The actual cost of an enterprise website solution is much more involved than a sales quote or billing invoice may suggest. When evaluating how much your current website provider truly costs, consider the total resources your company allocates to managing it. That includes employee labor, IT, external SEO and security services, external or in-house developers and designers, along with any third-party plugins and services that you need to run your site. 

Some expenses are direct and easy to quantify, while others are more diffuse. Just because your total cost may take some effort to break down accurately, however, doesn’t mean it’s not important to track. 

Taking a closer look at website platform billing policies 

Decision makers may believe that figuring out their website platform or content management system (CMS) costs is as simple as looking at a sales quote. Unfortunately, many website solutions don’t charge flat fees, meaning the low sales quote you see is rarely what you will end up paying. Many services charge supplemental fees based on your site traffic, number of site pages or contributors, or your merchandise sales.

Attempting to circumvent these extra fees often creates new, larger problems. When employees share contributor logins, it can lead to workflow confusion and major security issues (especially after team members leave the company). When you limit the number of pages on your website by consolidating content or omitting content you would otherwise include, you can compromise your site’s functionality and customer conversion rate. 

By contrast, upfront billing models like Squarespace Enterprise’s free up your focus to make your site as good as it can be. You won’t need to do a complex cost-benefit analysis on how an additional page, feature, or sale will impact your billing. With Squarespace Enterprise, you only pay a platform fee based on the number of websites (not pages) you need. Features like page drafts and Enterprise role permissions are automatically included and make the most of your unlimited page and contributor allowances. This helps you to establish efficient workflows and empower team members to try new ideas, iterate, and receive feedback before new content goes live.

Why a custom-built website solution or CMS won’t reduce costs

It’s a common misconception that website solutions utilizing a decoupled CMS, or a headless CMS (which require a lot of upfront investment) are cost effective over the long term. Both of these solutions separate your content’s presentation from the website’s backend development and require advanced developers to build and maintain. That means hours of ongoing work from your in-house development team or an expensive retainer for a professional web development agency. The quality and functionality of these custom sites can also vary significantly, even when working with reputable development agencies.

It’s important to consider both the dollar value of your development team’s time as well as the opportunity cost of diverting their attention from competing projects. Third-party agency fees can also be costly, and fees for even minor website change requests quickly add up. But the turnaround times agencies need to fulfill such requests also create an opportunity cost as your team pauses progress while waiting for changes. 

Custom-built sites require more developer resources than those built with out-of-the-box solutions like Squarespace Enterprise, but the costs don’t stop there. These kinds of sites also need hosting resources, which may mean securing, warehousing, and upkeeping servers. 

Cost of third-party tools and integrations 

Some website providers require third-party plugins just to function, which may come with monthly subscriptions. Regardless of their price tag, plugins are security vulnerabilities and often create other site issues because they’re not maintained by the same team as your website platform. Without the right updates, these plugins will stop working and cause numerous issues downstream. 

With Squarespace Enterprise, you don’t need plugins for basic website functionality. Because so much is built into the platform itself, you won’t need to rely on third-party tools that can compromise your site. While Squarespace has a robust set of solutions for most applications, if you need a particular feature that Squarespace doesn’t provide, you still have the option to use plugins at your discretion. 

When assessing website solutions, sales quotes don’t always give you the whole picture. Complex billing procedures can quickly inflate payments, while custom CMS or web solutions can demand significant resources and be complicated to manage. Straightforward, all-in-one platforms like Squarespace Enterprise keep things simple.

Squarespace Enterprise is the smart business choice when it comes to website providers and prevents the resource drains that less efficient solutions require.

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