Why a Cheap Website Costs More Than an Expensive One

There is a certain logic to getting the cheapest possible website. You are a small business. Money is tight. A website is just a website, right? Put something up, check the box, move on.

This logic costs small businesses billions of dollars in aggregate every year. Here is why.

The Fiverr Website

You can get a website on Fiverr for $100-$500. It will be a WordPress template with your text and logo inserted. It will look like every other Fiverr website because it is the same template the freelancer uses for every client. It will be slow because it is running on shared hosting with a dozen unoptimized plugins. And it will be abandoned the moment the project is "delivered" — no one is maintaining it, updating it, or optimizing it.

Six months later, a plugin has a security vulnerability. A year later, the theme is no longer updated and starts breaking. Two years later, it looks dated and the contact form has been broken for months without you knowing.

Meanwhile, every visitor to your site forms an instant judgment about your business. A slow, generic, slightly broken website says: this business is small, unprofessional, and possibly struggling. That judgment costs you customers you never even know about.

The Free Wix/Squarespace Site

"Free" comes with a price: a subdomain (yourbusiness.wixsite.com), Wix branding on your site, limited storage, no custom analytics, and significant SEO limitations.

Even the paid plans have performance issues. Page builder websites load significantly slower than hand-coded sites because they carry the weight of the entire page builder framework. Your customer does not care that you can drag and drop elements — they care that the page loads in under 3 seconds.

The Nephew Who Knows HTML

He is enthusiastic. He charges very little or works for free. And he builds you something that works... until it does not. When something breaks at 10 PM on a Friday and a potential customer cannot reach you, the nephew is not answering his phone. There is no SLA. There is no maintenance plan. There is no accountability.

What Quality Actually Costs

A properly built website for a small business should cost $500-$2,000. Not $10,000 (that is the agency tax). Not $100 (that is the "you get what you pay for" zone). The sweet spot is a professionally designed, fast, mobile-responsive, SEO-optimized site with proper hosting and ongoing support.

That is exactly what SitesByTed delivers for $500. Professional quality at a price that reflects AI efficiency, not cut corners.

The Revenue Test

Here is the question that matters: will a better website generate at least one additional customer per month? If your average customer value is $200 or more, then a $500 investment pays for itself in the first month.

For most small businesses, the answer is not one additional customer — it is 5-15 additional customers per month when you go from a slow, outdated site to a fast, professional one. The ROI is not a question. It is a certainty.