The hidden costs of a cheap website

Let us be clear at the start, because this is usually an article arguing that you should spend more. Cheap is not the problem. We have argued at length that the cost of building a website fell dramatically and that prices should have followed.

The problem is a specific bundle that often travels with the lowest price: nobody owns it, nobody checked it, and nobody is available. Any of those can occur at any price point. They just cluster at the bottom.

The form that goes nowhere

The most expensive fault we see, by a distance.

A contact form sits on the site. A visitor fills it in. They see "thanks, we will be in touch". Nothing is sent anywhere. The enquiry does not bounce, nothing errors, no warning appears in any inbox.

The owner concludes, over months, that the website does not generate enquiries. It generates them and drops them. The cost is not the price of the website, it is every job that quietly went to somebody else.

Test it today. Submit your own form and see whether it arrives. Then check the spam folder, because the second most common version of this fault is that it arrives and gets filtered.

The domain in somebody else's name

You pay for a website. The designer registers the domain, because it is easier and you did not know to ask. Their name is on it.

Two years later you want to move, or they stop answering, or they stop trading. The domain is not yours. Recovering it ranges from a mildly awkward email to genuinely impossible, and in the meantime your business address on the internet, printed on your van and your invoices, belongs to someone else.

This is the single most consequential thing on this page, and it is free to prevent. Ask the question before you sign, per what to check in a quote.

The listing nobody claimed

For a local business, the Google Business Profile drives more enquiries than the website does. It is also the thing most likely to be left undone, because it is not part of "building a website".

An unclaimed or half-finished profile means wrong hours over a bank holiday, no photographs, no categories, and no way to collect reviews properly. The site can be immaculate and the business still be invisible on the map.

The page a machine cannot read

A growing number of cheap sites are built so that the content only appears once the browser has run JavaScript. To a person it looks fine. To some crawlers, link previews and AI assistants, the page is close to empty.

This is not exotic. It is the default behaviour of several popular tools, and it is entirely invisible unless someone checks. Which is why "we fetched it with JavaScript off and here is what came back" belongs in the evidence a supplier hands you.

Nobody to ring

Everything above is fixable. The compounding cost is having nobody to fix it.

A site with no support does not fail dramatically. It goes stale. The prices are last year's, the phone number is the old one, the member of staff who left is still on the team page. Each is a small thing that nobody wants to raise an invoice over, and together they say something about the business that is not true.

Then something actually breaks, on a weekend, and the search for whoever built it begins. We wrote about that specific situation because it is common enough to deserve its own page.

What cheap-and-fine looks like

None of this is an argument for spending more. It is an argument for spending on the right four things, which are not expensive:

• The domain in your name, which costs nothing extra
• A form somebody has actually tested
• A claimed and completed Google Business Profile
• A named person who answers, with a known response time

A site meeting those, built quickly and cheaply, is a perfectly good website. A five-thousand-pound site missing two of them is not.

The price is not the signal. What happens after launch is the signal, and it is knowable in advance if you ask.