Why a cheap website usually costs more in the end
A £199 build looks like a bargain until you find out what was left out. This is what gets omitted, how to check your own site for it, and how to tell whether yours needs fixing or replacing.
We build sites and we refresh them
Worth saying at the top, because it changes how you should read the rest. We do both, so we have something to sell you whichever answer you arrive at. Weigh our advice accordingly.
What we will say is that a rebuild is usually not the answer. Most underperforming small business sites do not need replacing — they need the things that were skipped putting back, which is cheaper and faster. We would rather tell you that than take the bigger invoice, because the bigger invoice is not repeat business and the refresh often is.
The price is real. The scope is the problem.
A build advertised at £149 or £299 is not a scam. Somebody genuinely will produce five pages for that. What the price cannot cover is the work that does not show up in a screenshot.
- Anything resembling SEO“Free SEO included” usually means a plugin was installed. A plugin is a place to type meta descriptions. It does not research keywords, structure a site or write anything.
- Original copyPlaceholder text, text lifted from elsewhere, or something generated in seconds. Duplicated copy is the single most common thing we find on budget builds.
- Legal complianceCookie consent that meets PECR, a real privacy notice, accessible markup. All of it invisible, all of it your responsibility rather than the builder’s.
- Room to growAdding a service page or starting a blog turns out to need the developer back, at which point the quote approaches what a proper build would have cost.
- Anyone to ringSupport, backups and hosting charged separately, or not offered at all.
Seven things you can verify this afternoon
All free, none technical, and between them they will tell you whether your site has the problem this article describes.
- Search your own business nameIf your site is not the first result, something is badly wrong. This is the easiest search you will ever rank for.
- Look for the padlockNo HTTPS means browsers are actively warning visitors away. Cheap to fix, and inexcusable to leave.
- Open it on your phoneText running off the screen, buttons you cannot press, anything you have to pinch. Most of your visitors are seeing what you are seeing.
- Copy a sentence from your homepage into Google, in quotesIf it appears on other websites, your copy is not original and neither is your ranking chance.
- Check your phone number is textA number inside an image cannot be read by Google, or by anyone trying to tap it on a phone.
- Look for Search ConsoleIf nobody ever set it up, nobody has ever known what your site is doing. It is free.
- Run the free checkersOur broken link checker and health score checker will find the rest in a couple of minutes.
Speed, mobile and compliance
Three things budget builds routinely skip, all of which carry a cost that arrives later.
- SpeedGoogle’s own research into mobile abandonment has consistently found that a large share of visitors give up on pages taking more than about three seconds. Core Web Vitals turned that into something Google measures directly. The usual culprits are unoptimised images and too many plugins, and both are fixable without rebuilding anything.
- MobileMost UK web traffic is on a phone. A layout that breaks on a small screen is not a cosmetic problem, it is most of your audience. Google’s mobile usability guidance covers tap targets, text size and viewport, and cheap builds fail all three regularly.
- CompliancePECR requires consent before non-essential cookies are set, which means analytics tags must not fire until the visitor agrees. UK GDPR requires a real privacy notice if you have a contact form. And while WCAG 2.2 is only a legal requirement for public sector bodies, an inaccessible site can still fall foul of the Equality Act 2010. We are not lawyers, but these are the three we most often find unaddressed.
Build cheap, or fix what you have
| Budget build | Refreshing an existing site | |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | £99–£300 | From £199 |
| SEO | A plugin, no strategy | Audit, keyword research, structure, internal linking |
| Copy | Placeholder or duplicated | Written or rewritten by a person |
| Compliance | Usually omitted | Cookie consent, privacy notice, HTTPS |
| Adding pages later | Often needs the developer back | Built so you can do it yourself |
| Support | Extra, or none | You email us |
To be fair to the other column: if you need a web presence at all and have £200, a budget build is better than nothing, and plenty of businesses have started that way perfectly reasonably. The mistake is expecting it to bring in enquiries. It is a business card, not a shopfront.
Our pricing is published, including one-off refresh work if you do not want a monthly plan.
Frequently asked
Can SEO be added to a cheap site later?
Usually yes. The exceptions are sites built on closed platforms where you cannot edit page titles, add pages, or reach the code. If you cannot change your own meta titles, that is the warning sign.
Do I need a new website?
Probably not. The honest test is whether the platform can grow — can you add pages, edit your own titles, and reach the code when something needs fixing? If yes, refreshing is cheaper and faster. If no, a rebuild may genuinely be the cheaper route. We build sites as well as refresh them, so take that into account, but we will give you the reasoning rather than just the recommendation.
How do I know if my copy is duplicated?
Copy a distinctive sentence from your homepage, put it in Google inside quotation marks, and see what comes back. If the same wording appears on other sites, it was templated.
What does a refresh cost?
From £199 as one-off work, or as part of a monthly plan from £199. Everything is on the pricing page rather than behind a quote form.
What a refresh looks like
Paramount Space Cleaning in Coventry came to us in October 2025. Service pages, local pages, technical fixes and a Google Business Profile that had never been finished. In seven months they went from no visibility to position one for “deep cleaning coventry”, page one for 55 search terms, and a £7,000 commercial contract traced back to organic search.
The caveat we attach to everything: one business, one city, one sector that is competitive but not brutal. Not a forecast for anyone else. Nora approved every figure before we published it.
Simon & Lisa Batchelor run Get Your Website Seen. Simon spent ten years as owner and editor of a magazine, then built and sold Commerce Computers Ltd, a trade computer supplier that traded online as shop4it.co.uk. So we have been on the buying side of marketing that did not work, which is most of why this site reads the way it does. You deal with us directly, and every figure published here belongs to a client who approved it.
Find out what yours is missing
The free audit covers the seven checks above and everything behind them. Written by one of us. It is lead generation and we are not pretending otherwise, but you get it without a call first — and if the answer is that your site is fine, we will say so.
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