The price tag
What a low price usually leaves out
Plenty of small businesses need only a simple site and have no reason to pay for more. What a low price leaves out is rarely on the front of the offer, so before you pay anyone, find out the following.
- Who owns the domain. If the provider registers it in their name, they hold the keys to your web address. Ask for it in your own name. How to buy a domain name and keep it in your name explains how.
- Whether you can take the site with you. Some builders let you export your pages. Others do not, and leaving means starting again.
- What the price is after the first year. A low first-year offer can rise sharply at renewal. Look for the renewal price, not the introductory one.
- Who makes changes. Is an edit included, or charged each time, or left for you to work out yourself?
Ownership
Renting a site you cannot take with you
Many cheap builders, and most free ones, are in effect a rental. Your pages live inside the builder's system, and if you stop paying or want to move, you usually leave them behind. Your words and photos may be yours in principle, but a site you cannot export is hard to move.
That matters less on day one and more in year three, when the site is the thing customers find you through. The question is simple: if I stop paying, what do I still have? A good answer is your domain, your content and a copy of the site itself.
Speed
Slow templates and lost enquiries
A site that takes a long time to load on a phone loses people before they read a word. Cheap templates are often heavy: large images that were never resized, scripts for features you will never use, and shared hosting that slows down when the server is busy.
You can check your own site in a couple of minutes. Open it on your phone, on mobile data rather than Wi-Fi, and watch. Then run it through Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool. If the page is slow to show anything, a customer with a burst pipe or a dead boiler is likely to try the next business on the list.
Free
What "free" costs you
A free plan has to be paid for somehow. Usually that means the builder's name in your web address,
adverts or branding you did not choose, and a limit on what you can add. A web address
like yourbusiness.somebuilder.com looks less established than
yourbusiness.co.uk, and it is not yours to move.
Free is fine for a hobby or a test. For a business that wants calls and enquiries, the missing pieces tend to be the ones customers notice.
Weighing it up
When cheap is the right call
Sometimes a low-cost builder is the sensible choice. If you are testing an idea, trading part-time, or need a single page while you work out what you want, you do not need to spend much. Just go in knowing what you are getting. For a fuller comparison, see Squarespace or a custom-built site, and for typical figures, how much a small business website should cost.
Before you pay
Questions to ask before you pay
- Who owns the domain, and is it registered in my name?
- Can I export the site if I leave, and in what form?
- What does it cost in year two and after, with everything I need included?
- Who makes changes, and is that included in the price?
- How does it load on a phone? Try a site the provider has already built.
If you would like to see a real alternative before you decide on anything, I can build a free preview: one page, with nothing to sign or buy.