How Outsourcing Website Development Benefits Your Small Business

To no one’s surprise, small business owners are typically on a tight budget. As such, when considering services their business needs, small business owners often ask themselves the question, “Should I do it myself or hire an outside entity to do it for me?”

It’s the classic strategic ‘make or buy’ decision, whereby a business chooses to do something in-house or to reach out to an external supplier. However, even though platforms like WordPress make website development seem like a piece of cake, you may want to reconsider how outsourcing website development will benefit your small business.

1. Cleaner Code

In the world of coding, there is such a thing called ‘spaghetti code.’ As the term implies, spaghetti code is twisted and unorganized blocks of code (like a bowl of noodles) that are difficult to read and decipher. WordPress has a great front end that makes website development a visual process, but unbeknownst to novices, each visual element added changes the code on the back end.

Sometimes plugins and front end elements change the code in ways that conflict with other plugins and widgets, making the code chaotic and hard to read. For that matter, amateur website developers often lack the ability to read the code at all. But outsourcing your website will help ensure better code maintenance.

2. Tighter Security

When most people hear the term ‘website development,’ they most often think of the visual elements and structure of the menus and pages. Believe it or not, website development also encompasses one of the most crucial elements of any site: security. It’s easy to get distracted by choosing the right theme, artfully creating the most attractive color scheme, and finding or creating high-quality images for your site, thereby overlooking security entirely.

But without adequate security measures in place, you can easily invite a hacker through the backdoor to your site.

And the repercussions could be dire. The administrative data on your website could be compromised, and the hacker could bring your website down indefinitely. In addition, you could lose trust with your audience if the hacker is able to obtain payment card data, usernames and passwords, and any other sensitive customer data contained on your website.

3. Time Savings

The amount of time it takes an experienced professional to develop a website is less than it takes a small business owner who has never built a website before. And let’s face it, small business owners don’t really have any time to spare. Every second you’re distracted with website issues is an opportunity cost, and that time could be better spent growing and running your business.

4. Multifaceted Expertise

Another reason outsourcing is beneficial to small businesses is because your outsourcing partner has a broader skill set than you. If you thought the only task regarding your business’s website is to actually build it, think again. Web development professionals have multifaceted expertise in many areas of digital marketing.

For example, not many web development professionals also have SEO skills that will help optimize a website to capture organic rankings. This can be a big problem when you launch your website and get no traffic.

In addition to organic traffic, some web development experts can also help you with other traffic streams, such as PPC ads and social media marketing.

Furthermore, they can also help audit an existing website to fill the gaps and fix overlooked problems.

5. Peace of Mind and Backups

There’s no such thing as 100 percent perfect software. Despite the best efforts of software engineering teams and plugin coders, software will always be fallible. And when things go sour, it can be incredibly stressful. The only antidote to that stress is to make sure you have your ducks in a row and regularly backup website data.

Though there are automation tools like backup scheduling, it’s better to have the peace of mind that a qualified professional is constantly monitoring, backing up, and preserving your website data. Not only does the theme and the theme’s plugin code need to be backed up, but also information stored in databases such as customer records. Outsourcing website development will help give you the peace of mind that you aren’t going to encounter a website apocalypse.

6. Existing Skill Set

In Greek mythology, there was a beleaguered soul named Sisyphus who was tasked with eternally rolling a boulder up a mountain. And if you don’t already know your way around website development, WordPress, or you lack website skill sets, it can feel like a never-ending uphill struggle. Like it or not, you’re going to run into roadblocks that, to a novice, are unforeseeable due simply to a lack of experience.

However, if you opt to outsource website development, you can take advantage of the resource of an existing skill set, which has two advantages.

First of all, outsourcing to a skilled professional means that website issues are resolved more quickly, diminishing negative impacts on your digital presence and small business.

Second, you’ll have fewer hassles and headaches when things go awry and you won’t have to learn from square one how to resolve them.

7. Unique Design

Platforms like WordPress comes with easy-to-install themes that look downright aesthetically pleasing. But there’s one problem: everyone else has access to the same themes. A theme isn’t necessarily the end-all-be-all for website development.

Though they may be appealing up front, many of the prefabricated WordPress themes are rather cookie cutter in nature, and your website isn’t going to stand out from your competitors who may be using the exact same theme you use. Outsourcing website development to a seasoned professional will differentiate your website from competitors who simply use basic themes.

Conclusion

Outsourcing web development is more advantageous to a small business owner than trying to take care of a website in-house. If you want to accelerate your digital marketing campaign, build a website, or update an existing website, reach out to us today.