A partner who had previously consulted me about website building just came to complain that he had been scammed by a website building company. He spent 8,000 yuan, and the website they built was terrible. After reviewing the websites, I found they were even worse than terrible. Not only was the speed optimization lacking, but the most basic mobile responsiveness was also missing. If you give me 8,000 yuan, I could build a website even worse than that. Jokes aside, since the money has already been spent, complaining won't solve the problem. I suggested he find an outsourced website building company to tear down and rebuild the site. This is a typical case of being scammed by an outsourced website building company. Today, I'll write about the pitfalls of outsourcing foreign trade website building and how to avoid them.
1. Blindly asking for exorbitant prices
For a B2B foreign trade marketing website, if someone dares to charge you tens of thousands of yuan, I can say that this person is definitely ripping you off. Why do I dare to say this? I suggest you read my previous article, "How Much Does It Really Cost to Build a Foreign Trade Website." A simple marketing-type foreign trade website doesn't cost much at all. If it's a B2C website without secondary development, charging over 10,000 yuan is normal. If it involves secondary development, charging over 20,000 yuan is also normal.
2. Not having control over the hosting and domain
I have always emphasized that you must buy the hosting server and domain yourself, and not let the outsourced company buy them. This is mainly because these outsourced website building companies can take back your website whenever they want, and you have no control. If there are no disputes, it's fine. But if there are disputes, you can only stare blankly. I recommend SiteGround for hosting and NameSilo for domains because they are relatively cheap.
3. Buying pirated themes from Taobao, which cannot be upgraded
I have also encountered this before. When building a website for someone, they bought a pirated theme or a translated theme from Taobao. As a result, to upgrade the theme, they had to keep buying upgraded versions from Taobao. Otherwise, it was impossible to upgrade. I also suggest buying legitimate themes yourself. For example, with WordPress, legitimate themes are much safer than free themes.
4. The website cannot implement basic functions
For instance, in the example I mentioned earlier, the requirement was for mobile responsiveness, but it was not met. They didn't install speed optimization plugins, so the website was very slow to open. These basic functional requirements must be specified with them from the beginning. Many of these involve the website building program. Once the program is chosen, it is difficult to change after the website is built.
5. No on-site SEO optimization
This is also a very common phenomenon. They only build the site for you without doing on-site SEO optimization. Basic page titles, description tags, H1 tags, URL optimization, and image alt tags are all missing. Without these basic on-site optimizations, it is not conducive to Google crawlers indexing and ranking your site.
6. Promising to rank the website on the homepage in a short time
This is a bundling strategy, combining website building with optimization. Building a site may not cost much, but once it involves ranking optimization, the price skyrockets. The basic price is 30,000 to 50,000 yuan, promising to rank the website on the homepage in a short time. Some people still do this, first collecting your money, then making some worthless long-tail keywords rank on the homepage. To be honest, doing effective SEO can't be done with just tens of thousands of yuan. It takes at least 100,000 yuan for effective white hat SEO.
It's best to build your own foreign trade website. There are too many pitfalls with outsourcing. Is building a website difficult? Not at all; WordPress can handle it.
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