Why You Can’t Afford a Cheap Website
A few weeks ago, a prospective client called us in a panic. They’d just been sued for tens of thousands of dollars because their website wasn’t ADA compliant. They came to us looking for help after they had already been served with the lawsuit and began negotiating with the plaintiff.
They’d paid a few hundred dollars to an overseas developer for what looked like a bright, festive retail website. When I looked at their site, I could see the problem immediately: tons of issues that would prevent someone with disabilities (blindness, low vision, motor control issues, etc) from using the site.
For example, almost all of the text on the page was embedded inside images rather than written as actual text. That matters because visitors who use screen readers (software that reads websites aloud for people with visual impairments) would hear almost nothing useful. The site was essentially invisible to them.
That’s the kind of thing that gets businesses sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act. And it did.
ADA compliance is just one of the reasons this article exists, but certainly not the only one.
A business mentor of mine used to say: “I can’t afford a cheap attorney.” His point was simple: cutting corners on cost upfront usually means spending far more to deal with the consequences later. Websites work exactly the same way.
That cheap website isn’t going to stay cheap. Here’s why:
The Lawsuit You Didn’t See Coming
The Americans with Disabilities Act applies to websites. Courts have been clear on this for years, and the number of state and local ADA-related website lawsuits filed annually now runs into the tens of thousands. Settlements range from a few thousand dollars to well into six figures, and that’s before attorney’s fees.
There’s an old saying in construction: it’s always cheaper to build it right than to fix it later. The same is true for websites. Retrofitting accessibility into an existing site costs more than building it in from the start. Doing it under the pressure of a lawsuit is even more expensive.
The most common ADA issues, poor color contrast, missing alt text, text displayed as images, vague link labels, are not exotic problems. They’re basic. A developer trained to build to WCAG standards (the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that define what ADA compliance actually requires) handles these automatically. A developer who has never heard of WCAG doesn’t know, doesn’t ask, and has no idea how much trouble he’s going to get you into.
The Privacy Fines & Penalties Nobody Warned You About
California’s privacy law, the CPRA, treats every affected customer as a separate violation, with fines up to $2,500 per person for unintentional violations. If your ecommerce site gets breached and 100 customers’ data is exposed, you’re looking at potential fines of $250,000, and with 1,000 customers, that’s $2.5 million, before a single dollar in legal fees.
And California is just one state. More than a dozen others have passed their own privacy laws, and the EU’s GDPR applies to any business that serves European customers, with penalties up to 4% of annual global revenue.
A professionally built website has privacy compliance built in from day one: proper data handling, a real privacy policy, cookie consent, secure data storage. A cheap website has none of that. And when regulators come looking, or a customer sues, “I didn’t know” is not a defense.
The Hack That Shuts You Down
Privacy compliance and website security go hand in hand. You can’t honestly say your customers’ data is private if your site isn’t secure. Cheap websites are often built on bargain hosting, with outdated software, no active monitoring, and no backups. One security hole is all it takes.
If your site gets hacked, you could be offline for days, explaining to customers why their information was exposed. The cost of cleaning up after a breach, paying for forensics, notifying customers, making repairs, and absorbing lost sales during the downtime, almost always dwarfs the cost of doing it securely from the start.
If Google Can’t Find You, Neither Can Your Customers
There’s an old joke in the SEO world: The safest place to hide a body is on page two of Google. Nobody looks there. If your website isn’t showing up on page one, ideally in the top few results, for searches related to your business, you might as well not have a website at all, as far as new customers are concerned.
Bargain basement websites often are not built with SEO in mind. That means all of the things that professional web developers and SEO experts put into their sites (strategically written content, page titles, heading levels, page structures, landmarks, linking strategies, and tons more techniques) would likely be missing or done wrong.
And that means your site likely won’t show up when people search for what you do and where you do it.
And if people can’t find you, they’re likely not going to buy from you.
And here’s a bonus: Many of the things that make a website accessible to people with disabilities are the same things that make it attractive to Google. Google crawls your site the way a blind user uses it: reading alt tags, parsing link descriptions, processing text. That means that making your site more ADA compliant will probably help it rank better, too.
Slow, Broken, and Invisible on Mobile
More than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. Google knows this, which is why it ranks your site based on how it performs on a phone, not a desktop. A site that looks fine on a laptop but breaks on an iPhone or Android gets penalized by Google.
Cheap websites are slow by nature. Heavy, poorly written code, unoptimized images, and bargain hosting all add up. And text embedded inside images doesn’t resize properly on a phone. It just gets tiny, distorted, or cut off. That’s an ADA violation and a mobile problem rolled into one.
Studies show that a significant portion of visitors leave a site that takes more than three seconds to load. You paid to get them there, through word of mouth, advertising, search, and they’re gone before they read a single word.
Invisible Lost Revenue
This is the one that keeps us up at night on behalf of our clients. A lawsuit sends you a bill. A security breach announces itself. But lost revenue from a cheap website arrives in total silence. No invoice. No warning. Just customers who (if they found you at all) took one look and left without a word.
Think about the last time you were walking through a mall, spotted a store, and noticed the display window was dusty, the signage was crooked, and the salesperson inside looked like they’d rather be anywhere else. You didn’t go in. You didn’t need a reason. You just kept walking.
Your website does the same thing to people. Except online, there’s no social awkwardness about leaving. No eye contact to avoid. They just click the back button.
Visitors may not be able to tell you exactly why your site looks off, but they feel it. Mismatched fonts, generic stock photos, cluttered layouts, a template they’ve seen a dozen times before: it all adds up to a loss of trust. And they go look for someone else, find your competitor and give them the sale that should have been yours.
That lost customer never shows up on any report. Which is exactly what makes it so dangerous. You never know how much business you’re losing, so you never feel the urgency to fix it. But it’s happening every day.
Every item on this list, the lawsuit, the fine, the breach, the lost Google rankings, the mobile visitors who bounced, the customer who clicked away, was preventable. Not through magic, but with a professionally built website that had these things built in from the start.
Your Cheap Website Was Never Actually Cheap. You Just Haven’t Gotten the Bill Yet.
A good website isn’t an expense. It’s the one investment that works for your business around the clock, every day, without asking for a day off. Done right, every dollar you put into it has the potential to come back 2x, 3x or even 10x. Done wrong, you’ll spend years paying for what you thought you saved.
Let’s Talk About Your Website
If your website was built on the cheap, or you’re about to build one and wondering where to start, we’d like to help. We’ll show you what a professionally built website can do for your business, and what your current one might be costing you. Contact us to get started.
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