When talking about the value of products and services, the phrase "You get what you pay for," is often thrown around. But what is the value add of an expensive web developer— and, more importantly, what are the problems with cheap outsourced web development? It's easy to outsource inexpensive development, but what are the implications of outsourcing to inexperienced development partners?

It turns out —more than you may realize…

In this digital world, your website is the main infrastructure behind your marketing, so it should funnel new prospects and leads to your sales team. Ideally, you've created a website that functions to educate prospects and leads, and even your existing customers, to keep them buying from you in the long term. Your development partner is your biggest strategic ally when it comes to evolving your web marketing strategy. An inexperienced developer hired on price alone can hamstring even the best marketing strategies. 

We often encounter clients and prospects burned by developers who make big promises and fail to deliver on them. When companies outsource projects based on price alone, it can be more limiting than you think.

Here are just a few reasons to avoid cheap development outsourcing:

Website Bloat

Band-aids are great for small cuts, but they're not a long-term solution to your website health. Infrastructure is the most important aspect of your web marketing strategy. You need a framework that is agile enough to handle integrations and other additions and projects as you scale. Often businesses explore only the aesthetics of a new website project without  understanding who they're marketing to, how users will be interacting with the website, what their goals may be, and how to serve these visitors best. Companies can become so focused on sales and talking about themselves that they forget their website visitors are looking to solve problems.  

After the shiny newness of your website wears off and the lack of strategy  becomes more apparent, your developer may turn to add-ons and plug-ins to accomplish new goals that your company has created. These will inevitably bog down your website and leave security holes when these plug-ins are not kept up to date. This is not only risky for your organization, but it can significantly impact page load times and seriously handicap the user experience. A poor user experience can not only compromise your conversion rate but seriously impact your SEO strategy, since load times and user experience are  major factors for search engines.  

An inexperienced or inexpensive web developer will usually fail to see the big picture and generally just take orders. This often means piecemeal solutions that ultimately cost you much more money in the long run and fail to meet the needs of a growing organization's marketing strategy. 

Lack of Long-Term Strategy

With any site redesign or major integration, savvy businesses understand that you need to build these projects with an eye on the long term. The level of skill and business acumen that you may find in an inexpensive web developer will leave you wanting for strategic insight and growth planning to determine how your website will scale as your business grows.

You'll want to strategize with your development partner to determine exactly how your new website will earn new business or support existing business. What functionality do you eventually want to add to expand the value of your website to operations, sales, and existing customers? For example, after a Shopify conversion for one of our clients, they're now exploring how to enhance customer experience by adding a customer portal to give existing customers access to historical purchases, service requests, and more. 

The continuous improvement model is how we prefer to work with our clients, collaborating closely on an ongoing basis as an  extension of their in-house team in a long-term partnership based on trust and expertise. Cheap web development rarely, if ever, results in this type of engagement.

Lacking Trust and Integrity

We hear horror stories of businesses being ghosted by their developer, locked out of their website, unable to make changes or experiencing a site hack as a result of their developers’ lack of security planning. When developers are hired for a single job for a low, restrictive hourly rate, they are not generally invested in your success. In hiring a reputable developer for a long-term partnership, you can ensure that you have a partner who can service  your growing needs and will get the job done right the first time. A trustworthy developer will be able to be honest with you about the limitations of your current website, areas of opportunity, risk exposure, and optimization needs. 

Experience and authority will help your website grow into a data-gathering tool that integrates and streamlines marketing, sales, and operations seamlessly. As you grow with the right partner on your side, your website can scale right along with you and often automate aspects of your organization, saving you both time and money. 

Do you have website outsourcing horror stories of your own?

Jump into the comments and share your experiences!