Every organization that has ever decided to save money on its website has made what feels, at the time, like a rational decision. The budget is tight. There are direct service costs to fund. The board wants to see money going to programs, not overhead. And someone always knows someone who can “put together something decent” for a few hundred dollars, or free, or in exchange for a letter of support.
That decision has a real cost. The problem is that the cost doesn’t appear on the line item where the money was saved. It appears distributed across dozens of small inefficiencies and missed opportunities over the following years—and nobody ever adds it up.
This post is an attempt to add it up.
The staff time cost
A website that is difficult to update requires staff time every time it needs to change. If updating a page requires filing a ticket with a developer, waiting for a response, reviewing the change, and going back and forth over email—that’s a process that might take four hours for a change that should take fifteen minutes. If your organization makes twenty small updates a year, you’ve spent eighty staff hours on something that a well-built, staff-manageable site would have handled in five.
That’s not hypothetical. It’s the pattern I see constantly in organizations that chose a WordPress build because it seemed powerful and flexible, and are now paying developer fees for every small change because nobody on staff feels confident touching it.
A website that requires developer assistance for basic content updates is not a free website. It’s a website with a recurring cost that was never disclosed at the time the decision was made.
The credibility cost
People make judgments about organizations based on their websites. This is not ideal and it’s also true. A website that looks like it was built in 2015 by a well-meaning volunteer, that has a broken mobile layout, that loads slowly on a phone, or that has inconsistent design—communicates something about the organization. It communicates that the organization either doesn’t know what it looks like or doesn’t care.
For some visitors, this doesn’t matter. For others—potential major donors doing due diligence, foundation program officers reviewing applicants, potential partner organizations, journalists—it’s part of how they form an impression. First impressions in these cases are often digital, and a website that undermines credibility is a website that is costing the organization something, even if the cost never appears on a budget line.
There’s also a client-facing version of this. For people seeking services from an organization working in health, legal services, or crisis response, a professional, trustworthy website communicates something: that this organization is organized, legitimate, and worth engaging with. A website that looks unreliable can be a barrier for people who are already skeptical about asking for help.
The SEO cost
A website with poor technical foundations—slow load times, missing meta descriptions, broken links, no SSL certificate, un-indexed pages, duplicate content—will rank lower in search results than it should. That means fewer people finding your organization when they’re looking for the services you provide.
This cost is invisible in the budget, but it has a real equivalent: every person who searches for the kind of help you provide and doesn’t find you is a missed connection. For organizations that measure impact in terms of people served, a website that isn’t being found is actively undermining the mission.
SEO is recoverable, but it takes time. An organization that has been running on a technically deficient website for three years doesn’t flip a switch and immediately appear in search results. The benefit of doing things right at the beginning is not just avoiding the immediate problem—it’s avoiding the compounding cost of years of reduced discoverability.
The security cost
I covered this more thoroughly in the Squarespace post, but it bears repeating here: an unmaintained website with outdated plugins, an expired SSL certificate, or an insecure configuration is a liability. For organizations handling sensitive client data—any organization in health, legal services, housing, or crisis response—that liability is not abstract.
A data breach at a nonprofit serving vulnerable populations is not just a reputation problem. It’s a harm to real people. And the cost of recovering from a breach—in staff time, in remediation, in notification obligations, in lost trust—almost always exceeds what would have been spent to build something secure in the first place.
The redesign cycle cost
Here is perhaps the most quantifiable version of the myth: organizations that cut corners on website design tend to redo their websites more often.
A website built thoughtfully on a manageable platform, with content structured for long-term maintainability, can serve an organization for five to seven years with incremental updates. A website slapped together cheaply tends to require a full redo in two to three years—because it became embarrassing, because nobody knows how to update it, because it broke in ways that aren’t worth fixing, or because staff turnover meant the institutional knowledge about how it worked evaporated.
If you spend $1,500 on a website and need to redo it every three years, you’ve spent $4,500 over nine years—and endured three painful launch processes. If you spend $6,000 on a website that lasts seven years, you’ve spent less and experienced the disruption once. The math is straightforward; the psychology that makes the first option feel like savings is what’s worth examining.
What this isn’t arguing
This is not an argument that you should spend as much as possible on a website, or that expensive automatically means good. There are very expensive websites built by large agencies that are bloated, inaccessible, unmaintainable, and effectively obsolete the day they launch. Budget isn’t a proxy for quality.
What it is arguing is that the decision to save money on design should be made with a clear-eyed accounting of what the savings actually cost. If a $500 website is going to require $200 of developer time per year, look embarrassing to funders, and need to be replaced in three years—it is not a $500 website. It’s a $2,100 website with a delayed invoice and a side of organizational stress.
The organizations that get the best value from their web investments tend to be the ones that think clearly about total cost over time, not just upfront price. They hire people whose work they trust for reasons beyond price. They invest in things that will last. And they’re honest with their boards about the fact that a professional website is program infrastructure, not overhead—because it’s the thing that makes it possible for the programs to be found by the people who need them.
If you’re trying to think through what the right investment level actually looks like for your organization’s specific situation, I’m always happy to have that conversation before anyone commits to anything.