What I'd do with a £5,000 website budget

The most common mistake I see with small business websites isn’t bad design. It’s spending the whole budget on the build and leaving nothing to get anyone to it.

A shiny new site with no visitors is a brochure in a drawer. So if you’ve got £5,000 and one shot at this, here’s roughly how I’d split it.

£750 on thinking before anyone designs anything

Who is this site for, what do they need to know, and what do you want them to do? Write it down. Look at the three competitors you lose work to. Talk to two or three recent customers about why they chose you. This is the cheapest part of the project and the one people skip most often.

£1,000 on words

Most websites are written last, in a hurry, by the business owner at eleven at night. Then everyone wonders why the site doesn’t sell. Good copy that sounds like you and answers real questions is worth more than any animation.

£2,000 on the build

A clean, fast, mobile first site on a platform you can update yourself. You probably need fewer pages than you think. A strong homepage, a page per main service, an about page that shows real people, and a contact page that makes it easy.

£250 on the basics nobody sees

Analytics set up properly, Google Business Profile, Search Console, structured data, a sitemap, sensible page titles. Unglamorous, and the difference between being found and not.

£1,000 held back for the first three months

This is the bit everyone wants to spend on the build. Don’t. Use it to get the site in front of people, whether that’s local search, a small paid campaign, or a few strong pieces of content. Then look at what’s working and fix what isn’t.

The short version

Spend less on the website than you planned, and more on the thinking before it and the push after it. If you’d like a second opinion on a quote you’ve been given, I’m happy to take a look.