Should You Hire a Web Designer or Build Your Own Website?
So, you need a new website for your business. The good news is that you have more options than ever.
You can build it yourself using Wix, Squarespace, Webflow or another website builder. You can buy a template, ask AI to help you put it together, hire a freelancer for a relatively modest fee, or hand the whole project over to a web design agency.
And that brings us to the big question: is hiring a web design agency actually worth it anymore?
After all, if you can build a perfectly respectable-looking website yourself for a fraction of the price, why wouldn’t you?
It’s a fair question. And the answer isn’t that every small business needs to spend thousands on a professionally designed website. Some genuinely don’t. If your requirements are simple and you’re reasonably comfortable with technology, the DIY route can work perfectly well.
But there’s a caveat.
Building the website is only one part of the job.
Your website isn’t there simply to look professional and prove your business exists. It’s a marketing tool. You need people to find it. You need the right people to understand what you’re selling. And, ideally, you need some of those people to pick up the phone, make an enquiry, book an appointment or buy something. That’s where things like marketing strategy, user experience and conversion tracking start to matter.
So, rather than asking “What’s the cheapest way to build my website?”, a better question might be: “What do I actually need my website to do for my business?”
The answer will tell you a lot about whether you should build it yourself or bring in the professionals.
Table of Contents
When Does Building Your Own Website Make Sense?
Let’s start by giving DIY website builders their due. They’re pretty good these days.
If you need a homepage, an About page, a few service pages and a contact form, there’s no reason you can’t build these yourself using a platform such as Wix or Squarespace.
You don’t need to know how to code. Hosting and security are largely taken care of. There are plenty of attractive templates, and it’s difficult to completely break your website while experimenting with them.
For some businesses, that’s all they need.
Perhaps you’re just starting out and don’t have much money to invest. Maybe most of your business comes through referrals and people only visit your website after they’ve already heard about you. Or perhaps you’re technically inclined, enjoy this kind of thing and have enough marketing knowledge to know what you’re doing. In those situations, DIY can be a sensible choice.
There’s also the question of time. If you’re happy spending your evenings learning how to build the site, writing the copy, finding images, setting up analytics and figuring out why something looks strange on mobile, you can certainly save money.
Just remember that your time has a cost too.
A Good-Looking Website Isn't Necessarily a Good Website
AI-powered website builders have made it much easier to create something that looks professional. But looking professional and performing well are two different things.
Most small business owners aren’t web designers. More importantly, they’re usually not digital marketers.
You might choose a beautiful template, add your logo, write a little about your business and create a contact page. Everything looks great. But is the website designed to turn visitors into customers?
Are your landing pages structured to guide people towards making an enquiry, booking or purchase? Do they clearly communicate why someone should choose your business over the three other competitors they’re also considering?
Then there’s everything that happens around the website. If you’re running Google Ads, for example, do you have dedicated landing pages that give visitors the information they’re looking for and encourage them to take the next step? Can you track enquiries, bookings, calls or purchases so you know which campaigns are actually generating results?
These are marketing considerations as much as web design considerations, and they need to be thought about from the start. How you plan to attract visitors and turn them into customers should influence everything from the structure and content of the site to its calls to action and functionality.
This is where working with a professional who understands both web design and digital marketing can make a real difference.
SEO Is Another Big Piece of the Puzzle
This is probably one of the biggest things small businesses overlook when building their own websites.
Most modern website builders have SEO tools. That’s useful, but having access to SEO settings doesn’t mean your website has been built with SEO in mind.
Imagine you’re an accountant.
Without doing any keyword research, you might decide your website needs Home, About, Services and Contact pages. Under Services, you list bookkeeping, payroll, tax preparation and company registration.
Perfectly logical.
An SEO specialist might look at the same business and recommend dedicated pages for each of those services because people search for them separately. They might identify additional services worth targeting, questions potential customers are searching for and opportunities to create useful content around those searches.
Suddenly, the structure of the website looks quite different.
And that’s before getting into internal linking, page titles, redirects, indexability, duplicate content, structured data, page speed and all the other things that can affect how easily search engines understand and rank a website.
SEO shouldn’t be something you suddenly remember three months after the website launches.
If organic search is going to be an important source of leads for your business, it should influence how the website is planned from day one.
Think About What Happens After You Launch
There’s another common misconception about websites: that launching one is the finish line.
In reality, it’s usually the starting point.
A website sitting online by itself isn’t going to magically produce customers. You still need to get people there.
Maybe you’ll invest in SEO. Perhaps you’ll run Google Ads. You might advertise on social media, publish articles, send email campaigns or build landing pages for individual services.
As those campaigns develop, your website needs to develop with them.
You may need new pages. You might discover that people are abandoning a particular contact form. You may want to connect enquiries to your CRM, add appointment booking, install advertising pixels or improve conversion tracking.
This is why it helps to think about your website as part of your wider marketing ecosystem rather than a standalone piece of design.
After all, even the best-designed website isn’t much use if nobody can find it. Launching the site is only the beginning. You still need a plan for attracting the right visitors and turning some of those visitors into customers.
What About Hiring a Cheap Freelancer?
Of course, DIY and a full-service agency aren’t your only options.
There are plenty of talented freelancers, and platforms such as Fiverr and Upwork have made it possible to find someone to build a relatively inexpensive website. For a straightforward project, this can be a great middle ground.
The question is what you’re actually hiring them to do.
If you give someone a template, your copy, your images and a clear page structure and ask them to assemble everything, you’re primarily buying their technical time. That’s very different from asking someone to determine how the website should be structured, research your market, consider SEO, plan the user journey, write or improve the content, set up tracking and think about how the website fits into your wider marketing strategy.
Neither service is inherently better or worse. They’re simply different products. And comparing them purely on price doesn’t tell you very much.
Don't Make "As Cheap as Possible" the Goal
This is perhaps the biggest point to consider.
If you’re running a business, the objective shouldn’t be to build the cheapest possible website. It should be to build a website that helps the business make money.
Imagine one website costs $1,000 and another costs $5,000. If the $5,000 website generates substantially more enquiries over the next three years, which one was cheaper?Obviously, paying an agency more money doesn’t automatically guarantee results. There are excellent agencies, mediocre agencies and expensive agencies that produce beautiful websites with very little thought given to marketing.
That’s why you should ask what you’re actually getting for the money. Does the agency understand SEO? Will they help plan the website structure? Are they thinking about conversions? Will analytics and tracking be configured properly? Do they understand how the website will work with your advertising? What happens when you need to add new content six months from now?
Those questions are far more useful than simply comparing the number of pages you get for your budget.
So, Do Small Businesses Still Need Web Design Agencies?
Not every small business does.
If you need a simple online presence, you’re comfortable with technology and you have a decent understanding of digital marketing, there’s nothing wrong with building your own website.
And if you’re just starting out, launching something simple now and improving it later can be far better than spending six months trying to create the perfect website.
But the fact that it’s easier than ever to build a website doesn’t mean it’s easy to build one that markets your business effectively. That’s the real value a good web designer or web design agency should bring.
You’re not paying someone thousands of dollars because they’re the only people capable of dragging text boxes around a screen or installing WordPress. You’re paying for their experience in deciding how customers should move through the site, how you’ll be found on Google, how you’ll turn visitors into enquiries and how the website will support your marketing as the business grows.
So, yes, you can absolutely build your own website.
The more important question is whether that’s really where you want to save money. Your website may be one of the first things a potential customer sees when they discover your business. It may sit at the centre of your SEO, Google Ads, social media and other marketing campaigns for years.
Treating it simply as an expense to minimise can therefore be a false economy.
Sometimes DIY is exactly the right answer. But if your website is expected to play a meaningful role in generating leads and revenue, getting professional help may be less about spending more money on a website and more about investing in a better marketing tool.
Auther
Ninnate Liumthong
Our WordPress wizard Ninnate (“Meaw”) will transform client ideas into beautiful and functional websites.
She’s obsessed with Google Core Web Vitals and improving PageSpeed. She’s also a very nice person and clients like working with her.
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