A £200 website isn't automatically a bad decision — but the price on the invoice is rarely the whole cost. Here are the costs that don't show up on it, and a simple way to think about them.
1. The lost-enquiry cost
This is the big one, and it's different for every business, so here's an illustration with made-up numbers rather than a statistic. Assume your site gets 500 visitors a month. Assume a dated, confusing site turns 0.5% of them into enquiries, and a clearer one turns 1% into enquiries. That's 2.5 enquiries a month versus 5. Assume you win one job in three, at £1,000 a job. The difference works out at roughly £800 a month of work.
Those assumptions are mine, not measured results — your traffic, enquiry rate and job value will be different, and the gap could be bigger or smaller. The point is to run the sum with your own numbers. Even small changes in how many visitors get in touch can outweigh the difference in what you paid for the site.
2. The time tax
Cheap websites often need owner-fiddling. Updating a price, changing opening hours, adding a service — each change can mean time spent figuring out a tool you don't know. As an illustration: if a change takes you an hour and you make twenty a year, that's twenty hours of your time you could have spent on paid work.
3. The brand drag
If your van is clean, your work is professional, and your testimonials are strong — but your website looks 2014 — you're leaking trust at the most expensive point of the sales funnel. The visitor has already searched, found you, clicked through. And then bounced because the site says "amateur". You rarely get a second click.
4. The hosting trap
Cheap sites are often built on cheap hosting that goes down, gets hacked, or expires when the original freelancer disappears. Then you're paying for an emergency rebuild, and you may lose your email or search rankings along the way. It's a common story.
5. The SEO ground state
Cheap templates often skip the basics: no structured data, slow pages on a phone, no clear path to getting in touch, no sensible links between pages. You can spend a year not ranking, then pay someone a monthly fee to retrofit what should have been there on day one.
Adding it up
I'm not going to give you a total, because I'd be making it up. Lost enquiries, your time, brand drag, a hosting emergency and a later SEO fix are all real costs, but how big they are depends on your business. Do the illustration above with your own numbers and compare it with what a properly built site costs you each year. For most businesses that get their work from people searching online, the answer is clear.
The point
Cheap can turn out to be expensive. A properly built site — clear, quick on a phone, with structured data, decent hosting and a design that matches your business — isn't a luxury for a small business. It's the basics.
AJH Technology websites start at £150 a month with nothing upfront, on a 12-month minimum, with hosting and monthly changes included. Talk to me before you spend the £200.