The ₦300k website is the most expensive purchase many small businesses ever make. Not because of the invoice — because of everything that happens after. Here's the arithmetic nobody shows you at the point of sale.
Where the real costs hide
A cheap build isn't cheap because the builder found efficiencies. It's cheap because things were skipped — and every skipped thing has a price that lands later, on you. The site loads in six seconds, so half your mobile visitors leave before seeing anything. There's no technical SEO, so Google sends the searchers to your competitors. The contact form was never tested, and it's been failing silently since March.
Put small numbers on it and it stops being abstract. Say your website could realistically bring 20 enquiries a month, you close a quarter of them, and an average customer is worth ₦50,000. That's ₦250,000 a month the site should produce. A cheap site delivering half of that is quietly costing ₦125,000 every month — ₦1.5m a year, forever. The 'savings' on the build were consumed in the first eight weeks.
The six failure modes
- Slow pages — attention on mobile is measured in seconds. Speed is a feature customers feel before they read a single word.
- Invisible on Google — no page structure, no metadata, no local SEO. The site exists, but only for people who already have the link.
- Broken forms — the most expensive bug in small business, because it fails silently. Leads bounce off it for months while the site 'looks fine'.
- No maintenance — unpatched software gets hacked, and a hacked site costs more to rescue than years of maintenance would have.
- Poor mobile experience — most of your visitors are on a phone. A site that fights their thumbs sends them straight back to the search results.
- No measurement — without analytics you can't see any of the above happening. The leak stays invisible until the year-end numbers ask hard questions.
How to buy a website properly
The fix isn't 'spend more' — it's 'buy different things'. Judge proposals by what happens after launch: Is hosting and security handled? Will forms be monitored? Is there analytics, and will a human explain them to you monthly? Is anyone responsible for the site still working in a year? A builder who can't answer those isn't selling a business asset; they're selling a file.