A website built cheaply, by a relative or a handy friend, is not a mistake in itself. Sometimes it is exactly right for a start. The problem is rarely the price or the person. The problem is that, after launch, nobody handed anything over to you.
You have a website, but not its keys. And you find that out on exactly the day you need them.
Where the real cost hides
The cost of a cheap website never appears on an invoice. It shows up in three places you do not see directly:
- Customers who leave without telling you. Someone looks you up on their phone, the page loads slowly or the form does not work, so they call the next name on the list. You get no notification that it happened.
- Your time. Every price change, every holiday opening time, every new photo waits on someone else's availability, someone with a different job and a different life.
- The rebuild. If the foundations cannot carry what you want to add later (bookings, payments, a second language), you end up paying again for the same website.
None of these is certain. All three are more likely when you do not know what you have.
The twenty-minute inventory
Take a sheet of paper and answer each point. If any answer is "I don't know", you have found the first thing to fix.
The domain
Whose name is it registered in? Do you have an account with the company it is registered with? When does it expire, and which card renews it? A domain in someone else's name, left to lapse, means the address your customers know you by is no longer yours.
The hosting
Where does the site live? Who pays, and with which card? Do you have your own account there, or only the person who built it?
The admin panel
Do you have a user of your own, with your own password, not a borrowed one? Do you know who else has access? If you cannot change a phone number on the site yourself, you do not really have access.
The backups
Are they made automatically? Where are they kept (ideally not on the same server)? Has anyone ever tried to restore one? A backup that has never been tested is a hope, not a backup.
The form and the email
Right now, send a message through the contact form on your own site. Does it arrive? Where? If your email address is on your domain, who manages it?
The licences
If the site uses a paid theme or paid plugins, whose name are the licences in? If they lapse, the site stops getting security updates.
Signs it is already costing you
A few things you can check today, no technical knowledge needed:
- On a phone, the site loads noticeably slower than on a laptop, or only reads with zooming.
- The browser shows a security warning next to the address.
- The last content change was more than a year ago, because asking was too much hassle.
- You search Google for what you do plus your town, and you do not appear.
- You are not sure the messages from the form reach anyone.
The sum you do yourself
I will not give you figures, because yours are the only ones that matter. Answer three questions:
- How many enquiries a month would a working site bring you, and what is a new customer worth to you on average?
- How many hours did you lose last year waiting for small changes?
- What would it cost to rebuild everything from scratch if you lost access to the domain or the hosting tomorrow?
If the answer to the first question is bigger than you expected, the cheap site is no longer cheap.
What to ask for next time, whoever builds the site
- The domain and hosting in your name, in your accounts.
- An administrator user of your own, and a short walkthrough of how to change text and photos yourself.
- Automatic backups, stored somewhere else, and a restore tested at least once.
- A test on a phone, not only on a big screen.
- A clear answer to "who fixes the site when it breaks, and how fast?".
None of this depends on how good the person who built the site is. It depends on what you are handed at the end.
If you ran the inventory and ended up with a lot of "I don't know", write to me through the contact form and I will help you get your access back. If you want to see what you receive at handover when you work with me, it is all described in the packages.