Full Transcript
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Welcome to the 805 Web Minute and today we're talking about why that gorgeous, easy-to-use website builder you saw advertised might actually be costing you time, money, and customers right here on the Central Coast. It's so true. They have these amazing ads. You see the beautiful templates and it just looks so effortless. It's really no surprise they're one of the most popular builders out there with something like an 18% market share. Absolutely. So for this deep dive, we really want to look past that shiny exterior, right? Unpack what happens after you've clicked publish? Exactly. We're talking about the real costs, the financial ones, the technical headaches, and maybe most importantly the cost of your own time. Okay, let's get right into it because I get the appeal. I really do. If you're a small business owner here in SLO County, you're watching every single dime. The phones. And you see those prices, a basic plan for 16 bucks a month, maybe a core plan for 23. It feels like a total no-brainer compared to hiring a pro. So where's the first catch? The first catch is it's pretty subtle, but it's aimed directly at anyone who wants to sell something, which is basically every business. Right. That's $16 plan. It comes with what is essentially a mandatory transaction tax. That tax. How does that work? The platform just takes a slice. It's 2% of every single sale you make on physical products or services. But here's the critical part. That's a second fee. You are already paying the standard credit card processing fee to stripe or whoever. Oh, so this is on top of that? Exactly. On top. So let's say you're a local consultant in a Rio Grande and you sell a $500 package. The credit card company takes its cut maybe 15 bucks. Then the square space on that basic plan just takes another $10 for themselves. Wow. And you said it's even worse for digital products. It jumps to 7%. If you're selling an online course or an ebook, they take a 7% cut. Your margins just get crushed. So you're basically being penalized for using the plan they advertise the most. What's the escape hatch? How do you get
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out of that fee? And there it is. The upsell. To get rid of that fee, you have no choice but to upgrade to their core plan, which is $23 a month or even higher. So that's $16 price tag is basically fiction for any real business. It is. You're already at $23 a month just to start. And that's before we even talk about the add-on stack. Right. Because you need more than just a page. You need a professional email. You need a professional email. So there's your Google workspace. That's another six to maybe $72 a month. Your domain renewal after the first free year. That can be 20 to 70 bucks a year. What about service businesses? Like a massage therapist and Pasa Robles. They need scheduling. That's a huge one. Appointment scheduling is another add-on. That'll run you 16 to $49 a month. And then you need to actually talk to your customers. Email marketing. Email marketing. Another $5 to $48 a month. Okay. So let's just, you know, put a number on this for someone listening. If you're running a real business in San Luis, Bisbo, you're not paying $16. You're actually paying what? You're realistically looking at $40 to $80 a month. Easily. That's three to five times what you thought you were signing up for. Yeah. And we haven't even touched the technical limits yet. Let's go there. Segment two. The template trap. This sounds ominous. What's the biggest limitation that catches people by surprise? This one is honestly it's shocking to most people once you choose your template in Squarespace 7.1, which is the current version. You can't switch it. Wait, what do you mean you can't switch it? You can. You're a locked-in for the life of that website. Why? The point is flexibility, isn't it? I should be able to try on a new look. You'd think so. But it's a structural choice they made. To change the template, their system would have to remap every single piece of content. So they just don't allow it. For you, the business owner, it means if you spend 40 hours building your perfect site and then six months later, you rebrand. I have to start over. You have to throw all that
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work in the trash and start from a blank page. It's a massive, massive sunk cost. That's brutal. And I imagine that rigidity extends to other features too as your business grows. It does. Take something as simple as your navigation menu. You might have a lot of services, right? Sure. Well, you can only have one level of drop downs. That's it. If you have a complex business, you're forced to make your website confusing just to fit their system. That sounds like a classic walled garden problem. What happens when you need a very specific tool for your business? That's when you hit the wall. Hard. They only offer about 47 official extension. 47 total. Total. Compare that to other platforms that might have 60,000 plugins. If you need a special booking tool for wine tours that's popular in our area or a custom quote calculator and it's not one of those 47, you're just out of luck. Your business growth is literally capped by their features. 100%. And it's the same with payments. You get stripe in PayPal. That's it. No square, which is huge for local businesses here. No other options. Before we move on from the tech site, there's one thing you mentioned that would give me const anxiety losing your work. Yes. The lack of an auto save or a version history. It's a wild risk for a modern platform. So if my Wi-Fi cuts out while I'm editing a page, poof, it's gone. Any changes you made in that session are just gone. There is no undo. That is just a huge hidden cost of stress right there. You're spending time worrying about the tech instead of running your business. And that's the perfect lead in to what I think is the biggest hidden cost of all. The opportunity cost your time. The dollar value of your time. Because when you choose DIY, you're not just a business owner anymore. You're now also a part-time web developer. And that's time you're not spending on, you know, billable work. Exactly. So studies have tried to quantify this. Building a good content rich website from scratch for a novice takes somewhere between 190 and 400 hours. Hold on, 400 hours. That's 10 full-time work
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weeks. It's an enormous amount of time. It's your nights. It's your weekends for months. Even if we're super conservative and say a simple site takes maybe 30 to 40 hours. That's still a full work week. You're not focused on your actual job. Right. Now let's put a price on that. Let's say your time is worth a very conservative $50 an hour to your business. 40 hours times 50 bucks. That's $2,000. $2,000. That's the real setup fee. You just paid it with your time and your stress instead of with a credit card. And that's a key point. The work doesn't stop when you launch the site. So many people think it's a one-time project. It's never a one-time project. You have to do maintenance. You have to add new photos, update your blog, check for broken links. On average, small businesses spend about five hours a month on this. Okay, let's do the math on that too. Five hours a month and $50 an hour. That's another $250 a month forever in your time. So when you add it all up, the 80 bucks and fees plus the $250 in your time, this cheap DIY website is actually costing you over $300 a month. And it turns you the expert in your field into a poorly paid, stressed out webmaster, which brings us to support because when something does break and it will, who do you call? That's the million dollar question, isn't it? Who do you call on a Friday night before a big holiday weekend when your contact form stops working? You can't call anyone, can you? You cannot. Squarespace is famous for not having phone support. Your only options are live chat or submitting a ticket and waiting. And that person in the chat window, they don't know my business. They don't know the central coast. They don't get the urgency. Not at all. They can answer platform questions, sure. But if your site goes down on a Saturday morning when tourists are trying to find you, you are completely on your own until someone gets back to you. It's a huge operational risk. Okay, let's shift to the customer's experience, specifically speed. We know most people around here are on their phones, right? Oval wellingly, the data is clear. It's 68.2% of
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all website visits now come from mobile devices. Your site has to be fast on a phone period. And there's a hard number on how fast it has to be, isn't there? There is. And it is unforgiving. 53% of mobile visitors will leave. They will just abandon your site if it takes more than three seconds to load. Three seconds. Three seconds. And this is the fatal flaw of many DIY sites. To make them look pretty in the templates, they get bloated with huge, unoptimized images, fancy animations, things that look great on your iMac. But they absolutely choke a phone on a 4G connection. Exactly. So you spend all that time and all that money to build this beautiful site, only to have more than half your potential customers click away before it even loads. So DIY is a trap of time, hidden fees, and risk with the other end of the spectrum, hiring a big web design agency. Yeah, and that's often trading one set of problems for another. An agency gives you a professional result that the barrier to entry is just massive. You'd have a money. A lot of money. The upfront cost is typically anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000. Or more. $15,000. Just to get started. Just to get started. And the timeline is long too. You're looking at eight, 12 weeks, maybe longer to even launch. And then you're still paying. For every little change. Every single change. You need to update a photo or add a testimonial. That's a bill. And it's usually at $100 to $200 per hour. It's just complete overkill for most local businesses in Santa Maria or a task adera. So that's the real dilemma. DIY looks cheap, but it costs you your sanity and your time. An agency is professional, but it costs a fortune. That's it. Exactly. The DIY route really only makes sense if you genuinely love building websites, have hundreds of hours to spare and want to be your own 24-7 tech support. Right. Most people just want a great site that works without the $10,000 price tagger, the headache of being locked into a template. There has to be a better middle ground. There has to be. That's the quick tip for today. If you want a professional website without the agency price tag
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or the DIY headache, here is the better way. At UGRO.Pro, we build it, we manage it, and we handle every update forever for just $79 a month. There is zero setup fee, no contract lock-in, and it is strictly month to month, so there is zero risk. We're local here in AG and we can have you live in days, not months. Want to see what your site could look like? Go to UGRO.Pro right now and we'll design three custom mock-ups for your business. Completely free, no strings attached. Thanks for listening and keep growing.