The real cost of a cheap website
A ₦150,000 site that has to be rebuilt in fourteen months was not cheap. It was expensive, paid in instalments.
We rebuild a lot of sites that are less than two years old. The pattern is consistent enough to be predictable.
The original build came in low because it was assembled from a purchased theme and a dozen plugins. It looked fine on launch day. Then the business changed slightly — a new service line, a different audience, a landing page for a campaign — and the theme could not accommodate it without a developer who understood that specific theme's conventions.
Meanwhile the plugins aged. One stopped being maintained. Another introduced a vulnerability. Page weight crept past four megabytes and mobile traffic, which is most traffic, started bouncing.
By month fourteen the site cannot be edited safely, cannot be extended, and cannot be made fast without removing the things that made it cheap. So it gets rebuilt, and the cheap build becomes a deposit on the real one.
This is not an argument that every business needs a bespoke site. It is an argument for being honest about the lifespan you are buying. If you need something for a six-month campaign, buy cheap deliberately. If this is the front door of a business you intend to run for a decade, price it accordingly the first time.
Working on something this applies to?
Book a free 30-minute discovery call. We will tell you what we would do, whether or not you hire us to do it.
