5 Ways to Save Money on your Website

Starting a website can be very inexpensive. As a matter of fact, the entire All the Frugal Ladies site cost only $115 dollars to put together!

If you are going down the DIY route and you’re building a basic website that doesn’t need extra functionality, you can lower costs significantly.

All it takes is knowing a few tricks of the trade – here are 5 ways to save money on your new website.

Use coupon codes

Discount codes for domains, hosting and additional services abound on the internet.

Domain registrar sites like NameCheap and GoDaddy are extremely competitive and are constantly offering coupon codes to bring new clients their way.

Web hosting companies do the same and will even up the ante by including freebies in the purchase, like a free domain for purchasing a year of hosting.

GoDaddy is a great place to start – they offer top-notch deals for new and existing clients.

Head here to find the latest GoDaddy coupons, promo codes and credit offers. From there, it’s easy to grab the coupon and apply it to your purchase.

The coupons are constantly updated so you don’t have to deal with expired or irrelevant codes.

If you want the experience to flow even easier, install the Wikibuy plugin to your browser – the coupon codes will be applied automatically!

With a few clicks, you can save tens of dollars on GoDaddy!

Use a template instead of building from scratch

If you’re building a basic website, unless you need a very specific design, look into using a template.

WordPress has thousands of free templates available for download, but if you want something fancier and extensive, there are thousands more templates for low cost.

Setting up the template is relatively easy, but it does require some technical knowledge on using WordPress.

I’m a fan of ThemeForest due to their extensive library, solid developers, and great prices. A beautiful, put-together WordPress template can go for $59 or less.

For that price you can create a website that includes theme options, dedicated developers constantly debugging and improving the theme, and a high-quality design.

It’s a more affordable alternative than hiring a web designer and developer to build a site from scratch.

An example of the stunning designs you can building with one theme, Avada

Buy long-term hosting

Many of the hosting companies don’t offer discounts on renewal. Instead, the low cost is an initial benefit to grab you as a new customer.

For example, HostGator, a well-known hosting company may offer new users 25% off their hosting on their first year. As of the second year, the rate goes up to the standard full price with no options for applying coupons or discounts.

To avoid the rise in cost, buy hosting for longer periods from the get-go, particularly if it includes a discount or a usable code.

If you’re planning on running your website for a few years, there’s no risk involved, and the cost is relatively low.

All the Frugal Ladies started off at Bluehost. We bought a 3-year hosting plan for an unbeatable prize.

When the 3 years were up, the price went up dramatically and we had to switch to a competitor. It’s a shame we didn’t buy the hosting for more years at the very start. 🙁

Wait for special day offers

All services have fallen on the bandwagon of offering low deals for those special online sales days.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the best time to pick up cheap services and discount codes. I’ve seen crazy discounts of up to 50%-70% off web hosting and domains.

If you can wait until then, it’s better to stick it out to save money. Be very attentive as the coupon codes are released only for a day.

Start with Shared Hosting

For a new website with little traffic, the best (and cheapest) bet is a shared hosting plan.

Shared hosting is both the most popular and most affordable hosting plan. With this plan, you will be sharing server space with many other websites.

The downside to this is that shared hosting is usually limited in terms of bandwidth.

However, it’s sufficient to handle regular traffic for a small to medium blog. The providers limit traffic to about 20k visitors a day, which is more than enough for most websites.

If your site increases in size or you have a need for more bandwidth, you can always upgrade your plan to fit your needs.

GoDaddy hosting offers – start low and upgrade as necessary!