For businesses of all scopes and types, websites can serve as audience boosters, reputation builders, and lead generators. Unfortunately, not all businesses are using this opportunity.
It can be very disappointing to see a company without its own site. The absence of a corporate website is often because of limited budgets, especially when it comes to a website for a small business. The Covid-19 crisis has added fuel to the fire and tightened web development budgets even more, regardless of the business scope.
However, there is always a solution, and our web agency is convinced that a professional site doesn’t have to cost you a fortune — it can be friendly to tight budgets. In this post, we explain how the WordPress CMS helps you create a website on a budget.
Making a DIY website vs hiring a web design agency
What is the cheapest way to build a website? Here is what first comes to mind when your website development budget is limited — a DIY (do-it-yourself) site creation kit. However, this option has plenty of limitations, which we have discussed in our post about hiring a web design agency vs making a DIY website. In a nutshell, a DIY site often issues like:
- No brand identity, blends with other similar sites on the Internet
- Hard to extend with new features
- Hard to customize to meet your business needs
- Hard to migrate to another platform
- Not very SEO-friendly
- Limited features in the free packages
- Full of ads in the free packages
- And more
If you need a robust business tool, it’s much better to think at a level higher. Consider choosing an enterprise-level site creation platform — for example, the WordPress CMS. A professional web development agency can build a website on a budget using WordPress as a basis. Still, it will be a lot cheaper than creating a custom website from scratch. Read on to discover what makes WordPress the optimal solution to create an affordable website.
Why choose WordPress for affordable websites
WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) based on the PHP programming language. According to the latest statistics, 32% of the entire web is built with WordPress. It is very versatile and allows developers to create many types of sites — from small blog sites to very complex enterprise applications. As an option, it’s a very good idea to choose WordPress for small business websites with a tight budget.
Strong free basic website package
WordPress has a strong free core package with out-of-the-box functionality that can be used to quickly create a low-cost website. It includes a very friendly admin dashboard to manage and control the site’s settings, a built-in blog, and much more. The site will be up and running from the beginning — it will just need a domain name and hosting.
Easy to extend and customize
Of course, a uniform site will not be enough to represent your business and fulfill its goals, so you will need to touch it up:
- To add the brand identity, you can choose among 7500+ free themes, buy a commercial one, or order a custom WordPress theme design.
- There are thousands of free and paid add-ons to extend the website functionality beyond the core.
- Customization or completely custom plugins are also often used in order to meet the business needs more exactly. Unlike simple site constructors, WordPress offers virtually unlimited opportunities here for professional developers to create what customers want.
56,680 free add-on plugins to get various functionality
Let’s take a closer look at add-on plugins. Currently, wordpress.org hosts 56,680 free add-ons that create extra features on a website, and this number keeps growing. Commercial plugins are not included into these stats. All plugins on wordpress.org are either totally free or have a pro version alongside the free one. Even their pro versions often are acceptable for minimal budgets.
The plugins cover plenty of features you may need to create — for example, there are free social share plugins, SEO plugins, plugins for business websites, WooCommerce to create online stores, and so on. Some of them are so useful, popular, and versatile that we have singled them out as must-have WordPress plugins.
Large choice of developers
To build a website on a budget with WordPress, you will have a good choice of skilled talents. WordPress has a comparatively easy learning curve for developers. It’s also easy for them to improve their skills and exchange their experience at WP conferences. An average budget for a weekend-long WordCamp is around $40 per person.
User-friendly out-of-the-box
You will not have to spend extra time (and time is money!) to discover how everything is arranged inside your site. Despite its powerful capabilities, WordPress is tailored to ordinary users. It started 17 years ago as a blogging platform and has grown into a strong CMS, but still has intuitive user interfaces as a priority. WordPress admin dashboard uses drag-and-drop functionality and helpful hints in a casual, friendly tone.
Very easy editorial experiences
You will not have to spend funds on teaching your editors how to use the admin dashboard for plenty of routine tasks. For example, it is easy for them to create posts, create pages, change images, use the Media Library, set up RSS feeds, create email subscriptions, make lists of latest or featured posts, and so on.
The new modern drag-and-drop Gutenberg editor also makes it easy to do dozens of interesting tricks. For example, anyone can create a colorful CTA button inside a blog, which once used to be available to developers only. WP also has a wide array of alternate page builders (Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, etc.) to every editor’s liking.
SEO-friendly
WordPress follows SEO best practices and is SEO-friendly out-of-the box, which means your new website has the best chance to bring in new customers from organic searches. WP allows you to easily fill your site with keyword-rich content and update it regularly. It also offers a variety of search engine optimization tools and plugins, for example, Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack, XML Sitemap, SEOPress, Schema – All In One Schema Rich Snippets, and many more.
Security tracking included
WordPress has a team of security researchers and developers who track and fix WordPress core vulnerabilities in order to better protect sites. Security releases will be applied automatically on a site unless this option is turned off by the administrators. Of course, there are additional security measures to secure a WordPress site, but the work of the security team is extremely valuable.
Let us help you build a website on a budget!
If you are interested in affordable website design, this is the page to be on. Our web development agency switched to a cost-effective approach that allows us to create great sites while our customers stay on budget. This is achieved thanks to a thoughtful use of ready-made solutions (and there are tons of them in WordPress!), as well as thanks to our developers’ efficiency and expertise that allows them to work quickly.
That said, we are ready to make a website on a budget that fully meets your business needs thanks to the capabilities of WordPress. Contact us and let’s give your ideas a discussion!
