Being a small business owner, it may feel a luxury to have a website. Small business owners may prefer to focus on more vital expenses rather than having a site. However, in the 21st century, having an online presence is more than an essential. According to Statista Research Department 85% of consumers make purchases on the web. So, if you want to survive as a small entrepreneur, building a website is a reasonable decision to start with.
3 reasons why you need a website for business!
A site for a small business is like a key for a piano. It will make your business seem real and will bring enough spotlight to it.
Building credibility
Customers nowadays unconsciously expect the businesses to be on Google. If people could search for your services, find a website with your contact, valid location, they will be 50% more inclined to become consumers. A digital presence ensures trustworthiness. It will furthermore enable you to have a business email instead of your personal one leaving a professional first impression on the website visitors. In a word, sites make you look professional and competitive with other lookalike businesses.
Generating new leads
With a little bit of marking touch, Google can provide you a wave of new customers. Even though you may feel content with the amount of your current clients, all the business undergo a turnoff of customers sooner or later, that’s why it is essential to attract new customers occasionally.
With so many SEO tools available on the web, one can create an easily navigational website, with optimized and comprehensive content, a great user experience without necessarily mastering any of the required digital skills. All the above mentioned factors will ensure that you rank high on Google, hence people will find your business quicker via organic search.
Showcase your product and services SELL them
The contemporary advancement of technology enables entrepreneurs to have online E-commerce sites, where you can display your products and have people buy them online with a single click. Many product development services such as Google analytics, Google Search Console allow you measure certain metrics about how many people visit your website monthly or weekly, how many of them, take your desired call to action (conversion, for instance). Based on this information, you will be able to constantly improve your rankings, thus ensuring persistent growth of sales.
How much does it cost to build a website for a small business ?
The average amount to build a site may vary from 2000$ to 10000$ depending on everything you will need to have. Before feeling overwhelmed about the cost to create a website for your business, let’s divide it down and understand where it is coming from.
Domain Name
Your domain name is your online address. It exhibits where your business resides. You can buy a domain name from companies like GoDaddy, HostGator, and Dreamhost. It is advisable to purchase a domain name identical to your business name. For instance, the domain name of the tech company Apple is Apple.com.
Domain names may cost from 0.95$ to 12$ per name. If our desired domain name happens not to be for sale, you will have to come with another one.
Website Hosting
Without a web hosting site, your files won’t be stored anywhere. So, we can say that a hosting is like home, where you restore all your belongings including HTML,CSS files, documents, media files and more. Website hosting provides you with a server to host your business so that visitors will be able to have access to these files.
Site hosting may cost 24$ to 24000$ annually.
You can also buy a shared hosting which means that the server will be shared among several websites. It may cost 24$ to $120 per year.
SSL Certificate
You have surely witnessed websites with a label “not secure” and it has surely impacted on you as an unreliable source. It is because such websites fail to buy a SSL certificate to have a https:// rather than a http://.
SSL certificate protects not only your website but also its visitors. Even though it is optional, it will only benefit you to have a certificate, as it will naturally trigger your visitors to keep on exploring your website and even take the desired call to action.
You can easily acquire a free SSL certificate as most of the hosting companies provide the websites with it, however, depending on the importance of being secure, one can purchase a SSL certificate costing up to 1500$.
Number of Pages
Depending on the kind of website, the number of pages differ, hence the cost differs too, as the latter pretty much is influenced by the numbers.
For instance, websites such as e-commerce sites can contain more than 50+ pages. Even though most of the pages may look alike being built by the same templates following the same features, still it takes time for developers to customize the pages by uploading different images, changing the colors, fonts and more. As time costs money, having many pages costs higher than building simple landing pages.
Average small businesses have 1 to 50 pages costing 1000$ to 5000$.
CMS – (Content Management System)
CMS is a kind of software that lets you build, design and constantly update your own website without any software development knowledge. The most famous CMS platforms are WordPRess, GoDaddy website builder, Shopify and more.
The advantages of using a CMS platform are
- SEO-friendly features For instance: WordPress Yoast SEO plugin thoroughly optimizes content ensuring better user experience for the reeders.
- Cost-effectiveness: building a website from a website builder can cost 0$ to 300$
- Easy maintenance: Easily updating your website adding or removing pages.
Consider all those factors while learning how to make a website for business.
However, you should keep in mind that you should do all the job, hence it may take lots of time for your project to launch.
You should also learn how to maintain it.
To avoid such problems, you can easily hire freelance developers and have them build a site for your small business quickly and efficiently.