Why Pay Monthly Websites Work So Well for Welsh Small Businesses

Most businesses in Wales are small. Not small as in a team of thirty, but small as in one person, a van and a phone that rings while they are halfway up a ladder. A £2,500 invoice for a website is not a line in a marketing budget for that business. It is a real decision with a real cost somewhere else.

That is the whole reason the monthly model fits here, and it is worth setting out properly rather than dressing it up.

The money works the way the business works

A sole trader thinks in months because that is how everything else arrives: the van finance, the insurance, the phone, the accountant. Income is uneven, especially in trades where a wet February can be quiet, so the outgoings that cause the least trouble are the small predictable ones.

A one off build inverts that. It asks for the largest single payment of the year before the website has brought in a single enquiry. Plenty of good businesses simply never get past that, which is why so many are still running on a Facebook page and word of mouth.

Wales is a lot of small places close together

This matters more than people expect. A trade covering the Valleys might work in Pontypridd, Caerphilly, Treforest, Nelson and Ystrad Mynach in the same week, and customers in each of those search using their own town, not the region.

That means a website needs a page for each place that earns its keep, and a Google Business Profile kept current, and reviews coming in steadily. That is ongoing work rather than a thing you build once, which is exactly what a monthly plan is set up to do. Our own Wales location pages work this way, with separate pages for Cardiff, Swansea, Wrexham, Bangor and the rest.

What the monthly fee actually removes

Where it does not make sense

Being straight about this is more useful than a sales pitch. A monthly plan is the wrong choice if you have the money spare and someone who will genuinely keep the site maintained, because buying once will cost you a little less over five years. It is also wrong if you want to build and tinker with it yourself, since the managed part will only get in your way.

And if your website will never change, a fixed brochure site for a long established firm, you are paying monthly for maintenance you do not need.

A note on the Welsh language

We get asked whether sites need to be bilingual. Commercially, there is no requirement for a private business, and for most trades in Cardiff or Newport an English site is what their customers search in. In parts of north and west Wales it is a different picture, and a bilingual site can be a genuine signal that you are local.

It is a judgement about your customers rather than a rule, and it costs more to do properly because everything doubles. We cover this in more detail in branding for small businesses in Wales.

What it looks like in practice

1. 1You ring or fill in the form, and we reply within one working day with a price and a start date.
2. 2We go through what you do, where you work and what you want the site to bring in.
3. 3We write and build it, and you review it on a private link before anyone else sees it.
4. 4It goes live, usually 7 to 14 days after your content reaches us.
5. 5From then on it is ours to host, patch, back up and keep current, and yours to ring about.

Every plan and figure sits openly on our web design prices page. If you would rather weigh this against paying once, we have run both sums.

Keep reading

See every article on the blog