Search for a business website in Nigeria and you’ll find prices that range from almost nothing to a great deal, for what looks like the same thing. The cheapest isn’t always affordable, and the most expensive isn’t always good. This guide helps you work out what you’re really paying for.

What “affordable” should mean

A website is affordable when its whole cost makes sense for what it does for your business, over a year or more, not just on the day you pay for it. A cheap site that customers can’t load on their phones, or that costs you a developer every time a price changes, isn’t cheap at all.

What you’re paying for

The build

Design, pages, writing, photos, and setting everything up. More pages, a custom design and features like bookings or payments all add work.

The domain name

Your address, like yourbusiness.com.ng or yourbusiness.com. It renews every year. It must be registered in your company’s name, with your login. If it isn’t, you don’t really own your website.

Hosting

Where the website lives. It’s paid monthly or yearly, and the cheapest plans can be slow or unreliable.

Email

Addresses at your own domain usually cost extra.

Changes

Prices change, staff change, opening hours change. If every change needs a developer, this becomes one of your biggest website costs over time.

Looking after it

Updates and security fixes, especially for sites built on popular platforms, which attackers target.

The hidden costs to ask about

  • Domain and hosting renewal prices after the first year, not just the first-year offer.
  • What a small change costs, and how quickly it’s done.
  • Whether you get the logins to everything.
  • Whether the site will still work if you stop paying the person who built it.

Ask for a written quote that lists every cost for the first year, and what each costs after that.

How to keep it affordable

  1. Start with the pages you need. Home, what you do, prices or menu, about, contact. You can add more later.
  2. Choose a site your team can edit. An admin panel lets you change text, prices and pages yourself. Our admin panel checklist shows what it should let you do.
  3. Make it fast on ordinary phones. Most of your customers are likely to visit on a phone, often on mobile data. A slow site costs you customers, which is the most expensive cost of all. See testing on real phones.
  4. Keep the domain and accounts in your name. It costs nothing and protects everything.
  5. Don’t pay for features you might need one day. Build for today, and grow it.
  6. Mind the law. If your site has a contact form, it collects personal data. Our note on NDPA basics for small business websites explains the simple steps.

Template, builder or custom?

There are three main ways to get a website, and each has a place. We compare them in buying a website in Nigeria.

Websites with an Admin Panel

Websites with an Admin Panel is our product for Nigerian businesses that want a website built for them that they can run themselves: your team changes the text and adds pages from a simple admin panel, without paying a developer for everyday changes. It’s in development; join the waitlist to be one of the first to use it.