Are you struggling to keep a handle on your business expenses? New Zealand is currently experiencing runaway inflation and costs for just about everything, whether it’s at home or in your business, are going up rapidly. In some cases, you’ll be able to pass these rising costs on to your customers, but what about checking to see if there are cheaper alternatives?
Here are five things you can check to see if there are easy savings to be made on your website costs and improve the profitability of your business.
1 – Monthly website hosting
Hosting is a must-have if you want your website on the internet. Even if you use a service like Shopify or Squarespace, you’re getting charged for hosting, it’s just bundled into the monthly price you pay.
How much are you currently paying? It’s possible you haven’t checked lately. This is common with regular monthly payments, but it pays to know because you might be paying a lot more than you have to.
Some of the benefits of our affordable website hosting include:
- Free SSL security certificate
- Regular backups
- Free software updates (eg WordPress plugins)
- Personal kiwi service
- 24/7 downtime monitoring
- No long-term contracts
- No exit fees
- Free POP email accounts
- Free transfers for most websites
- Free DNS updates or changes
- Free optimisation of hosting account to ensure best performance
- Prices is just $12.90NZD/month
If you’re put off switching website hosts (or changing from Squarespace or Shopify) because it seems like too much hassle or expense, don’t stress. For a lot of websites we actually do the transfer for free and take care of all the technical stuff behind the scenes. Just get in touch and ask – we’ll get back to you asap and let you know what’s involved.
2 – Domain fees
We’ve talked before about the great variation in domain registration and renewal fees, and the crazy thing is that it’s exactly the same product regardless of where you get it. Even if you registered your domain with us to get the cheapest price, you can easily change your domain to another registrar absolutely free and you won’t lose any of the registration period you’ve paid for.
So, basically you’ve got nothing to lose by buying or renewing your domain with us and you could easily save $50 a year for each domain you own.
Read this post to learn more about how to transfer your website domain.
3 – Extras that could be free
Are you paying for any of the following things?
- SSL security certificate (the green padlock that shows on your website)
- Backups (getting a copy of your website files)
- Email accounts
- Website software updates (e.g plugins etc)
- Moving your website to a new host
- Setting up GA4 Google Analytics
It’s possible some website companies will charge you a lot of money for these sorts of services, when you could be getting them for free if you move your hosting to us. Check out some of our very affordable business website hosting plans.
4 – Upgrades
Users of Shopify will be well familiar with this money trap. Any time you want to add a new feature to your website they ask you for more money, and your monthly fees go up.
With our e-commerce websites, you can log in to your site and add new features yourself — all for free! Want to add free shipping? Want to add new fields to your checkout page? Want to add multi-language options to your website? Our websites let you do these sorts of upgrades and many more for free.
Other types of upgrades you can do for free include:
- Facebook Chat boxes
- Customer reviews
- Spam protection
- Customised forms
- Online calculators
- SEO management tools
- Anti-hacker protection
- Photo galleries
Currently, WordPress offers over 60,000 free plugins that can be used to add cool features and new functionality to your website.
5 – Maintenance work
If you’re currently getting charged an arm and a leg for any changes or fixes you want done on your website then maybe it’s time to review your setup. It seems some website companies create intentionally complex websites for clients, knowing that they will be obliged to come back to them any time they want to make a change or add a new feature.
Some CMS’s, like Silverstripe or Joomla, are not as user friendly as more popular CMS’s, which means that for clients with those websites, they often don’t know where to start and will just ask their developer to make the change, meaning even simple changes could be over $100 each time. The other difficult thing is that since these types of website systems are not as common as other setups (eg WordPress) then the number of developers you can choose from is a lot more limited, and this can mean you end up paying a lot more for maintenance work.
For the record, we do have experience working in the following systems if you do need assistance and want to compare what you’re currently paying:
- WordPress
- Silverstripe
- Squarespace
- Shopify
- Joomla
- Static HTML
If your website setup isn’t listed above, we may still be able to help so just flick us an email and we can let you know if we’re able to reduce your website maintenance costs.