Over the past 15 years, it is fair to say that the web design industry has changed considerably. Once upon a time, if you wanted a professional website making for your company, you would have had to pay tens of thousands of pounds for it.
Since more and more people have been learning web design at college and university however, the industry has diluted and cheaper websites are now available for very little cost – sometimes even under £50.
Although some of these websites will be sound enough, more often than not, they will be hastily put together, offer large security flaws and more than likely will not be built using the latest technology and software.
But what are the true dangers of a cheap (or free) website?
Cheap websites can be more expensive
Though this may sound a little silly, the truth is that by buying a cheap ‘quickfix’ website, you may end up paying more for it than if you went to a more professional and ‘expensive’ web design company.
This can be for many and any reason.
You will be open to attack
Cheap websites may not have much security protection from hackers and other malicious entities.
This is mostly because the person designing your website will not only not want to put in a lot of time making it secure, but because they are being paid very little for what should be quite a large job, they won’t spend too much money on it either.
A cheap website will probably be designed using outdated software
Being that the company you’ll be buying from will be typically quite small, it is highly unlikely that it will not be using the latest software to build your website.
In addition to this, as the company may be charging cheap ‘bundle’ packages, there will be less chance that it is able to purchase new software or even train the people properly who are supposed to be using it.
Cheap websites are bad for SEO
If you want people to find your website, you need to have good SEO. More than ever, search engines such as Google are upping the stakes for websites of all sizes.
Websites on cheap hosting plans will suffer major downtime, something that will push any website, large or small, down the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Additionally, page loading time can directly affect the bounce rates of a website. In fact, if a page fails to load by four seconds, it will be abandoned by 25 per cent of people, which will destroy any website in the search engines.