Easy ways for small businesses to cut the cost of website building

By Henry Brown

Every small business owner knows that they need a top quality website if they’re going to make it. It’s a great way to market yourself and a new platform for selling your products. Any company that doesn’t have a website is going to fall behind. The only problem is that building your own company website is going to cost you quite a bit of money. A conservative estimate for a good business site is about $3000 but you could easily spend upwards of $10,000 if you’re building a lot of features into the site. When you’re first starting a new business and you don’t have that much cash to spend, it’s not a good idea to blow that much on your website. You can use these simple tips to cut the cost of building a website if you don’t want to spend all of your startup capital on it.

[amazon_link asins=’1119327776′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’succeedingi0d-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’d9be2417-ed7a-11e8-847b-49add6491bb3′]Use premade templates

Building a website from scratch is often the best way to make sure that you get exactly what you want from the site but it’s also a lot more expensive. There are some great services like WordPress that let you build a site using premade templates and it’ll cost you next to nothing. You just need to pay for the domain name and hosting for the site. It might not suit your needs forever and you may not get the exact website that you’re looking for, but when you’re first setting your business up and you can’t afford to build a website from the ground up, it’s a great alternative.

Consider a virtual private server

Hosting services are a website expense that you can’t avoid, but that doesn’t mean you can’t save a bit of money by using a virtual private server instead of a physical one. You can easily find a cheap vps to host your site in the cloud rather than a physical server. Not only is it more cost effective, it’s also more secure and far less prone to issues because there isn’t the chance of a hardware failure.

[amazon_link asins=’0992279445′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’succeedingi0d-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’f2e13ad0-ed7a-11e8-977d-45a3ec179292′]Use free images

Good quality images are essential on all websites but producing original ones is very time consuming and it can be expensive. It could involve paying a professional photographer or at the very least, buying your own camera equipment. But if you’re trying to keep costs down, you should take advantage of all of the great free images that are available online. The quality on those sites is still great and you won’t have to pay anything. When you’re earning a bit more money, you can think about creating your own original images for the site.

Cut down on pages

Every page on the website needs content and creating that content costs money. That’s why the simplest way to cut the cost of building a website is to cut down on the number of pages on there. When you’re designing the website, make a list of the things that are absolutely necessary and don’t put anything else on there.

Building a website can be incredibly expensive and that’s tough for new businesses, but if you use these simple tricks to cut the cost, it’s a lot more manageable.

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Henry Brown is an online marketing executive. When he isn’t talking shop, he’s roaming the streets of London, uncovering the extra-ordinary in the ordinary.

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