Table of Contents
What are additional one-time fees to consider?
Away from your website setup, you should also factor in these one-time purchases:
- Domain Name Registration: You’ll typically pay a fee to secure your website’s unique address; while often done annually, you can sometimes pick multi-year plans.
- SSL Certificate: Some website providers give you an SSL certificate for free, while others will charge a fee; paid SSL certificates might have longer validation periods and other advantages.
- Premium Themes and Plugins: Premium themes and plugins typically offer more customization and full-feature access; they can be expensive.
What are the costs associated with website content creation?
Investments associated with creating content for your website can include:
- Copywriting: You should strongly consider hiring a copywriter for producing sales-focused, engaging, and informative written content, even if they are expensive. Copywriters should also optimize your on-page SEO with keywords and other practices.
- Photography/Videography: Hire a photographer or videographer for a more professional look. Hire a creator with experience working with brands similar to yours.
- Graphic Design: You should use custom graphics and visuals to emphasize your brand, its identity, and aesthetics.
Deep Dive:
Consider learning design skills and concepts to make graphics with resources like YouTube and Canva Design School. You can also use stock photos and videos if you’re on a tight budget – however, you should also look to replace these once you’ve started growing.
What are website maintenance costs?
Areas to invest in for your website maintenance include:
- Software Updates: You must keep your website themes, plugins, and platform up-to-date. Turn on automatic updates for both security and performance.
- Hosting Fees: Consider the server hosting space fees associated with your website – you can normally choose to pay monthly or annually, depending on what’s best for you.
- Backups: While backups may cost money, doing so is vital for disaster recovery. Check if your provider has options.
- Security Monitoring: Implement security monitoring (e.g. installing a plugin) to fend off hackers and other cybersecurity risks (e.g. malware).
Pro Tip:
Choose a hosting provider that offers automatic backups and security monitoring as part of their package to save on these costs.
Are there any hidden costs associated with website maintenance?
Yes – you need to consider the following into your budget when building a website.
- Technical Support: You need a technical support team to make big changes and resolve technical problems. Some website hosting providers have a support team, so you should look for this before subscribing.
- Performance Optimization: You must optimize your website speed and performance, as these can influence your search engine rankings. Look for plugins and check if your site provider can do these automatically.
- Marketing and SEO: You should invest in different marketing aspects (e.g. social media/content marketing) to promote your website and potentially boost search engine rankings. SEO tools (e.g. Semrush and Ahrefs) should also be a consideration.
Deep Dive:
Think about the skills you can learn yourself (e.g. SEO).
What happens if I don’t pay for website maintenance?
Reasons not to ignore website maintenance include:
- Security: You don’t want outdated software because your site data is more vulnerable to cyberattacks; it’s normally very easy to set a plugin to run automatically.
- Performance: The user experience is influenced by loading times – make sure that there are no on-site errors or anything else that could increase your bounce rate.
- Functionality: Since outdated plugins and themes might result in them no longer working, which could affect how visitors use your site, keeping them updated can enhance long-term success.
- Search Rankings: Google and other search engines always prefer well-maintained sites, which is why you need to prioritize maintenance.
Deep Dive:
Create a monthly site maintenance budget so that you know exactly what to expect.
Conclusion
You must know exactly what you need to pay for on your website if you want sustainable growth in the long run. Budgeting is essential due to a mixture of one-time feed and ongoing costs, such as content creation (ongoing) and registering your domain (one-off).
Budgeting also mitigates long-term threats and avoids unexpected expenses that could otherwise arise – not spending the money on your site can lead to bigger and more expensive problems.
