As the 1998 New Radicals song once told us... 'You Get What You Give'. Generally in life, the more hard work you put in, the more you'll reap the rewards. Or at least, that's what we're told the believe. Believe it or not, that also rings true for your website. The more you invest in it, the better it performs and the harder it'll work in promoting your business. That said, it always surprises us just how many people go down the bargain bucket route when it comes to website design and development. As a creative agency, our job is to guide clients and advise them on how to achieve the best design and promotional creativity outcomes possible. After all, we want them to get good returns and more conversions just as much as they do.
When businesses look to upgrade, change or start out with a new website, one of the first things they'll consider is price. It's probably the most important factor – with many wanting to get as much for as little as possible. Some even consider having a website as a ticked box. To them, it doesn't really matter how it looks, as long as it's there and they can say they've got one. We see this especially with people offering trade services like plumbing and building services, and small bricks-and-mortar stores.
Whatever your business sector or size – a cheap website often ends up costing you a lot more in the long run. There are likely hidden costs that will creep up, and there's always the risk of high bounce rates and lost conversions.
At Haddington & Haddington, we always build our websites in Webflow because we want to give our clients a quality product that performs in the ways they need it to. In making this choice, we'll admit that we're not the cheapest web design agency in Suffolk, but what you do get with us is a performance-focused website that complements your business and acts as your shop window. A lot of the clients we see across Suffolk, the South East and beyond have chosen the budget route with their web design, and are now looking to us to fix a cheap solution that became a problem very quickly. These folks had the inconvenience of rebuilding their current site, or just starting from scratch in a different platform.
In this blog, we'll take you through the real costs of a 'cheap' website.
Poor performance
Cheap websites have a bad reputation for their performance. A common assumption is that all websites are the same, so it doesn't matter what platform you have. The differences between a professionally built website and a cheap one aren't just design-focused – they also vary wildly in terms of functionality.
A cheap website may get you an online presence, but that doesn't mean it'll function well across all devices such as mobiles and tablets, or that it'll rank well in Google. In our experience, it'll often do the complete opposite, which means that businesses lose clients and vital leads due to high bounce rates.
We also see plenty of websites that have traffic going to them, but generate few conversions. This is usually because cheap websites are heavily templated, with a weak page flow and few clear calls to action. Budget templates are thrown together (sometimes using AI too), with very little thought into how human users move through content. As a rule of thumb, a website should tell visitors where they are and guide them towards the next action – whether that's filling in a contact form, getting a quote, booking a call, clicking a button, or signing up to a subscription. If your website doesn't do this, it becomes more of an online brochure site rather than one that captures leads.
Low quality hosting is terribly slow, which can lead to people leaving websites because they don't want to wait around. This in turn has an impact on SEO performance and user trust. People have busy lives nowadays. They don't want to wait a few minutes for a website to load on their mobile device. As more visitors leave, Google clocks this as low engagement and starts to rank the site lower. Unfortunately, these types of performance issues often mean one thing – starting over from scratch in a new platform. Rarely can they be fixed quickly with a few tweaks.
Suffering SEO
This is another time consuming and expensive problem that cheap websites cause. When you build a budget website and launch it, it'll likely have poorly formed URLs, messy page hierarchies and a lack of clear SEO copywriting and organised information architecture.
This results in a website that doesn't align with search intent as it struggles to climb the ladder in Google's search results. Even when traffic does come to the site, it may not convert. We'd fix this by restructuring the site and optimising content for SEO. If this problem sounds familiar to you, get in touch with us so we can discuss how to improve your traffic with a thorough website re- optimisation.
What actually is a 'cheap' website
From our perspective, 'cheap' websites are the type that cost anywhere from £200-£600, where turning out a website quickly takes precedence over design, user experience, structure and SEO. When you pay this little for a website, you don't have the option to customise features, or the time and budget to consider your SEO, content hierarchy, the conversion journey of the site or how to scale or improve it as your business grows.
Most of the websites we build in Webflow usually start at more than double these costs, depending on site size and flexibility. We know there are cheaper web design agencies out there, but we pride ourselves on building sites that are super fast, SEO-focused and made to develop alongside your business needs. A professional website build is designed to stick around for a long time, generating enquiries and reinforcing trust and quality. For many businesses, it's actually more cost-effective to spend more on a website the first time around, because this removes the hassle of switching platforms or having a major rebuild later down the line because of months or even years of lost business.
Your website is often judged based on how you look compared to your competitors. So if someone is looking for a particular service in the Suffolk or the surrounding areas, they'll also be taking a look at other websites to see which one they trust the most. If two businesses look very similar on paper, but one has a better website with clear information, a more professional design and quicker speeds, that alone can give them the edge. This is especially important if you're a local business competing for local search terms.
