A website is very easy to see as an expense. There is the initial cost of building it, then hosting, maintenance and whatever other work is needed over time. All of those costs are easy to identify and easy to add up.
What is much harder to put a figure on is what the website is doing for the business or organisation.
It may be bringing in work, saving somebody’s time, helping people find information, making something easier to manage or influencing a decision that happens much later.
Those things do not necessarily appear anywhere as “website value”. They happen in different parts of the business, sometimes months after somebody first visited the site.
This can make the calculation rather one-sided. We know exactly what went into the website, but we are not necessarily looking at what came out of it.
What is the website actually doing?
I have two recent examples from very different clients.
One is a small business run by one person. In the first month after her new website went live, she received four phone enquiries. She makes a point of asking people how they found her, and all four said they had found her online.
The other is a membership organisation. Its new website began performing well for relevant Google searches quite quickly after launch, and prospective members have been getting in touch.
Neither example proves that the website alone caused every enquiry. People may have heard about the business or organisation somewhere else first, visited several times, or been influenced by things that are impossible to separate neatly.
But that’s part of the point. A website often sits somewhere in the middle of a much longer decision.
If I were looking only at what either of those websites cost, I would be ignoring the people appearing on the other side of that expenditure.
What are you actually paying for?
A website may appear as a single cost on an invoice or in a budget. But that one heading can cover work doing very different jobs for a business:
- Visibility – helping people find you who didn’t already know you existed.
- New business – bringing in enquiries, bookings, sales or other opportunities.
- Communication – explaining what you do and giving people the information they need.
- Customer service – helping people find answers, information or do things for themselves.
- Efficiency – cutting down on admin, repetitive questions or awkward ways of doing things.
- Trust – giving people confidence when they look you up after hearing about you somewhere else.
- Keeping things working – security, updates, fixing problems and looking after what is already there.
They can all end up lumped together as “website costs”.
But that doesn’t tell you what you’re actually paying for.
When the aim is to spend as little as possible
“I need a website. How much does it cost?” must be one of the sentences web designers hear most often.
There is nothing unusual about wanting to know what something will cost. But with websites, cost often seems to become more than a consideration. It becomes the starting point for deciding what to do.
A cheap website. A DIY website. The minimum that will do the job. Not necessarily because anybody has established that spending more would achieve nothing useful, but because the website itself is being treated as a cost to the business – and costs are there to be kept down.
That thinking doesn’t end once the website has been built. The same thing can happen when budgets are reviewed. If website spending is seen simply as another expense, reducing it can look like an obvious saving.
But what if the business has a problem that the website could help address?
At that point, reducing the website budget isn’t simply reducing a cost. It may also mean reducing what the business is prepared to spend on solving the problem.
If it were a salesperson, would you think about it the same way?
Businesses are used to spending money in order to make money.
Salespeople are an obvious example. Their salary is a cost to the business, but nobody would decide whether they were worthwhile by looking at the salary alone.
The question is what role they play in bringing in work, keeping customers, developing relationships or opening up opportunities.
A website can play some of those roles too.
It may help somebody find the business in the first place. It may give them enough confidence to get in touch. It may answer the questions they need answered before they are ready to buy. It may help existing customers or members keep using what the organisation offers.
That doesn’t make every website worthwhile, and it certainly doesn’t mean that spending more automatically produces more.
But if a website is expected to help the business grow, support customers or make things work better, the question isn’t simply how much can be saved by spending less. It’s also what could be gained by spending well.
Doing nothing has a cost too
There is another problem with looking only at the amount being spent: the alternative can appear to cost nothing.
If a piece of website work costs £3,000, it is easy to compare that £3,000 with not doing the work at all – apparently £0.
But doing nothing has an outcome too.
It might mean staff continuing to spend time on something that could be made easier. It might mean customers continuing to struggle to find information. It might mean fewer people finding the business, an awkward process staying awkward, or an opportunity simply not being pursued.
None of that automatically makes the £3,000 worth spending. Sometimes the cost of doing nothing really is very small, and the sensible decision is not to spend the money.
The cost of making a change needs to be compared with the cost of leaving things as they are.
The website is built. So why are we still spending money on it?
Seeing a website as something that has been bought can create another problem later on: once it exists, any further spending can feel like an additional cost for something the business has already paid for.
Some ongoing spending really is about keeping the website running – hosting, maintenance, security, updates and fixing things when they go wrong.
But not all work done to an existing website is maintenance.
A website also gives you information once people start using it. You can see how they find it, what they search for, which pages attract attention, whether enquiries or applications change, and where things aren’t working as expected. That can lead to new content, changes to existing pages, SEO work, different priorities or entirely new ideas.
A website also gives you information once people start using it. You can see how they find it, what they search for, which pages attract attention, whether enquiries or applications change, and where things aren’t working as expected. That can lead to new content, changes to existing pages, SEO work, different priorities or entirely new ideas.
At the same time, the business itself doesn’t stand still. Services change, new audiences become important, customers need different things and new opportunities appear. The website may need to respond to those changes too.
At that point, the business isn’t simply spending more money on the same website. It is deciding whether to spend money on a new problem, opportunity or objective – and whether the website has a part to play in it.
Lumping all of that together as “website costs” hides what the money is actually being spent on.
A website doesn't have to make money directly to justify money being spent on it.
None of this means that a website has to generate money directly to justify spending money on it.
For some businesses, sales, bookings or enquiries will be the obvious measure. For others, the website may be there to provide a service, support existing customers or members, distribute information, reduce administration or make something easier to do.
Sometimes success might actually mean fewer enquiries because people can find the answer or complete something for themselves without having to get in touch.
The important part is knowing what the website is there to contribute to. Without that, it is very difficult to decide whether spending £500, £5,000 or £50,000 on it is sensible – or whether spending anything at all is sensible.
The question isn’t whether a website is expensive. It’s whether the spending makes sense for what the business or organisation is trying to achieve.
So, is your website an expense?
Of course a website costs money. Sometimes a lot of money. And sometimes the right decision is to spend less, postpone the work or not do it at all.
But starting with “How little can we spend?” is a very different thing from deciding whether the spending is worthwhile.
A website might help bring in new business. It might save time, support existing customers, make something easier to run, improve how people find you or allow the business to do something it couldn’t do before.
So when the website appears in a budget as a cost, perhaps the next question shouldn’t automatically be how to reduce it.
Ask what could change because of that spending – and what could happen if you don’t spend it.
Then decide whether it’s worth the money.
