A professional website is a necessity for all businesses these days. The majority of consumers find businesses through online search and when they land on your website, you only have a few seconds to impress them. If your website doesn’t look good or it’s annoying to use, people will leave and go elsewhere, and you will lose that potential sale. That’s why it is so important that you hire a professional website designer to build and manage the site for you.
However, designing and building a website can be very expensive, and it is important that you manage the cost. A good website will help you to generate more revenue but if you let the cost get out of control, you will not benefit from that increase in sales. You will also struggle to run effective marketing campaigns if you pour your entire budget into the website. The good news is, there are some simple ways that you can cut the cost of building and running a website.
Find Cheaper Hosting Services
Finding the right hosting service for your website is so important. You need to make sure that your site can handle the level of traffic that you get, especially during a growth period. A good hosting service will also reduce website downtime, so it is important that you go with a reliable company. But you need to balance the level of service with the cost so you can manage your finances properly. GoDaddy is one of the most popular hosting services there is, and you can get GoDaddy hosting at a reduced price if you shop around for some coupons. In some cases, you can get up to 90% discount, which is a huge saving. As well as shopping around for coupons, you should also make sure to compare a lot of different services instead of going for the first one you find. Just make sure that you are not compromising on quality.
Use Templates
Building an entire website from scratch is a lot more expensive than using a template. A lot of businesses go for the first option because they have some specific ideas about what they want from their site and they don’t want to compromise. That’s fine, but there are some amazing templates out there and they are very customizable, so you can still get the site that you need and it won’t cost as much. Having a template in place means that the developer does not need to spend too much time designing the aesthetic of the website. They still need to build a lot of the technical stuff behind it, like navigation, and put the content in, but it is a much faster process.
If you are using WordPress for your website, which a lot of businesses do, there is a huge library of great templates to choose from. You can also find them on various online marketplaces like Template Monster and Theme Forest. Even though you may have to make some small compromises, you will save a lot of time and money during the website design process.
Reduce The Number Of Pages On The Site
The bigger the site is, the more money it will cost to build. Reducing the number of pages on the site is one of the easiest ways to save money and it is often a good design choice as well. When people enter your site, they want to find what they are looking for quickly, so navigation is very important. It doesn’t make for a good user experience if there are lots of pages to trawl through to find the relevant information. It can also make the website run slowly as well. You need to find ways to streamline the site and cut back on the number of pages, so you can save money and improve the user experience at the same time.
The best way to do this is to sit down and draw up a list of the necessary information that needs to be on the site. Then you can start grouping some of this content into pages and getting rid of anything that is not absolutely essential. Once you have your list of pages, take it to your web designer and they can get started. If you are unsure, ask them for ways to cut back on pages and take their advice.
Cut Back On Expensive Features
When you are designing a website, it is important that you get all of the essential features in there. It needs to look professional, run quickly, and deliver good quality content. However, a lot of businesses get carried away and start adding more features that are not really necessary and cost a lot of money. Things like elaborate animations, for example, take a long time to build so the developer will charge you a lot for them. Videos pop-ups that automatically play when the user enters the site are another common example. Users don’t like them because they want to browse at their own leisure, and they are an extra feature that costs you money, so you should just ditch them. If you can streamline the design and cut out these unnecessary and expensive features, the overall cost of your website will be much lower.
Use Free Images
Images are so important on a website because they make it more visually interesting and help to keep people engaged. People are going to be put off by a big wall of text, so you need plenty of good quality images on your site. Unfortunately, good quality images can be incredibly expensive and when you are using them on every page, the cost will quickly start to add up.
But you don’t need to pay for lots of expensive images for your website because there are plenty of great alternatives out there. There are some great sites where you can find royalty free stock images for free. Sites like Negative Space are great if you need some free stock photos, and the quality is great. The only downside is that the selection will not be as good as it is on the paid sites and you will have to spend some time searching for the right images, but it’s worth it because you will make big savings.
Another great option is to use your own images. If you take your own images, you save money and it adds more authenticity to your site because they are original images and you can get exactly what you want. Just make sure that the quality of the photos is professional because low quality images have a negative impact on the user’s perception of your business.
Repurpose Existing Content
If you are a new startup and this is your first business website, this one doesn’t really apply to you. But if you are designing a new site to replace your old one, you can save a lot of money if you repurpose your existing content. If you already have plenty of images on the site, they can easily be used again on the new site. If you have a blog on the site, you should bring all of the old articles over to the new site so you have a full catalogue as soon as the website goes online.
Usually, the problem with an outdated website is not the content itself, it is the design and functionality of the site. There is no need to scrap all of the content and start again because a new design can really bring that old content to life again.
Do Website Work In-House
When it comes to the actual design and build of the website, it is important that you hire a professional because you don’t have the knowledge and the expertise to handle it yourself. However, there are a lot of aspects of a new website that you can handle in-house. For example, you can still create a rough layout of the site and a list of all of the pages that need to be included. You can also select your own templates. If you do these things before you go to a web designer, you save them time and they will charge you less.
You can also manage the content side of the site on your own as well. As we have already seen, there are plenty of places to get free images or you can take your own. Collect all of these and have them ready before you approach a web designer. You can have your marketing team write the content for the site as well, so you don’t need to pay for that either.
If you can handle a lot of the work yourself and only outsource the aspects that you are unqualified to do in-house, you will save a lot of money on your new website.
These are all effective ways to save money on your new website without compromising on the quality.
