Your cheap “Bargain Bin” website will destroy your business

Imagine you found a brand new Ferrari in an alleyway. There's a dodgy looking man stood next to it. He walks up to you and he says something to you. Here mate, you can have this Ferrari for 20 quid or something to that effect. Looking surprised, you Oh, thank you, kind sir.

I would love to purchase the Ferrari from you. Although, there's something weird about the car keys. He gives you them and you realize that they're made out of cardboard. And then you look down the alleyway and you also realize that the car is made out of cardboard. And that's exactly what a bargain bin website is.

It looks something like this. This is just a bin I found in the office. Because from a distance, that bargain bin website looked like a right deal. But when you get up close to it, you start to realize that it's just a soggy piece of cardboard. And yeah, I'm going to stop this metaphor now and we're going to move on because in this video, we're going to be talking about the bargain bin website and why it's probably really bad for your business.

It's filthy in bottom of this bin. By the way, you can trust what I say. I've designed and built hundreds of websites over the years. And I've been doing this for about 25 years now. So, I do know the real value of building a good website.

I also know the terrible value of spending 20 quid and then finding out you've got a dud website. And that's what this video is going to address right now. I get it and I understand why you'd want to spend bargain bin prices on a website. 20 quid is damn appealing. However, what you quickly realize is that it has very serious other problems that are going to cause you endless problems down the line.

Basically, all you're looking at is alleyway of problems from problem one, two, through to about a thousand problems. The phrase buy cheap and buy twice could never be truer for something like a website. You see, a website isn't just a series of pretty pictures. Your website will become the center of everything that you choose to do in your business if it's done properly. Spending 20 quid though will mean that it's not done properly.

Probably don't know now. Pretty much definitely. But first, we have to talk about spanners. Come on. Now, I couldn't find a spanner.

So, we're going to have to make do with this bin, this screwdriver, this PC, and this bag. Now, the real cost of a bargain bin website is the fact that it's going to look like a bag of spanners. This isn't going to work, is it? Just like everyday life, a website relies on first impression. If somebody goes to your website for the first time, looks at it and thinks, "Oh my god, this website is a bag of spanners," they're not going to return in a hurry.

The contact form not working, the fonts looking a bit strange, the colors not looking great, basically the site not looking professional. And when you're creating a business website, the website looking professional is a very important thing to get right. Just realized this table turns. Better not do that actually cuz the computer cost a lot of money. The real issue here with a bag of spanners is more user experience rather than anything else.

If the website's a bit glitchy, if it doesn't work on mobile or, god forbid, takes 10 seconds to load, the first impression that you're trying to create just isn't going to work. And even if you've only spent 20 quid on this cardboard Ferrari, by that point, nobody's going to want to visit it or drive it. I'm really hammering home that metaphor, aren't I? And if you're going to spend 20 quid, at least make sure the information on it is correct. you can at least do that for me rather than doing anything else.

I know the the other stuff's difficult, but let alone the fancy bollocks like brand damage and other words that we may talk about. The real issue with a bargain bin website is that it probably isn't built very well. So, it won't perform well. And that's what we're going to go talk about now. And when I'm talking about performance, what I mean is loading slowly.

And I have a horror story to tell you here. I once had a potential client come to me and they hadn't bought a cheap website. They'd spent £60,000 on it. Yes, that's right, £60,000. And in that process of spending £60,000, they were now spending multiples of thousands of pounds running Google ads.

And the further issue with this was that whilst they were running Google ads, they were getting zero leads every single month. So at this point, they'd spent £60,000 on a website and then multiples of thousands of pounds on Google ads to return an absolute fat zero of anything. So the issue with this at this point is that they've wasted nearly £100,000 and seen no return whatsoever. So I had a look at their website and even at this website, this £60,000 website, I was shocked to discover that the website took 10 seconds to load. That on Google page speed it was 20 out of 100 on mobile.

The website was an absolute car crash. And the solution, unfortunately, was that they had to spend £8,000 again with us this time for us to build them a proper website that loaded quickly, that worked on Google page speed, that allowed Google Ads to crawl it properly. Now, you probably haven't spent £60,000 on your bargain bin website. If you buy something like a Wix website, for example, doesn't work properly with Google page speed. The contact form probably doesn't work either, and you can forget any custom tracking whatsoever with something like Google Tag Manager.

If you want to use the website as a marketing tool in any way, i.e. you want to send traffic to it and get a result out of the other end, you're going to struggle because you've got a bargain bin website. Again, you know, that's the issue, right? But even if you fixed all that and you finally got a good website, you move on to the next issue. Then let's talk about things being done.

So, we've established your website doesn't load properly because you spent 20 quid. It doesn't look nice because you've spent 20 quid, but you've got it a bit fixed and now you think you're happy. This is the key mistake right here that I see most businesses make. They think when a website is done and they can wash the hands of it and they'll never have to spend money on it again. It couldn't be further from the truth.

Whether you've got a bargain bin website or you spent multiples of thousands of pounds, your website is never done. Things change. Your marketing moves on. You have to change and react to how the market is. You have to change and react to what your competitors are doing.

The key difference is this. Most people think they have a website. Some people think they have a digital marketing tool. Whilst the second one, having a digital marketing tool, sounds a little bit up your own ass. It's actually the attitude that you need to have about your website.

And if this thing that you have here is a piece of none of the other activities that you do in your marketing will ever work properly. If you want your website to be a marketing cornerstone, you have to do it right and spend a serious amount of money. If you just want a website because you think you need one because you're a new business, you can pay any amount of money and the money you spend doesn't really matter. But be assured that website will bring you nothing. It'll be no kind of marketing tool whatsoever.

The main real point I'm getting at with this video is that whilst the bargain bin website won't cost you much to make, it'll cost you everything in terms of your marketing because your marketing won't be able to work until you invest seriously in a proper website. If you want to do your website right, I guess you go look at the video where I talk about the 317 websites that I've built and the 24 lessons I learned from it. It's up there right now.