The Real Cost of a DIY Website

The appeal of building your own website is easy to understand. Platforms like Wix and Squarespace have improved significantly over the past few years, and the headline pricing looks reasonable. A subscription running to £15 or £20 a month compares favourably to a professional quote. It's all good maths until you factor in the parts most people leave out.

What the platforms actually charge

The free tiers on Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress.com come with trade-offs that make them unsuitable for most businesses. Your domain is branded with the platform's name, or ads appear on your pages, or both. The plans that actually work for a small business typically run between £12 and £25 per month depending on the platform and the features you need. That's roughly £150 to £300 per year.

That's not an unreasonable figure on its own. The issue is what gets added to it.

The time cost

Building a website from scratch on any of these platforms takes longer than the tutorials suggest. Choosing and adjusting a template, writing content for every page, uploading and resizing images, setting up a contact form, connecting a domain, then working out why the mobile layout looks different from what you designed on a desktop. For someone starting from scratch, 20 to 40 hours to get something presentable is a realistic estimate.

If your time has commercial value, and for any trading business it does, those hours carry a real cost. A lot of Yorkshire tradespeople discover this after spending evenings wrestling with a page builder when they could be doing billable work. If your time is worth £25 an hour and you put 30 hours in, that's £750 in opportunity cost before the platform subscription enters the calculation.

Wix vs professional web design looks quite different once that number is in the column.

The limits you hit later

Most DIY sites work reasonably well in the first few months. The problems usually surface later, when you want to change something the template doesn't easily support, or when you start noticing that your pages load slowly, your meta descriptions are blank, your images are unoptimised, and your Google Search Console has never been connected.

These things matter for whether people find you. Fixing them means learning more about SEO and web performance than most business owners signed up for when they chose to build it themselves. Some DIY site owners end up paying a developer to sort out a site they built, and that often costs more than a clean professional build would have in the first place.

There's also a subtler problem: most website builder templates are recognisable. Customers have seen the layouts before. A template that's been lightly customised with your logo and some text doesn't make the same impression as something built specifically for your business.

An honest comparison

Say year one looks like this: 30 hours of your time valued at £25 per hour (£750), plus a platform subscription at £200 for the year. That comes to £950. Year two is cheaper in subscription terms, but the time debt from maintaining and tweaking something with structural limitations doesn't go away.

A professionally built site from a small agency runs from around £300 to £500 for a functional small-business build, with modest annual hosting after that. Wix vs professional web design over two years is often much closer than it appears, and the professional build doesn't carry the ongoing time cost or the ceiling you eventually hit on what it can do.

When DIY is actually the right answer

If you're in the early stages of testing a business idea, have more time available than budget, and genuinely enjoy learning this kind of thing, a DIY website is a perfectly valid starting point. The platforms are capable, and someone with time and patience can produce something decent.

The argument isn't that building it yourself is the wrong choice. The argument is about fit. Your time has a real value, and if spending 30 hours outside your area of expertise isn't how you want to spend it, the cost comparison looks different.

A website is a tool. The question is whether building it yourself is the best use of the time it takes to build it.

If you'd rather get it done properly without the learning curve, we can help with that.