6 Reasons Why Website DIY Builders Save You Cash

You might not think of it much but with a single act or a choice of going for DIY Website Builders can save you at least about $7000, more or less when you are looking to design or redesign your website.

How, you ask?

We could just write a one-liner such as this: direct savings, indirect savings, and opportunity cost.

We could then throw in wasted time learning, practicing, and doing your due diligence counting to “10,000 hours” as Malcolm Gladwell writes in his popular book, The Outliers.

Website DIY builders only average around $10 per month (including hosting, which you’d need anyway). While we are at it, here are some of the best website DIY builders you get for your money:

Weebly
Mozello
Strikingly
Wix
Duda
SquareSpace

Website DIY Builder Options for Ecommerce

Shopify
BigCommerce

Wondering how a website builder saves you money? Here’s how:

Study. Do. Study. Do

Education is expensive. If you were an individual or a small business owner itching to create websites for yourself, you’d have to learn a bunch of technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, My SQL, Javascript, J Queries, or even server side programming – depending on what kind of website you are looking to build.

Offline education can easily cost you “an arm and a leg” and doesn’t make any sense to invest in that. Online education also sets you back by anywhere from $15 to $120 per month (books and other reference material not included).

Hint: Learning coding alone can set you back by $400 per year on study material alone.

Time

Choosing to “learn and do” website design is a choice that’ll cost you the time you’d use to run your business, build your team, and do things you are better off with. Assuming it takes you a year to learn HTML and CSS basics along with another year to get anywhere near average skill level with coding, you’d have lost a couple of years.

Sometimes, 2-3 years is all it takes for a startup to gain the tipping point (AirBnB and Evernote, each worth millions of dollars, case in point).

Software

Building websites – with the exception of DIY website builders – cost you professional software such as Adobe’s Suite of products. Adobe’s Suite of products can cost you around $50 per month (depending on where you live).

This is a recurring subscription that adds up to $600 per year. You’d then spend another $360 on a premium hosting account, along with all kinds of tools you’d need to build that website. Give this setup about 7 years and you’d have paid more than $7000 for one-time work or just for a few websites.

Subscriptions

If you choose not to use a DIY website builder, you’d need a couple of other subscriptions to keep your website up. Security software, a Content Delivery Network (to make your website load fast), the cost for using stand-alone software for emails, and more.

Add each of these up and you’ll easily rack up more than a few thousand dollars in the average it takes a webmaster to realize that you are overspending for things you’d find a usual DIY website builder package.

Ongoing costs for conversion optimization

In digital marketing, conversion optimization is big for the simple reason that it’s the one, single, ongoing activity that turns your website from a digital brochure to a humongous money-maker. If you had to depend on yourself (or others) for website design, you’d never get this as a part of the website development package (yet, this is exactly what you need).

Your website is never a done thing. But the only way you can save thousands of dollars on ongoing conversion optimization spend is when you cut down the time it takes to make a website go live and spend time and resources on CRO.

Opportunity Cost

Every choice we make is set off against a choice we didn’t make. Instead of spending your precious time building a website (which you could easily outsource or build one using a web builder), you could be hustling, networking, doing a few things that can change the way you do business, hire more people, and more.

You might not realize it but a few decisions we make can prove to be expensive. Are you making these expensive mistakes when it comes to website design or using DIY website builders?