Top hacks for saving money when you launch a business online

How much does it cost to set up a business website?

Unfortunately, there are as many answers to this question as there are to ‘How long is a piece of string?’.

Pay a professional web developer to create a bespoke all-singing, all-dancing site, and you can be looking at thousands of pounds.

Use a CMS like WordPress to set up a site yourself, meanwhile, and you can launch your business online for less than £50 a year.

The route you go down will depend on numerous factors, from how technical you are and how much time you have to spare to how you want your site to look and function.

In this article, we’ll look at a few hacks for saving money if you are planning on building and launching your site yourself.

1. Look out for free domains names

To get online, websites need both a domain name and a hosting package. The typical price for a non-premium domain name is between £5 and £25 a year. While this amount won’t break the bank, little expenses like this soon add up over the course of a year.

The good news is that some hosting plans come with a free domain name for the first year. At tsoHost, all four of our annual cPanel-based Web Hosting plans come with a domain included for the first year. As do all three of our WordPress Hosting plans and our WordPress Ecommerce package.

2. Find a plan with a free SSL certificate

If you sell online, your website will need to have an SSL certificate to protect the private data that your customers share with your site.

Even if you don’t sell online, however, it’s still best practice to have an SSL certificate attached to your site. Not least, because if you don’t, Google displays a little warning symbol and the words ‘Not secure’ in the address bar, next to your site’s domain name, and customers who want to find out more about this warning can click on it and read the following:

‘Your connection to this site is not secure. You should not any sensitive information on this site because it could be stolen by attackers’.

The absence of an SSL certificate can also impact where your website is listed in the search engine results.

Google classes an SSL certificate as a ‘tiebreaker signal’, which means that if your competitors’ sites are equally as well optimised for search engines, but they have SSL certificates where you don’t, they will most likely rank above you on the results pages.

Just like domain names, hosting companies will often include the cost of an SSL certificate in their plan prices, which can save you around £50 a year.

At tsoHost, we include free standard SSL certificates for the first year with our annual Ultimate and annual Maximum Web Hosting plan and all our WordPress packages.

Our annual Economy and Deluxe Web Hosting plans, meanwhile, come with 50% off the Standard SSLs for the first year of hosting.

3. Root around for free WooCommerce plugins

WooCommerce is one of the world’s most popular platforms for setting up an online store.

It lets you customise your store in hundreds of ways, by adding plugins.

Some of these plugins are free, but there are also some premium plugins that cost extra.

These premium plugins can cost up to $150 a time.

At tsoHost, our WordPress Ecommerce Hosting plan includes £4,000 worth of these premium plug-ins for free.

That’s 75 extra ways to customise your site – all completely free.

4. Look out for sales

Just like many other businesses around the world, web hosting companies can host sales that let you pick up a bargain on everything from domains to web hosting.

Popular times for sales are January, summer, and Black Friday.

tsoHost regularly, hosts sales. To be the first to find out about them, follow us on social media or set your email permissions to accept marketing emails.