Cheap Websites Only Serve the People Who Make Them

What “cheap” actually means

When I say cheap, I’m not talking about a small budget. I’ve built plenty of perfectly decent sites for small businesses on tight budgets. Tight is fine. Tight just means you’re paying attention to where the money’s going.

I mean cheap. The £200 Fiverr build. The £500 “we’ll get you online next week” specials. The volume agencies pumping out forty template sites a month with the client logo dropped on top. The Wix-on-stilts agency job at £8k where 95% of the work is the template that came in the box.

You know the type. Portfolio page with 180 sites on it that all look like the same site in slightly different fonts.

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The model only works one way

Think about how that business has to operate to make money at £400 a build.

They can’t spend a week thinking about your business. They can’t write proper copy. They can’t structure the site around how your customers actually behave. They definitely can’t sort it for search, because that takes hours, and hours don’t fit into a £400 invoice.

So they don’t.

What they do is open a template, drop your logo on it, swap a few stock photos, paste in whatever text you’ve sent them, and ship it. Two hours of work, maybe three. Times forty clients a month. Now the maths works — for them.

The site you end up with isn’t designed for your business. It’s designed for theirs. Their business is volume. Your business is somewhere on a spreadsheet labelled “March”.

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“But it looks fine”

Yeah. It looks fine. That’s the whole trick.

A modern template — Wix, Squarespace, one of the page-builder WordPress jobs — will give you something that looks fine. Reasonable colours. A slider. A team-of-three photo. A contact form. Job done, on the surface.

The problem isn’t what’s on the surface. The problem is what’s not underneath.

No keyword research. No proper site structure. No internal linking that means anything. Page titles that all just say “Home”. Meta descriptions copy-pasted from one page to the next. Image files that are 4MB each and labelled IMG_2049.jpg. Schema markup? Don’t be daft. The mobile version’s a mess because nobody actually opened it on a phone — they just looked at the “mobile preview” tab in the builder and called it tested.

I check sites like this all the time. I run the audit, I show the owner the report, and there’s usually a long pause before they say it.

But it looks fine.

It does. It looks fine. It just doesn’t do anything.

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Who the cheap site actually serves

This is the bit that genuinely winds me up.

The cheap-website agency knows — knows — that what they’re shipping won’t bring in work. They know it won’t rank. They know it’ll need replacing in 18 months. That isn’t a flaw in their business model. That’s the model.

Because here’s how it plays out:

You buy the £400 site. Six months in, you’ve had three enquiries, all from people who already knew your name. You start asking why. You google around. You discover SEO exists, sort of. You go back to the agency. They sell you “an SEO package” — another £150 a month, in perpetuity, for some meta-tag fiddling and a monthly PDF that says “everything is going great”.

Or you give up on them and go elsewhere, and the next person you hire has to charge you to redo what should’ve been done properly the first time.

Either way, you’ve paid twice. The first agency got their margin. The second one’s now charging you to clean up the mess. The only person who loses in this transaction is you.

I’ve seen this play out so many times I could draw the timeline from memory. Year one: cheap site, no enquiries. Year two: panic, “SEO package”, still no enquiries. Year three: rebuild, this time properly, this time at three or four times the cost they thought they were saving back in year one.

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The tells

If you want to know whether you’ve bought one of these, here’s the rough checklist. And I know how this reads — I’m not trying to make anyone feel daft. Most people have one of these somewhere in their past.

• The site was delivered in under two weeks.
• Nobody ever asked you who your customers actually are.
• Nobody asked what enquiries you wanted the site to bring in.
• Your homepage copy is two paragraphs of generic stuff about your industry.
• The same agency built sites for fifteen of your competitors and they all look basically the same.
• You can’t edit anything without breaking it.
• You’ve got “SEO” as a line item on a monthly invoice but you can’t actually say what’s being done for it.
• The agency’s been quiet since launch.

If three or more of those ring a bell, you didn’t buy a website. You bought a placeholder.

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What it actually costs to do this properly

I’m not going to pretend a proper website is cheap. It isn’t.

A small-business site that’s actually built for the business — researched, structured, written, designed, developed, optimised, tested — sits somewhere in the low thousands at the bottom end. Bigger jobs go up from there. We’re a small team, we charge accordingly, and I’m not going to insult you by claiming it’s £400.

What you get for the money, though, is a site that’s actually yours. Designed around how your customers search and decide. Built so Google can read it. Structured so it doesn’t fall over the next time WordPress pushes a core update. Written by someone who took the time to understand what you do. Maintained, so it keeps working — not abandoned the moment the invoice cleared.

That kind of site doesn’t need replacing in 18 months. It earns its keep, and then it keeps earning it.

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So no, I’m not on board with cheap

I’m not snobby about it. I don’t think every business needs a £15k website. Plenty don’t.

What I do think is that the £200 — £500 end of the market is a quiet little scam dressed up as accessibility. It’s sold as “getting you online”. What it actually does is take money off small business owners who don’t yet know what good looks like, ship them something that doesn’t work, and leave them worse off than if they’d waited six months and done it properly.

The cheap website doesn’t serve the customer. It serves the seller. That’s the whole point of it. And once you see the model from that angle, it’s hard to unsee.

If you’re sitting on one of these and you’ve started to suspect it isn’t earning its keep, that suspicion’s almost certainly right. Have a proper look at it. Or don’t, and have someone else look at it for you — Bamboo Manchester is the place, if you want a chat about doing it properly next time round.