Along with setting up your brick-and-mortar locations, your credit union website is a business decision and investment you need to plan thoroughly to be successful. Not only is your website an integral part of your marketing strategy to attract members, but it also provides an avenue for your members to conduct business with you 24/7.

Your credit union website can make or break your business. Whether you’re designing your site from the bottom up, redesigning your website, or looking for a new web hosting service, you want to cover all your bases before signing on the dotted line. To ensure a high return on your investment, you’ll want to consider the price, hosting ability, security measures, and the design and development involved with creating your website.

 

Setting Your Budget

Remember, your credit union website is an investment. An attractive, accessible site that is up and running 99.9% of the time will help you find and retain members. The cost for your website will include paying for the domain name, hosting capabilities, security, design/development, and maintenance. Here are average prices you can expect to pay each year for your website once it’s live:

  • Domain name registration: $15 – $20
  • Credit Union Web hosting: $350 – $10,000
  • SSL Certificate: $0 – $1,500
  • Maintenance: $400 – $15,000 (depending on the number of pages)

Initial design costs can run anywhere between $2,000 to $35,000 depending on the number of pages and the expertise of the designer.

The adage is true: You get what you pay for. And when your credit union website can affect the privacy or identity of your members, your website isn’t something to skimp on.

 

Designing and Developing Your Site

You’ll need both a web designer and a web developer to create content for your website and perhaps maintain it after it goes live. The web designer is responsible for how the site looks. The web developer takes the design and makes the website functional.

When choosing a person or company to create your website, you’ll want to make sure they concentrate on both the design and development for optimal user experience. Your website will be useless if it’s aesthetic but difficult to use or functional but boring.

 

Selecting a Credit Union Web Hosting Provider

Once your site is designed, you’ll need to find a company to host it. Your web hosting service is responsible for how quickly your website loads and ensuring your website never goes down.

In a previous blog, we told you how to choose a hosting provider. You’ll want to consider if you’ll share the host with other websites, if your site will be housed on a dedicated server, or if your web hosting service is somewhere in between. You’ll also want to understand some web hosting basics, such as bandwidth, backup measures, and member service so that you can compare apples to apples.

 

Enacting Security Measures

Although you can protect against malicious attacks against your website at the frontline, your web hosting provider can provide you with a higher level of security. As we mentioned above, an SSL certificate is a website expense you shouldn’t take lightly. Your web host should install an SSL certificate to ensure all user connections to your website are secure. Other security measures your web hosting provider should include in their services are malware and virus scanning, DDoS prevention, and network monitoring.

 

Final Words

Your credit union website may be the first impression a member has of your business. If you want to make sure your site is attractive, easy to navigate, secure, fast, and always up and running, CUWebsite™ Services is your one-stop shop.

We have several modern, responsive, and ADA-compliant templates from which you can choose to upgrade your current website or build one from scratch. We’ll host your site on a virtual private server maintained on a secure and monitored network protected by AT&T’s DDoS Defense System. You’ll get all this and more at an affordable cost when you partner with us.