Is your website actually paying for itself? A simple ROI check
Most SMEs can’t answer this. The maths is simpler than you think — four numbers and a spreadsheet tell you whether to double down or rebuild.
“Is my website worth it?” is a question most SME owners ask and almost none actually compute. That’s a shame, because it’s the simplest business question on this list — four numbers and a calculator.
The four numbers you need
- Monthly website cost (hosting + CMS + agency fees + a share of your time).
- Monthly conversion events from the site (bookings, enquiries, purchases).
- Conversion-to-customer rate (what % of enquiries become paying customers?).
- Average customer lifetime value — or first-year revenue if that’s more stable.
The maths
Revenue attributable to the site = enquiries × conversion rate × customer value. Divide by monthly cost. A ratio above 3:1 is healthy; above 10:1 means the site is under-invested (you should spend more on it); below 2:1 means something is structurally wrong.
A dental clinic example
Monthly cost: £140. Monthly enquiries from the site: 18. Conversion to patient: 40%. Average first-year patient value: £520. Revenue attributable: 18 × 0.40 × £520 = £3,744. Ratio: 26:1. That site is massively under-leveraged. Spending another £60/mo on content SEO or booking flow optimisation would almost certainly pay back within a month.
“A good website isn’t the cheapest one — it’s the one with the best ratio. Cheap is only cheap if it’s still converting.”
Where the numbers go wrong
- You’re not tracking enquiries. Set up GA4 events for form submits, calls, and WhatsApp clicks before anything else.
- You’re attributing all revenue to the site when the site is only the last touch. Ask new customers how they found you; use the answers as a discount factor.
- You’re spending heavily on ads and not splitting paid traffic from organic in the analysis.
Run the number once a quarter. It takes ten minutes and it’s the only business metric that tells you whether to spend more on the website, stop spending, or rebuild.
What we track for you automatically
Clients on our Business plan (£119/mo) get a monthly performance report with these exact numbers pulled for them: traffic sources, conversion events (bookings, enquiries, calls), and the ratio against monthly spend. Premium (£249/mo) adds conversion-event tracking for Meta, Google Ads, and LinkedIn, plus a quarterly 30-minute strategy call to talk through what the numbers mean and what we’d change.
If you’re currently running your site without any of this visibility, the first month of reporting almost always surfaces the two or three fixes that pay for the subscription several times over.