Creating a business website can be a time-consuming and costly proposition. You have to hire skilled website designers, get hosting, hire content writers, and make sure that your website is up to the mark. However, all these services can add up significantly, easily exceeding the budget you have allocated for this aspect of your business.
Every small business owner looks for different ways to reduce costs in their company without affecting their workings. When it comes to designing a website, you want it to be professional, contain all the necessary information, load speedily, and look great. With this in view, here we look at the best ways to build a low-cost business website.
1. It’s Crucial To Use an Affordable yet Reliable Website Platform
When you start looking, you will find a wide range of website building platforms available today. Using one of these can be the right choice if you want to get your site working very quickly. With website builders, you wouldn’t have to hire the services of a professional web development expert.
These platforms have straightforward drag and drop functionality that you can experiment with. However, there are certain limitations with free website builders, in terms of functions, but you can keep your website cost at the minimum levels.
WordPress is an incredibly popular platform that many small business owners use to create a professional-looking website within the shortest time. Look for an affordable hosting provider to maintain low costs.
2. Plan the Kind of Websites That You Want
If you want an affordable business website, you must put some thought into it to determine its functionality and design. This would be possible only when you have planned everything correctly, which would mean choosing the right theme template and plugins for building your business website.
3. Look for Cost-Effective Hosting Options
No matter what kind of website you design and plan, you would still need web hosting to ensure that it is visible on the internet. Many hosting providers run specials at different times, and you can keep an eye out for these. Sometimes, new customers can also benefit from an up to 50% discount during the first year. If you want a more cost-effective hosting option, purchase a hosting plan of three years or more.
When you are looking for a web hosting provider, check out various options available. Read their online reviews, understand what kind of features they provide what their uptime and performance are. Shortlist the topmost hosting providers and then compare all the features and aspects along with pricing. Determine which provider offers good quality services at affordable price points. When you are just starting, look for a shared hosting plan.
This is a basic hosting solution where multiple users are on the same server resources, which means that they share the costs. You can always upgrade the shared hosting plan at a later point. Once you feel that your website requires more resources, you can opt for a VPS hosting or dedicated hosting. However, shared hosting is a good option at the outset, and it helps you keep your costs at a minimum.
4. Use Ready Templates
The cost of templates can be quite high, and the one way to control this is by using a ready template. For example, the WordPress platform has a large number of free themes and plugins. You can mix and match and add the plugins that you want to keep the costs low. Look for a theme that matches your overall business image and branding. You can look for these on Theme Forest, Template Monster, Elegant Themes, Themify.me and Solo Stream.
5. Opt for Free Stock Photos
If you want to create an attractive and well-balanced website, you would need to add some imagery to it. They are a crucial aspect of your digital marketing strategy and help visitors better information about your service or product. They also boost your search engine results and create an engaging website. However, creating photographs can be a time-consuming affair.
Purchasing images from paid websites can be expensive, as each image can cause between 10 and $50. If you own a small business and do not want to invest a large amount of money at the outset, you can opt for royalty-free images or free stock images. There are many websites such as pixabay.com, Negative Space, pexel.com that you can get these on. It is an excellent way to create an attractive, engaging, budget-friendly website yet.
6. Consider Designing a Smaller Website
Adding too many pages to a website is time-consuming and expensive. When you have a website with multiple pages, you have to look for the images and add content to it, which increases the cost. So when you are planning your website structure, consider using a minimum number of pages. Try to see how you can categorise products and services to include that information on fewer pages instead of having one page for service or product. It will help to reduce the overall cost of your website significantly.
7. Give Unnecessary Features a Miss
It can be quite tempting to use different types of content, add cool tools or great videos to your business website. While it’s always great to add these features, it can become expensive. If you don’t need them when you are starting, you can add them at a later point when you earn a sufficient amount of revenue that will help you bear the costs of these added features. Maintain simplicity in your website without affecting quality for relevancy of information. That way, your customers will still get all the information they need without the clutter.
Various things go into creating a simple, professional, yet cost-effective website. Do not embark on this process in a hurry. Consider all the options available on the market and determine which platform will work best for you. You can always start with the most straightforward option right now and then move on to a more complex website with the larger number of pages and other advanced features and functions, later on.
8. Hire Freelance Website Designers
If you are not confident about building a website yourself even on the free platforms, look for the services of skilled website designers that provide cost-efficient services. Many freelance professionals offer excellent services at reasonable pricing. They will also customise their solutions and work with you to determine what your requirements for your business website are.
Make sure they have the skills to design and develop as well as maintaining your website. There will always be various things that you need to add, remove and make changes to down the track. The professional you hire should be able to meet these requirements as you would not want to deal with multiple people for the same job.
Keep in mind that there would be certain ongoing costs when you engage the services of these professionals or want to add certain features to your website over the years. Set aside some amount of your digital marketing budget to maintain your website and keep it working seamlessly.
In Closing
No matter how big or small your business or which industry you operate in, having an online presence is a crucial aspect. Modern-day consumers are very digitally-driven and prefer to conduct online searches even before they step into brick-and-mortar stores or make any purchase. They will assess your professionalism and standing in the market based on your website, how well it is built, how perfectly it functions and more.
So as mentioned earlier, while creating a cost-effective website, don’t compromise on aspects such as good quality content, a professional-looking website with the right kind of theme layout and more. Having a business website will help you provide your customers with what they need and reach them where they are.
However, there is no need to go over budget with this aspect of your digital marketing strategy. Following the steps mentioned above will help you save some dollars when building your business website. Keep these pointers in view even if you are hiring a professional web designer for the job.
For more information about how to reduce costs in your business, contact the experts at Benchmark Cost Solutions at this number – 02 9525 0777. If you prefer, write to us at this email address, and we will revert quickly.
Thanks for reading,
Benchmark Cost Solutions Team
02 9525 0777
