What does it really cost to run a website for an Online Business?

Having spent over two decades building and customizing websites, we've frequently witnessed online businesses being caught off guard by the ongoing maintenance costs. We want to help you avoid this pitfall! In this episode, we'll discuss common recurring business fees, unexpected expenses, and how to prepare for them. We'll also identify which investments are crucial for your business growth and the stages at which additional investments in your website become necessary.

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Transcript

Carrie Saunders: 1:02

In over 20 years of building and customizing websites, we've seen time and time again online businesses be unprepared for the ongoing maintenance costs, especially as they grow, and we don't want that to happen to you. We're going to be going over common reoccurring fees that you should expect for your website, as well as fees you may not expect, and how to prepare for them and how to prepare for them. Which one of these fees are actually important to invest in to help your business grow and at what stages you might want to consider some additional investments into your website. Welcome to the e-commerce made easy podcast. I'm your host, k Saunders. When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a nine-month-old. My main goal To help others. Now, with over 20 years in the e-commerce building industry, and even more than that in web development, I have seen a lot. I love breaking down the hard tech into easily understandable bits to help others be successful in their online business. Whether you're a seasoned e-commerce veteran or just starting out, you've come to the right place, so sit back, relax and let's dive into the world of e-commerce together. Welcome back to the e-commerce made easy podcast.

Carrie Saunders: 2:10

Today, we're diving into what it takes to maintain a website from a cost perspective, which ones you need to grow and when you might need them. So, no matter what business level you are, there are a few costs that you're going to have that apply to all businesses, no matter your size or where you are in your business stages, and the first one is hosting fees or software as a service fees. So if you have a website like WordPress or an e-commerce site that is a downloadable software, like we talk about on the podcast some, then you're going to have hosting fees for that. If you have something like Shopify or high level or something that's a software as a service, you're going to have those as your service fees, and sometimes our applications we download and host on our web servers to also have a monthly fee as well. So you're going to have some sort of monthly fee, whether it's for hosting, licensing of the software you're using on your website or a software as a service type of fee, for example, like Shopify or High Level.

Carrie Saunders: 3:11

Another thing that you're going to have is domain name fees. So every year you're going to need to renew your domain name, or at least renew it for a few years in the future. And actually a little side tip here. If you renew your domain name for four or five, et cetera. Years, google actually takes that slightly into account for search engine optimization, because it sees that you're dedicated to your domain and to your website. So I actually kind of recommend you renew your domain name for a bit longer than one year at a time, just for that, and that also cuts down on costs, usually whenever you renew it for more than one year at a time. So those are the two things that every website owner is going to have. It's going to be a monthly fee as well as a yearly or every few years.

Carrie Saunders: 3:54

If you renew more than one year for your domain name, you might also have a SSL certificate in there as well. I recommend every single website should have an SSL certificate, but many hosting companies provide a free one now and we won't go too much into that rabbit hole. But just note that an SSL certificate may be an additional yearly cost for you, depending upon where you're host or where you're using your services. So we see quite a few businesses that think these are the only cost once their website is up and built. Well, that can be true for a bit or for a little while. But to grow your online business, you really need to invest in it continually, and I see clients get behind on this. So, in helping over 16,000 businesses in the past 20 some years some of them, you know, with just one-off purchases on our website or others might be working with us more closely the ones that we've seen grow and continually to thrive are the ones that invest in their website and don't set it and forget it. We've seen such patterns on some of our clients that think it's a set it and forget it. I only have my $50 a month hosting fee and it's just going to make money for me forever. Well, it will make money for you for a while, it's going to start diminishing. You're going to make money for me forever. While it will make money for you for a while, it's going to start diminishing. You're going to have diminishing returns on that if you're not actually putting some money into your website.

Carrie Saunders: 5:15

So how do we go from here? And what can happen if we treat our website as a set it and forget it and we don't do anything else with it? So similar to owning a car if you don't ever get the oil changed, what happens? You get increased wear in the motor and eventually the motor will go bad and it won't be able to be driven anymore. You're going to get sludge. Your oil is basically going to turn to sludge in your engine. It's going to wreak havoc on it and be a major problem. I'm sure you realize that. You know changing the oil is something that we just must do on a car, so, similar to a car, we need to be doing regular maintenance on our website. Budgeting for maintenance is the minimum addition you need to have for your website. It's the minimum I recommend, on top of the standard ones that are going to always happen, and it depends on how large your site is and how complicated your technology is. So it could vary from just a few hundred dollars a year to a hundred thousand or more a year, depending on, like I said, how big your business is. So don't let that number scare you. It needs to be proportional to what you're making on your business.

Carrie Saunders: 6:21

So if you aren't making regular website updates, a few things can happen. Depending upon the platform you're using. You could have security vulnerabilities, so you are at a risk of getting hacked, which can close your business if it's a really bad hack and if you're not prepared for it and don't have somebody to support you with that, you could go out of compliance. There are new compliance regulations coming out all the time. Some of them active right now are GDPR and ADA compliance, etc. And you need to make sure that you're always up to date on your compliance for your website. Like I said, these are going to change, so you need to have somebody partnered with you that's going to help you with these changes as we build and grow our websites.

Carrie Saunders: 7:02

Too Many times our websites slow down, um, and we could be putting up images that are too big. We could be putting up too many things. We could be um, putting up things inefficiently, and if we aren't looking at this regularly while we're maintaining our website, we can really get penalized from search engines If our website gets really slow. We've talked about this quite a bit on our search engine optimization episodes on the podcast. You also may have broken links. You may have forgotten that you linked to this article. That was five years ago and then you decided to delete the article.

Carrie Saunders: 7:39

So doing regular maintenance and review of your website is going to be super important to not doing that and to creating a better customer experience, which is going to make you more money. So having someone to help you minimally maintain your website can help prevent running into issues like these, and most of the times you can stay ahead of the curve too, especially on any new compliance regulations, any new trends in the market and any new devices that you might need to be compatible with. So, as a general number, you can take one to 2% of the cost to build your website and have that as your monthly budget for maintaining your website. For example, if your website costs you $10, your monthly budget for maintaining your website For example, if your website costs you $10,000 to get built by somebody set aside about $100 to $200 a month for maintenance. Now, if you built the website yourself, which is definitely possible now with the current software that's out there, you can calculate how much time to actually take you to build that website up. Be really honest here with yourself Did it take you 20 hours? Did it take you 50? Did it take you 100? So use that to calculate like one to 2% of that time you might need then to keep the site maintained. But as you grow, though, I highly encourage you to look to outsource this, because it can be quite the time sink and when we're wanting to run our business and be effective in our business, we need to make sure we're delegating the things that aren't our main purpose in the business, like website maintenance. So look towards outsourcing that as you grow and get bigger.

Carrie Saunders: 9:16

Now this topic leads nicely into our next item, which is an emergency fund. Just like we all should have an emergency fund for our personal and for our business, we should have a website emergency fund as well. What if your site gets hacked? Are you going to have the funds to pay somebody to fix it? What if there's a new regulation, like we talked about a little bit earlier, that comes out quickly and you need to get it implemented pretty fast, but you don't have the time to do it because you're running your business and servicing your clients? And what if there's some critical software integration that you rely on that decides to close and stop working and you need to quickly find a new solution to help make sure your business processes are moving forward and doing what you need to do in your business. So it's hard to say without knowing your business how much you should have in your emergency fund, but I would say at least a few thousand dollars would be a really good starting point. It's going to help you with just about most things that might come up on an emergency basis at least a deposit for them. And if you're just starting out in business, set aside a budget that you can do each month to save back. Maybe it's just $50 a month, maybe it's $250, but create a budget and set it aside and start accumulating that to get an emergency fund that you're comfortable with, that you feel good about.

Carrie Saunders: 10:34

So next we're going to be going into some budgeting items that I look at as a bit more fun. For budgeting items and I know budgeting finances isn't really a fun topic, but I see these are fun because they can really help your business grow and we all want our business to grow right. So these are items that, when our clients budget and have these done, their business grows and even thrives and have these done, their business grows and even thrives. I'm always excited when we pair with clients and see their business thrive when they are doing these items. So let's jump right into these and don't worry if you're not there yet. Plan for it. Save a little bit at a time as you grow and implement these budget items as soon as you can, all right.

Carrie Saunders: 11:17

So the four budget items that are optional at first but will help you grow are content updates, search engine optimization, design updates and marketing. So let's first dive into content updates and SEO, because I feel like they kind of go hand in hand, they go together, and we talk about these a lot on our podcast, and the reason why I talk about these a lot is they're very important to long-term business growth. They both support customer trust as well as being found organically and without paid ads. So these are your long game revenue builders in your business. You can, at first, be the person doing the content updates, making sure that you have regular, fresh, new content on your website. I recommend, when we're doing things like blog posts, that we need to be doing these about once a month at minimum, and more often if you can. And as you grow, you'll want to work more on your business than in it, and when I say in it, I kind of mean these content updates are in it.

Carrie Saunders: 12:18

So creating a budget to delegate at least a majority of this task will help you grow. As you grow, you may be the one getting the main content ideas for your website, but then delegating the implementation to a staff member or a contractor. Or, as you get even bigger, you may fully hand this off to an agency that you trust to help you grow. You may fully hand this off to an agency that you trust to help you grow. So search engine optimization is also something you can do, at first, yourself if you don't have the room in your budget yet to test this one out and we do actually have a free SEO course if you want to do it yourself, you can find that at ecommercemadeeasypodcastcom forward slash SEO mini course, and we will link to that in our show notes as well. As you can join our free Facebook group where I dive into SEO there as well as other business topics, and that one you can join at e-commerce made easy podcast dot com forward slash Facebook. Again, both of these will be linked in the show notes.

Carrie Saunders: 13:17

So SEO is a great long game and if you're not familiar with it, I talked about this a lot on the, and if you're not familiar with it, I talked about this a lot on the podcast. But if you're not familiar with it, it stands for search engine optimization. This area will greatly reap the benefits for a very long time, especially if you're patient and you're methodical and you're consistent, it's going to really snowball and grow your business as you go. It's something I highly recommend you outsource, though, as you grow. While we can DIY SEO for a while, it will become quite the time suck if you're not careful. The SEO playing field is always changing and we should always be checking up on our SEO on our website as well. We want to make sure we're planning for any upcoming changes and monitoring the performance of your top targeting pages that you want to perform well, as well as the top keywords you want regularly. So these are some things you're going to want to do on a regular basis, especially as you grow. So hiring this out is a really helpful thing. So this budget item could range from $500 and up per month, depending upon how large your website is and how much is needed to do monthly to keep it in great shape. So just think about that as you're looking to outsource your SEO later on as you grow.

Carrie Saunders: 14:31

So next, let's talk about design updates. This is something that's easy to overlook and not have a budget for. I know we have been behind before on updating the design of our website, that's for sure. It is so easy to do when you're running a business, so this one I highly recommend you outsource. Even though we ourselves can do design updates to our own website, we just don't get to it without hiring someone else to do it for us. It's hard to make it a top priority when you're prioritizing your clients first, which is what we do. You may find this similar in your business that you concentrate more on their immediate need and the immediate need of your clients than the future now of keeping your site designed fresh for your future customers. Thankfully, design updates don't usually need to happen all the time. This one I would budget for once a year, or every few years, depending on the size of your business and your market. I wouldn't recommend waiting more than five years, though, between design updates and refreshes, or you'll likely get really behind the curve on current trends and expectations of customers out there on the Internet.

Carrie Saunders: 15:39

So, finally, let's talk about marketing. This area is vital to business growth. Many marketing items you can do yourself, similar to the previous ones we talked about, where you're first building your online business. However, it is one that can be a great time suck, very similar to SEO. You will at least, though, want to be having an email service provider be able to do your email marketing. This can vary in cost from $10 a month to hundreds of dollars a month, depending on how big your email list is, so it's not super expensive generally relative to the size of your business. We talk a lot about on this podcast about email marketing and we'll link to previous episodes on it.

Carrie Saunders: 16:16

If you're new to email marketing, it is one of the vital ways to keep your business thriving because you have interested customers on that newsletter list and you're able to reach out to them anytime you want, unlike social media marketing where you're only going to be seen by a subsection of your audience there. And as you grow you may want to outsource some, if not all, of your email marketing. So once you feel like email marketing is taking up too much of your time and effort, then you know that you now need to have a budget for it and have someone else help you with it. Similarly, for the other marketing areas like social media marketing, paid advertising, et cetera, our biggest growth clients both outsource social media marketing as well as paid advertising. If you're newer to online business, have this in your pocket to revisit regularly to see if you are ready to expand by outsourcing all or some of your marketing, set a goal for when you want this to happen or it'll never happen. So when you feel like you're frustrated with the time it's taking you to do your own marketing, make it a goal. Make it a six-month goal, a three-month marketing, make it a goal. Make it a six month goal, a three month goal, 12 month goal. But make a goal when you're going to start outsourcing this to make sure it happens. And by far, having a marketing budget is one of the key ways that we see clients grow and thrive. So I highly recommend you get this on your list. If it's not already on your list, all right.

Carrie Saunders: 17:39

So that was a packed episode. Let's recap. First, we talked about the two website recurring fees everyone will have, and that's hosting or software as a service fees, depending upon what type of software you have, as well as the main name renewal fees. And then next, we talked about fees that you'll want to look into as you grow, and they are website maintenance. We recommend this one first, at minimum. This is going to save you pain and heartache down the road if you keep your website up to date and maintained, and we also recommend an emergency fund in case something actually does go wrong you know, on an emergency basis and you need at least some seed money to fund some fixes, whether it's to your website or to services that you integrate with, et cetera. And then next we talked about content updates, search engine optimization, design updates and marketing. All of these are great add-ons to build and grow your business, and I recommend picking the ones that you can start out with and building from them and start outsourcing them as they become too much time consuming for you to do.

Carrie Saunders: 18:45

All right, so that's all I have for this week's episode. Thank you for joining me. Be sure to visit our show notes on the e-commerce made easy podcastcom website. If you're watching on YouTube channel, make sure you hit that subscribe button, and if you're listening on the podcast, hit that follow button wherever you're listening. If you're loving our e-commerce made easy podcast, I'd be thrilled if you could rate and review our show on Apple podcasts. Your readings help me reach more listeners and empower more people like you thrive in the online business world. Thank you again for listening and I'll see you next week.