

Paying for it twice

Buy cheap, buy twice. It’s an old saying and it fits websites better than most things.

Pay £3,000, and when the thing falls over you’re paying again. Now you’ve spent £6,000 and you’re back at the start. You could’ve paid £6,000 once to somebody who’d do it properly.

The second time round costs you more than money, too. You sit through the whole process again. You dig out the photos, rewrite the words, try to remember your logins (good luck) and chase whoever built the first one to hand over the domain. None of that time comes back.

How do you spot a cheap website before you buy one?

A few warning signs when the quotes come in:

• A “fully custom” website for £3,000 or less. Ask how many hours that buys and what they’re paying themselves an hour. The maths rarely works.
• They send you theme demos to choose from. That’s somebody else’s design with your logo about to go on it.
• Nobody mentions looking after it after launch. A website needs hosting, updates, security and backups. If none of that comes up, it’s going to be left to rot.
• They can’t tell you how fast it’ll load. Or they look at you funny for asking.
• Hosting is “included” for next to nothing. Cheap hosting is one of the most common reasons a website is slow.
• Nobody asks about your customers. If they don’t want to know who the website’s for and what it needs to do, they’re building a brochure and hoping.

If you’ve already got a website and you’re wondering, put your address into Google PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile score. Then fill in your own contact form and see if the email ever turns up. You’d be surprised how often it doesn’t.

Does spending more guarantee a good website?

No. You could spend £50,000 and still end up with a turd. More money buys more time and more skill, and whether you get a website that brings in work still depends on who you hand it to. I wrote about choosing a web design agency if that’s where you’re at.

There’s a floor though. Go below it and nobody can build a decent business website and still pay their rent.

When is a cheap website fine?

Cheap is the right call in two cases. I’d go cheap, or have a go yourself with a website builder or AI, if:

• It’s a hobby. You make candles at the weekend and want somewhere to show them off. Crack on.
• You’re testing a brand-new idea. You don’t know if anybody wants the thing yet. Throw a simple page up, see if anyone bites, and spend proper money once you know they do.

Building a website with AI is still pretty new, but it does work. I built one in about 20 minutes with Claude to see what the fuss was about. For a hobby or an idea you’re testing, I’d give it a go.

In both cases nobody’s relying on the website to pay the bills. The moment it needs to bring in work, or you’re about to put ad money behind it, the cheap one becomes a problem.

If £500 is all you’ve got right now and you do need a business website, save up. Put that £500 away every month until you’ve got about £6,000. It feels slow. It’s still better than paying for the same website twice.

A website is never finished anyway

Even if the cheap one works, that’s not the end of it. Your business will change and your competitors will get themselves better websites, and meanwhile somebody has to keep yours updated and secure. Ours are looked after by our sister company, Better Hosting, from £150 a month plus VAT. Leave one alone long enough and it goes off like milk, whatever you paid.

So if you’re about to hand over £3,000 for a website, ask what you’re not getting for that money. There’s a lot.