After receiving a similar message to the one below, we decided it was a good idea to list the advantages of having / using a website as even business owners can take their websites for granted. We believe it’s an essential part of any business and especially one that has been using a website and benefitting from it from great sales, enquires and online visibility.
Here is the example concerned website owner:
This is quite a lot of money to find which I wasn’t aware would be such a high amount. I think it’s a lot of money for me to find, and I wasn’t aware if would involve this much cost annually when I set it up. I understand that it is going to involve a lot of time and work to keep it updated in order to generate leads. I currently have other avenues that involve minimal work on my part and a similar cost that I get daily phone calls from. I can’t see a benefit to me with carrying on with the website going forward.
Here is the reasons why if you have a website and its bring in enquiries is going to be a bad decision to stop it.
Generally closing / stopping a website after 3 years and it being such a success will be a false economy in my opinion. Even though you mention other avenues to attract leads, I would suggest the website is at the centre of all those leads (social media and tradesmen membership sites) and is vital to be in place and to be upgraded / improved to keep your website visitors coming.
Below we give our thoughts as a website design company that has over 400 busines owner clients and give an overview about the website, in 10 years we have never had a website owner decide not to continue with a website that is associated with a company that is still operating and profitable so will give you my full attention / help in working this out as I know the website, domain and email can only enhance and help you in your day to day operations.
The standard domain renewal invoice covers the cost of the domain / website / hosting / email / and upgrading the website to be ‘secure’ with a SSL certificate to make it more attractive to the search engines and for it to avoid ‘non-secure’ browser warnings, this should be seen as a good / positive / cheap upgrade to keep the website above the competition. It also covers keeping the website safe / secure and optimised by keeping all elements of it (and there are a lot) updated and ensuring they are always compatible with each other. These elements consist of the websites codebase (the Content Management System), its design element (the theme) and elements that provide specific operations / specialist functions, like the front page slider function element.
Thoughts:
1 Believe the other avenues you are using to attract enquiries are great and know they help, the website is shown on Checkatrade / Trustatrader and bother regularly visit the website from that advert / listing.
2 Website is 4 Years old and in that time, it has attracted 4500 website visitors. The older a website gets, the more ‘trust’ the search engines gives to it. Generally, that results in higher rankings / higher website visits which can only lead to more enquiries and jobs / sales with such a great Responsive, user-friendly website like you have.
3 The majority of website visitors come to you directly from Google (organic search), this is normal and good. These website visitors are ‘free’ and will always be of no- additional cost to you. Removing the website will instantly stop these visitors / enquiries.
4 The website has been directly visited over 900 times from Checkatrade and Trustatrader, I would suggest if you didn’t have a website it would be less appealing to these visitors to contact you.
5, Website visitors are up over 30% compared with last year, this is despite any updates, improvements, enhancements from yourself in terms of content (text and images) on the website.
6, the Majority of the ‘hard work is done’ and the majority of the costs in setting up and running a website have been made, the website will continue to be productive and will be more productive if its renewed and upgraded as we recommend.
7, to enhance the website keeping it safe, secure, fast, efficient we need to do basic and regular maintenance and upgrades (this accounts for the server security, performance and maintenance package on the invoice and the recommended SSL upgrade).
8, The standard renewal invoice fully covers everything (domain / hosting / email / updates / ssl certificate) up until Feb 2020 and equates to less than £15 per month, surely this is a small price to pay for such a productive element of your business.
9, the cost of the website, its upgrade and maintenance is fully tax deductible and can be added to your self-assessment which is probably due about now, also you can add it to the assessment even if you have already submitted it.
10, People that find you on Google Maps visit your listing / website directly from that entry, this was created by us during the original project.
11, The website can be used for further advertising using Google PPC, (pay per click advertising also called Adwords. This allows you to choose where, when and what you want to be advertising and allows you to pay for higher rankings. You can ‘instantly’ attract highly targeted people that want your services.
12, thinking long term, if and when you want to sell the company, then your website / your online presence will not only be assumed to be included but it will enhance the value of the business. Obviously if you intend passing your company on to someone else its more useful / valuable if it has a ‘free’ source of enquiries.
13, If you decide not to renew your website you will find that could be re-purchased by a competitor who could use your old website includes your photos / text which could then be used to get business for them using the same website design / name.
I hope this gives you something to think about as we really don’t want to lose you as a client due to a bad decision, this has never happened to us, and know a website will always enhance / help a business. Indeed, we have had clients that have been advertising on the tradesman directories including the ones you use, checkatrade / trustatrader. They then got us to build and promote them a website and after a very short space of time told us they got 40% more work due to the ‘quality’ of the website that made them stand out / give more details of their work and allowed them to be a cut above the average advertiser on those sites. The websites we built from them have been built 5 years now and know the turnover of one of the companies has improved by 25% year on year for the last 5 years.
