Your website is one of the most valuable sales tools you can have. Though having a cheap website build does nothing but scares away traffic, thus, banishing your website to the outskirts, never to be unearthed again isn’t what we mean by having a website. In this modern climate, just having a website won’t cut the mustard. A cheap website build presents as low-hanging fruit that lures you into thinking that just as long as you have a website you’re saving money and cutting overhead costs. Ironically, cheap websites will cost you more than just money in the long term. What do we mean by this? Don’t worry, you’ve come to the right place. You’ll soon understand the cost-sapping dangers of building a website on the cheap.
The lure of an amateur cheap website build
Website builders such as Wix and Squarespace offer cheap affordable website construction that appeals more to the amateur user or to small businesses. In essence, it’s great; you don’t need to be a professional coder or understand its lingo to understand how to put a website together. These website builders allow you to just drag and drop the elements together like a toy in a Kinder Surprise chocolate egg.
So you’ve just cut some costs and created your website on an affordable amateur website builder, now how do you get it to function and rake in the traffic and conversions? This is where the long term costs come in. You’ll end up having to seek help from professionals — who are professionals for a reason — to help you produce a better functioning website that actually converts and makes you money.
For example, one of our current clients—before they came to us—had gone two months without any new customers because they chose to go down the cheap website route. Ironically, those amateur website builders did not teach them how to create a website that attracts new customers. This is where our agency came in to help.
Poor cheap website build design
With cheap website builds comes generic, bland website templates. Colours and an engaging page structure help convey your brand’s personality. Uniformity of branding is an important aspect that needs to be applied across all your marketing channels and your website should not be neglected.
Additionally, websites that are designed poorly will also affect the website’s functionality. Visitors come to your page for a specific reason. They could come wanting solutions or information to their queries. If your website is both poorly designed or lacks vital information, they will find it hard to complete any valuable actions, such as filling in a contact form. Of course, this is under the unlikely conclusion that they stay on your website long enough to work through your meandering website. The time needed to convince visitors to stay on your page is dwindling, and it is commonly said that first impressions count.
Poor conversion rates
Don’t let your website be the wall that visitors use to bounce away from. So you have a website, but your visitors aren’t completing the actions you want them to take. What is the point of having a website if it doesn’t drive enquiries or convert customers? Doing nothing, waiting for the magic beans— you traded for that cow — to grow into a beanstalk of possibilities just won’t cut it. You’re going to have to invest, research, and optimise the shortcomings of your website to improve its performance. In the online marketing world, I believe they call this SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Your website should provide a step-by-step guide that holds the hands of your visitors from the moment of their arrival, all the way to where they convert (buying a product, signing up to a newsletter or watching a video).
A website must go through constant tweaks and changes to truly maximise its functionality. Through A/B testing, you can constantly trial two different pages to see which function works best. For example, you could test against each other two call-to-action buttons to see which is most likely to be clicked on. Take Amazon for example, which invested a lot of research into perfecting their call-to-action buttons, from the tinkering of the colour, down to the messaging. On every product page, Amazon has two buttons, Buy Now and Add to Basket. The Add to Basket button would appear first and move customers into a confirming shopping cart screen with potential upsells. While the ‘Buy Now’ button below would skip the shopping cart and try to send customers one step ahead into a shipping address selection page – essentially a very subtle shortcut.
You don’t need to be Amazon, who throw millions into R&D (research and development), to get similar results. Choosing a quality marketing agency to create your website will make sure you are getting the most out of your website.
Reliable support
What happens when the cheap website you built is subjected to technical issues or security breaches? Who do you turn to, and how long does it take for the issue to get seen? Cheap website packages are most likely to have been built by inexperienced developers, which leave your website more vulnerable to these problems. If your business is purely online-based then this is a potential damning problem that looms over you. It’s even more of a problem if your business requires you to hold on to the personal data of your customers.
But don’t be scared, we wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t offer you some form of solution to all of these pitfalls. Want further insight? At Click Return, we use the latest technologies, years of experience and extensive industry research to create top-performing websites that convert. Get in touch with our team if you would like to find out how we can help you and your business.
We also run a Digital Marketing Course to help your website conversion rates.
