Someone will build you a website for £300. They are not necessarily lying, and the site may even be fine. But £300 is a price, not a cost, and the difference between them tends to show up over the following eighteen months. Here is where.
1. The domain in somebody else’s name
The commonest and the worst. The builder registers the domain on their own account because it is quicker, and it is never mentioned again — until you want to move, or they stop answering email, or they want a fee to release it. You then discover that the name customers know you by is legally theirs.
It costs nothing to avoid. Register the domain yourself, on your own account, with your own email, before anyone starts building. Give them access if they need it. Never give them ownership.
2. Hosting billed separately and annually
The £300 was for the design. Hosting arrives as its own invoice, often twelve months later, often at a number nobody mentioned. Ask what it costs and who it is with, in the first conversation.
3. Per-change fees
You assumed a phone number change was a phone number change. It is an hour’s billing with a one-hour minimum. Nothing wrong with a tradesperson charging for their time — you do too — but it needs to be known in advance, because it is what determines whether your site is still accurate in two years.
4. Stock photography
A cheap build is fast because the images come from a library. The result is a smiling model in a clean boiler suit that customers have seen on four other websites that week, and it reads exactly as what it is. Your own phone photographs of your own jobs, straight and well-lit, outperform any stock image — but someone has to take them, and on a £300 build that someone is you.
5. No SSL until a browser tells your customers
Certificates are free and take minutes, which is why it is so telling when one is missing. The cost is not the certificate; it is the browser warning a customer sees instead of your homepage.
6. The rebuild in year two
The largest hidden cost and the hardest to see coming. A site built to a £300 budget is built fast: a template, filled in, with the writing done in an afternoon. It looks finished. It ranks for nothing, because nothing on it was written around what customers actually search for, and within eighteen months you are paying somebody else to start again.
The £300 was not the cost. The £300 plus the second build plus the two years of the wrong site being the thing customers found — that was the cost.
The six questions
Ask these before any money moves, at any price:
- Who will the domain be registered to?
- What does hosting cost, who is it with, and who pays it?
- Is an SSL certificate included?
- What does a small change cost after launch?
- Do I get the files and the content if I leave?
- What happens if you stop trading?
A good builder at any price answers all six in a minute. Hesitation on the first is the answer to the whole list. If you would rather see the standard before discussing money at all, we’ll rebuild your homepage free and you can judge it against whatever else you are being quoted.