Cheryl Montgomery

Why Being Cheap Is Expensive

Director Of Web Development, Oozle Media

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Okay, guys, I have heard that this is a question that a lot of our clients have. They’re not really sure how much they should be spending on a website.

So, I thought I would try to take a gut feeling and then do some research, and see if I was right. So, I started researching this particular presentation. Hopefully, I can share some of this insight with you guys. Do you even need a website? It’s amazing to me how many people feel like they don’t need a website. Small business owners tend to think that they don’t need one.

36% of small business owners think that they don’t need a website and they don’t have one.

They think, “My clients aren’t online,” but the answer is yes. Yes, you do need a website.

SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate compared to only 1.7% for outbound leads such as print ads. So your clients are not only online, you’re actually more likely to close a sale or in our client’s case, enroll a student if you have an online presence.

93% of online experience begin with a search engine and of those, 63% are done on Google. 70 to 80% of people research a company online before visiting the small business or making a purchase.

I’m not 100% sure how that translates to enrollments. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be really close.

81% of people perform online research before making a large decision. 85% of Americans own a smartphone. At Oozle, this we know because a significant percentage of all of our traffic is on mobile, 76% of people search on their smartphones for a nearby business and visit it within a day. It’s going to hold true for just about any business including and especially I think with schools because people are going to want to know more about your school and identify with it before they enroll.

So when I ask what a website should cost, I’m referring specifically to websites that are built by agencies. There’s always going to be a friend who has a cousin who does websites and they’re always going to be cheap for reasons I’ll explain in a moment.

When I searched for this, these are the ranges that I found. Literally from site to site, it was so dramatically different that I felt like there wasn’t really a great, solid number that I could go with and say, “This is how much all of it costs.”

“$12,000 to 1$50,000,” I said that in front of one of my kids and they were like, “What costs $150,000 on a website?” I don’t know. I know that that’s quite a lot more than small businesses tend to spend. $3,000 to 10,000, which was closer to the range that I expected. $2,000 to $25,000, an even broader range.

If your site costs less than $5,000, if it’s a $3,000 site, a $2,000 site, you’re probably not spending enough. And if it costs more than $15,000, you just need to skimp check yourself and make sure that your money’s being spent wisely.

For example, you shouldn’t be spending that much more unless it’s a custom site and if you have additional functionality, if you’re not just content on the site.

So what’s the difference between the cheap sites and the expensive sites?

Well, you’re not going to be able to tell based on the superficial appearance of the site. Some of the cheapest websites are also the flashiest. That’s because they tend to be built in pre-existing themes, themes that you can go buy online. And also because of reasons that I’m going to get into in a moment. So, I want to get into the difference, the difference between why one website costs potentially thousands of dollars more than another.

Budget web design companies skimp on features.

Now I’m going to tell you guys a personal story about this. I was working with on a contract basis with a friend who ran an SEO business. And he said he didn’t need me to build websites because he had Frank. Frank was building websites for him.

And what I discovered, the reason why my friend needed me is because when Frank was building sites, he would say, “It’s $1,000 for a site,” but the site wasn’t including tons of basic functionality, like If you wanted to blog on a WordPress site, which is literally what WordPress was originally built for, you had to pay extra.

If you wanted more than just a very, very simple page template that you could edit, then that was extra. If you wanted a menu that could have dropdowns, literally a dropdown in the menu, then that was extra. So he actually had to hire me and pay me a lot of money, subjectively, to add all this functionality that just didn’t exist in the first place.

Cheap sites, especially using overseas developers often use nulled themes and plugins.

Now, this is probably not a super familiar term to a lot of people.

I started spending a lot of time on Facebook Groups with WordPress developers and PHP developers trying to offer help and support. And what I found was that a lot of people there were using basically pirated themes. Another word for it being nulled. There are pirated themes, pirated plugins.

WordPress has an open source license, which means that technically if you want to have a theme on WordPress, you can’t sell it for money. So whenever you pay for a theme what you’re really paying for is support and updates, ongoing security updates, which are super important because if you don’t get the security updates, you’re almost definitely going to be open to malware.

Almost all themes that you can buy online, the most famous ones, the most popular ones especially, are going to have security vulnerabilities and lots of them. I actually subscribe to a newsletter that daily sends out emails about which themes, which plugins are security vulnerabilities and alerts to update. And the most popular ones like Avada and Divi are constantly, constantly needing updates because they have security vulnerabilities.

If you pay somebody to build a cheap site, they’re even going a step beyond that. Sometimes they’re getting nulled themes, which means that they removed all the stuff that involved licensing. It’s basically a pirated theme.

So, when you get it, not only does it already have likely security vulnerabilities, sometimes they actually have the malware already installed because your site is valuable to them for redirecting traffic to various… I mean, we’ve all seen the spam emails and the types of joke sites that sell Viagra or whatever.

You don’t want your site to be hijacked in that sense, right? So, they do that and sometimes they’re also using your hosting for processing power to mine Bitcoin. So that’s another popular reason why.

But yeah, you won’t have any idea that it was a nulled theme until something bad happens.

Now, this is a thing that I’ve noticed. I’ve never personally understood this because at Oozle when I build a site, I’m not building it with built-in life expectancy. I have client sites that were built 10 years ago and some of them before I even started at Oozle, which was in fact 10 years ago.

And people still contact me and they want to know, “How do I do this? How do I do that?” And I’ll still answer them because as far as I’m concerned, they paid a good amount of money for a website and I don’t want them to just have to replace it every couple of years.

But it seems like a lot of sites that our competitors build, especially the cheaper ones in particular, the cheap ones they’re just not built with the future in mind.

They’re expecting that you’re going to rebuild it in a couple of years anyway. So why bother future proofing?

Your website is probably tuition for a new developer and building sites probably is not their passion.

This is especially true in Utah. I see it a lot firsthand. I have a lot of developer friends. I’ve done a lot of interviews for developers. A lot of the time, brand new developers or programmers are trying to get into more lucrative fields, things like software or enterprise-size sites. And they’re using your site to get experience. They don’t really necessarily care about it, and the sites that they’re building are stepping stones to a bigger career.

And actually, I recently saw something like a video online where somebody was basically bragging that they could make six figures within a couple of months by building a bunch of sites really, really quickly and then using that as a portfolio to get a better job.

So, you want to make sure that the company that you’re going with, it supports their developers, supports their team, and supports putting out a great product regardless of the price of that.

Because like I said, if you have somebody who’s just doing this site for money or just doing it as tuition to get a better job, they’re not going to do as good a job on your site. And they’re probably not going to care about it as much.

So without a guarantee of a company that’s there to support them and to support you or if you’re working with freelancers, then you might not be happy with your end result.

This new website often doesn’t contain basic SEO or content.

I’ve seen this so many times, and I’m sure Patrik also has been a good part of this. This is why we wrote together a post and pre-launch checklist to go through and make sure that the sites have all of their SEO and all of their content, at least they have the values for it.

We regularly see websites from third parties that absolutely tanked their clients’ search engine results because the new site doesn’t account for basic titles and metas.

It’s especially a problem with JavaScript only sites. And we’ve seen that a few times. It’s an amazing site. It looks really pretty and it loads really fast, and it has absolutely no SEO value whatsoever. There’s not even a place to put any titles or descriptions.

So, WordPress sites are great because they come with all that stuff as a framework ready to go. But if you don’t take over all of the existing SEO value from the existing site and put it into the new one, you’re starting all over again. And we’ve seen a lot of clients lose all of their search rankings just because they wanted a new site and the new developers didn’t check for that.

So, you want to make sure that you’re looking for that as part of a new site and that you don’t have an inexperienced developer that didn’t even move over those metas.

There’s no warranty, training, or support once the site is launched.

This can actually be true of more expensive sites too. I think it’s really unfortunate. There’s a lot of companies that are basically a churn and burn on your site. They launch it, they get the money and they’re gone. And you may not know how to do anything. You don’t know what the logins are, and as far as they’re concerned, they’ve fulfilled on the contract. They’re no longer incentivized.

So, even if they made mistakes, you can’t reach them, you can’t get it fixed and now you’re paying somebody else to fix it. It’s basically a standard in this industry.

The site isn’t made to convert.

This is I think the most important thing that you can be spending money on when it comes to getting a new website. Sites that are made to convert sites that are made to actually get you money are the only kinds of sites that are worth building.

Most sites, especially pretty flashy sites aren’t intended to get conversions. They’re intended to wow you long enough to build the site and get paid. They don’t actually make you money. There’s no CRO value built into the site.

So for example, what was their plan for somebody who lands on the site? What happens then? Are they going to fill out a form? Are they going to call a number? Are there calls to action? Are they actually trying to take all of your visitors and turn them into students? Are they actually trying to enroll them?

What IS CRO?

So CRO, conversion rate optimization, what is it? Why is it so important? Conversion rate optimization is the process of improving your site’s user experience in a way that encourages users to convert, which is, in the case of beauty schools, usually means filling out a form, calling a number, sending leads.

You need to know how many people are filling out your forms and calling you or your site is basically useless.

This is how you calculate the conversion, the conversion rate, roughly speaking, there’s some other factors that you want to take into account. But, you take your conversion rate. It’s the number of conversions, the number of leads that you have through phone calls or forms divided by the total number of visitors to your site, and then multiply it by 100 and you get a percentage.

The average conversion rate across all Google ads, all sites that any business, any business at all through Google ads is 4.4%.

And we tend to see our competitors actually building sites that convert more like 2% to 3%. And it’s common enough that that’s kind of what we work with.

So, our goal as a company is to make sure that we’re improving on that at all times, that we’re always doing homework, researching, installing a screen recording software on the site so that we can see how people are interacting with the site. You want to make sure that whatever new site you have that its goal is to actually get people to convert into leads, otherwise you have just a pretty brochure.

Why IS CRO Important?

So why is CRO important? I’ve basically covered it just now. The important thing to know about it too is that if you’re spending a lot of time on conversions, if you’re making sure that your site actually converts well, you’re actually sort of picking up the money being left on the table by other people on the sites that are not converting. So, you benefit from that right now.

It’s one thing to have a nice website. It’s another to put it to use for your business. And a few businesses kind of consider this aspect partially because they are working with digital marketing companies that aren’t telling them the truth about this. And you could be shooting ahead of them just by knowing what CRO is.

Also, in addition to knowing your site design and everything, then things like site speed dramatically affect your conversion rate. So, if you’re building a site using one of these sort of top heavy themes, then you’re going to have kind of a lot of code on it and a lot of, like, processing that goes into the site. So by the time it gets to your user, you’ve probably lost a few people. So it’s important to have sites that are built for you for your business.

Usually, if you ask somebody what the cost is of building a website, they’re thinking of the tip of the iceberg, which is exactly this question. What’s the site going to cost me? That alone is not the only cost. That’s the upfront cost. That’s the tip of the iceberg. It’s not the only cost.

There’s actually the rest of the iceberg, a significant iceberg of hidden costs. So what does a website actually cost? Well, like I said earlier, you may have to hire somebody to add missing functionality to the site. And as I’ve had to do that many times, I know that this is something that does get missed.

If somebody is going to be building you a website, you want to make sure that you’re getting everything that you expect to get out of it.

You don’t want to have to come back a week later and say, “How come I can’t have a blog? How come I can’t have dropdowns on my menus?” Because then you have to go through a whole new process, which is a waste of time as well as money.

If you don’t have a good mobile experience, you’re going to lose users. They’re going to bounce off of your site. It’s something that Google calls pogo sticking. If somebody searched for your site, searches your topic, and then they click on your site and immediately they can’t tell what they need or that they think that you don’t have what they’re looking for, they bounce right out and they go look for the site that does have that.

So, lacking a mobile experience is going to lose you a lot of potential students. And again, this is something I’m sure that Patrik can verify. But yeah, it’s called pogo sticking. And I’m pretty sure that we have a few third-party sites that we work with where we’re rebuilding it because the mobile site is so bad that given that most internet traffic is actually on mobile, it’s a crime to leave it like that.

You don’t want to have to go back and fix that. You want to make sure that you’re mobile-friendly from the start.

Bloated themes and plugins that slow down your site cause users to leave.

Like I was saying, there’s a lot of code involved in sites that use the commercially available themes because they’re trying to be everything to everyone. They have a ton of features that you’re never going to use, a ton of scripts that you’re never going to use. It’s all just stuff that’s loading and loading and taking up time and bandwidth that you’re not even using.

So having a site built by somebody who’s just rigging a theme to look the way they want it to is doing you a disservice. I actually at one point created a thank you page, which is very simple. It’s the header and it says thanks for filling out our form. And then there’s the footer.

And I created one using my methods, Oozle Media’s methods, and then I created one using a page builder like Elementor, which is very, very common, super common when you have sites built. And mine was, I think, 17 lines of code. And the one that was created by Elementor, keeping in mind it was the same view, had 100 and something lines. So that’s just to illustrate how dramatically different these can be.

Hours that you spend on tech support trying to resolve these issues on your own because your developer isn’t there anymore, and you’re not sure what happened.

Why did your site go down? Is there a problem that needs to be fixed? Don’t underestimate how much time or how much your time is worth. You’re running a business. So do what you do best. Leave this to professionals.

Expect that from the people that you’re working with. You shouldn’t be sitting on tech support trying to figure out why your site is broken when you should be able to call somebody and talk to them about it.

Lost brand loyalty and trust is kind of a big deal that I feel like gets overlooked a lot.

There are studies showing that users who land on a site that leaves a bad impression leave and they don’t come back. So if you think about it. Every time that you’ve done a search on Google and landed on the site and then realize it’s a bad experience and then had to bounce, you don’t go back later. You never go look at it again.

Being held hostage by a developer who did not give you the keys to your own kingdom.

We have so many clients that don’t realize that they don’t own their assets when their relationship with the developer is over. It’s especially true when sites are built as part of a marketing strategy. Sometimes you don’t get your domain and your site when you leave.

So make sure that that’s something that you actually own. And you can lose actual people landing on your site due to SEO issues like I mentioned earlier.

And this is more time loss, the inevitable redesign a relaunch every year or two. Obviously, this is not where you want to be spending your time and your site should not be designed to fail.

So here’s some questions to ask. I’m out of time. I think I totally went over. So yeah, so I’m going to just wrap this up real quick. These will all be available too, I think on our site later today.

But these are important questions to ask if you’re building a website. They basically cover everything that I was talking about before.

And then here’s some references.

Again, this is going to be available. If you guys have any additional questions for me, that’s my email address [cheryl@oozlemedia.com]. So if you have any other questions, you can email me there.