What to Watch for in Very Cheap Website Offers

A website being cheap isn't a bad thing in itself. Our own model tries to keep budgets low by adapting ready-made sites to your brand. What makes a site cheap is either an efficient process or gaps that the quote doesn't mention. Telling the two apart comes down to asking a few good questions while you read the quote.

Is cheap always bad?

No. A one-page promotional site, or adapting a structure that has been built and tested many times, takes far less effort than a design from scratch. A lower price is natural there.

What deserves attention is which items a cheap quote quietly leaves out. An item missing from the quote may come back later either as an extra invoice or as work that never gets done.

Items left out of scope

Gaps that can show up in low-priced quotes: mobile compatibility turns out to cost extra, the contact form doesn't work or messages reach nobody, there's no SSL certificate, the copy stays as “lorem ipsum” and content entry is left to the client. Then there's “1 year of free hosting”; the second-year renewal can be higher than you expect.

Ownership and lock-in

This can be the most expensive part of a cheap offer. In some service models, the site is built on the provider's own closed system. The site stays online as long as you keep paying monthly or yearly; the day you stop, it may go down. When you want to move it elsewhere, you may not be able to take the files or the database.

Registering the domain in the provider's name leads to the same place. Years later, when you want to change agencies, getting your own address back can take effort. We explained who should own a website in a separate post.

Speed, security and SEO gaps

On very low-cost sites, speed and security can be among the last things anyone thinks about. A theme bloated with many plugins, uncompressed images, a platform that never gets updated. The site looks fine on day one; months later it may slow down or get taken over through a security hole.

SEO can look similar. Every page title is “Home”, image alt text is empty, there's no sitemap. All of this can be fixed later, but fixing it can cost more than the original price difference.

Eight questions before you accept

• Whose name will the domain and hosting be registered in?
• When the project ends, can I get the site files and database?
• How many pages and how many revisions are included?
• Who will enter the copy and images?
• Are mobile compatibility, SSL and the contact form included, and will they be tested?
• What will I pay for hosting, domain and maintenance from the second year on?
• If something breaks after launch, how quickly is it fixed, and at what cost?
• Will I be able to update the content myself?

A company that answers these clearly and in writing deserves to be taken seriously even if its price is low. If the answers are “we'll see”, “that's separate” or silence, keep asking what the quote doesn't cover.

How to find an affordable but solid option

Put the quotes side by side and look at the line items, not just the total. Our post on reading website quotes walks through putting quotes from different agencies into one table.

In our view, a sensible way to combine a low budget with a solid foundation is adapting an already-tested site to your brand. At Kodyva, the price of each ready-to-brand site for sale is shown on its card in the portfolio; the price range of our corporate website service is 15,000 to 35,000 TL. The exact price depends on scope and is stated in the quote. Delivered sites come with an admin panel so you can update content yourself. Ask us the eight questions above too; ownership and handover terms are written into the quote. Compare that number with the total cost of a site you might have to rebuild before long.