The comparison, without the sales pitch
| DIY builder | Hiring a designer | |
|---|---|---|
| Up-front cost | £0–£300 | £500–£5,000 |
| Ongoing cost | £10–£30/month | £0–£60/month, often optional |
| Your time | 20–60 hours, realistically | 2–5 hours of input |
| Design | Template, shared with many others | Built around your business |
| Content | You write it | Usually written or shaped for you |
| When it breaks | You fix it or search a forum | You send a message |
| Portability | Tied to the platform | Usually yours to move |
The honest case for doing it yourself
Modern builders are capable. If you're starting out, unsure whether the business will take off, or just need something online this week, building it yourself is a perfectly sensible decision.
It also teaches you what you want. Plenty of people I work with built their own first, learned what frustrated them, and came back with a much clearer brief.
Where DIY tends to fall down
- It gets abandoned three-quarters finished, usually at the services page
- The structure follows the template rather than how customers decide
- Photos go up uncompressed and the site crawls on a phone
- The contact form is never tested and quietly fails
- The copy explains the business to the owner, not the customer
- Nobody sets up the basics that make it findable
The time cost people underestimate
Most owners who build their own site spend somewhere between twenty and sixty hours on it, spread over weeks of evenings. If your work is worth £40 an hour, that's £800 to £2,400 of your time — often more than paying someone.
That maths doesn't always favour hiring. If you enjoy it, or the evenings genuinely have no alternative use, DIY is fine. Just count the hours honestly rather than treating them as free.
What you're actually buying when you hire someone
Not just the pixels. You're buying decisions: what goes at the top, which pages exist, what to leave out, how to phrase the thing you find hard to explain about your own business. Plus a technical foundation that loads fast and is set up properly, and someone to contact when a form stops delivering. The design is the visible part; the structure is the part that earns the enquiries.
A middle option
Some people build their own site and pay someone to review it. That's a reasonable route, and it's why I offer the free Website Score — you get an outside opinion on structure, speed and trust signals without committing to anything. If the fixes are small, do them yourself.
Which to choose
| If you... | Then |
|---|---|
| Are testing a brand new idea | Build it yourself |
| Have more time than money right now | Build it yourself |
| Win work largely through your website | Hire someone |
| Have tried and got stuck halfway | Hire someone |
| Need it live properly within a fortnight | Hire someone |
| Enjoy the tinkering | Build it yourself, get it reviewed |