Cheap websites: what you actually get and what it costs later
A cheap website is a specific product with trade-offs that are invisible on launch day. What is in the box, what is not, and when cheap is right.
Our position, stated plainly
What is in the box
| Usually included | Usually not included |
|---|---|
| A template with your logo, colours and text | Design for your business and your customers |
| A handful of pages | Content written and structured to be found |
| A contact form | Spam protection that works, and delivery you can trust |
| Hosting on the supplier’s plan | Hosting in your name, on a platform that renews certificates and absorbs traffic |
| A launch | Anything after the launch: updates, security, monitoring, fixes |
| A site that looks fine on the supplier’s laptop | Speed on a mid-range phone, verified |
| A domain “handled for you” | A domain in your name with your billing details |
Where the cost goes
- Month one to twelve: the quiet costs. Slower pages on phones lose visitors silently. A form with no spam protection fills the inbox or stops delivering. Nobody applies updates. Nobody is watching.
- The first incident. A plugin vulnerability, an expired certificate, a broken form discovered by a customer. Fixed by the hour, if the supplier answers.
- The outgrowing. The business wants a landing page, an integration, a second language. The template resists; each change costs more than the site did.
- The exit. The business decides to rebuild properly and discovers the hosting and domain are in the supplier’s name, the layout cannot be exported, and the redirects are nobody’s job.
We have a rough measure of what that neglect looks like at scale. Across 3,059 reachable business websites in the south-east of the Netherlands, scanned in August 2026, 15.5 percent carried at least one of three defects: no HTTPS, no viewport meta tag, or Flash and other markup from the 2000s. Each one is cheap to prevent at build time and awkward to fix later.
When cheap is right
- A campaign page that ends in a few months.
- A business that is testing whether it exists, and needs something online this week.
- A club, a hobby, a personal page where speed and ownership do not matter.
- A placeholder while the real site is built, as long as the domain is yours.
In those cases we say so, and we do not sell a custom build that the situation does not need.
What this means for you
Decide what the website is for before you decide what to pay. If it is temporary or experimental, buy cheap, keep the domain and content yours, and expect to rebuild. If the business depends on it, the cheap option is the expensive one, and the questions in the table above tell you exactly which costs it deferred.
Frequently asked questions
Is a cheap website a bad website?
Not necessarily on launch day. Templates look fine and work. The problems are what is not included: no speed work, no security routine, no monitoring, no ownership of the platform, no aftercare. Those are absent by design, because they are what the price left out.
Can we start cheap and upgrade later?
You can start cheap and rebuild later, which is different. Little from a template site carries into a custom build except the text and images, so the cheap site is a cost, not a first phase. That is fine if it earned its keep as a temporary page. It is a poor plan if it was meant to be the site.
What questions expose what a cheap quote leaves out?
Whose name is on the hosting and domain? What happens when the contact form breaks in month four, and what does it cost? What are the mobile speed numbers on launch? Who applies security updates? Can we take the site elsewhere? Cheap quotes rarely have answers to any of the five.