It seems like a no-brainer. Why pay thousands to a web design company like us in Swansea when you can get the same thing for a fraction of the price?
Let’s be honest, that initial low price is a brilliant bit of marketing. But the "real cost" isn't the price you pay upfront, it’s the price you pay over the next three years in lost customers, wasted time, and sheer, hair-pulling frustration.
So, you’ve got your cheap site. It's live. But the logo is in the wrong place. The contact form doesn't quite work. And you want to add a new service to your homepage.
You log into the clunky admin panel and spend two hours trying to figure it out. You move one thing, and the whole page breaks. You're a smart person, you run a business, but you cannot for the life of you get it to look right.
Your time is valuable. Is it really a good use of your time to be fighting with a "user-friendly" template at 10 pm on a Tuesday? That's time you're not spending on sales, managing your team, or talking to customers. That is a massive, invisible cost.
This is the big one.
Your cheap website is almost certainly built on a generic, bloated, one-size-fits-all template. To get it to do what you want, it’s probably held together with 15 different plugins.
The result? It's slow. Really slow.
We've all done it: you click a link, the page just... hangs. A white screen. A little spinning wheel. What do you do? You hit the 'back' button. You're gone. And you're never coming back.
Your customers are doing the same to you. All those clunky plugins and unoptimised code are making your site a chore to use. If it’s slow, or if it’s a nightmare to use on a phone, you are actively turning away the very people you're trying to attract.
A cheap site is a generic box. To make it your site, you have to add bits. You need a gallery, so you add a gallery plugin. You need a booking form, so you add a calendar plugin. You want an SEO-helper, so you add that plugin too.
Before you know it, your website is a "Frankenstein's monster" of code, all stitched together, all from different creators, and all needing to be updated separately.
It's a security nightmare (as we've talked about before), but it's also a trap. What happens when you want to add a new, complex feature? You can't. The template doesn't support it. The plugins clash. You are completely stuck. Your business has outgrown its website, but you have no way to fix it short of starting all over again.
The first step is to change your thinking. A website isn't a one-off cost, like buying a new printer. It’s an investment, like hiring a salesperson.
A cheap website is a cost, it takes your money and gives you a headache. A good website is an investment, it works 24/7 to bring you new customers and make you money.
A proper, custom-built website is designed around your specific business goals. It's not a generic box. It’s built to be fast, secure, and do exactly what you need it to do. The admin system isn't a 50-button nightmare, it’s built for you, showing you only what you need.
It's tempting to save a few hundred quid on day one. But that "saving" looks tiny when you compare it to the revenue you're losing every month from a site that's slow, broken, and turning your customers away.
We're proud to have been recognised as Wales' Most Trusted Web Design & Development Company for 2025. This award reflects our commitment to delivering exceptional digital solutions and outstanding client service that sets the standard for excellence.
