Wix vs hiring a web designer.

What Wix and Squarespace genuinely do well

Credit where it's due, because plenty is due. The modern builders are remarkable: for a modest subscription you get hosting, an SSL certificate, hundreds of professional templates, and an editor a determined beginner can genuinely use. You can go from nothing to a published website in a weekend, with no gatekeepers and no invoices. Squarespace's templates in particular are tasteful enough that the floor - the worst site you can plausibly make - is far higher than it was ten years ago.

And the old technical objections have mostly died. DIY-builder sites can be indexed by Google perfectly well now, they're mobile-friendly out of the box, and the uptime is fine. If a designer tries to win your business by telling you Wix sites "don't work on Google", they're a decade out of date, and you should hold everything else they say to the same standard we're inviting you to hold us to here.

So let's be plain about who the builders serve brilliantly: hobby projects, community groups, ideas being tested before money exists, and anyone who genuinely enjoys tinkering with their own site and will keep doing so. If that's you, a builder may be all you ever need - and the rest of this guide should read as a checklist of what to get right, not a sales pitch.

The real cost of DIY, in money

The advertised price is never the paid price - true of web designers, and just as true of the builders. The entry plans that make the headlines carry the platform's adverts and hobble the features; a business actually trading needs the mid tiers. In practice a UK small business on Wix or Squarespace, once you add a business-capable plan, professional email (neither includes it - that's a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 subscription on top), the domain after its free first year, and an app or two from the marketplace, typically lands somewhere around £20-£40 a month, ongoing. Not a criticism - it's honest money for what's provided - but it retires the idea that DIY is nearly free and hiring is dear. The builder subscription never ends, and it never becomes a website you own somewhere else: leave the platform and the site stays behind. Design-your-own is a service you rent, not an asset you build.

For scale: that's the same order of money as our own pay-monthly plan (£29.99 a month, everything included), and the full market's numbers - freelancers, agencies, the lot - are in our website cost guide. The genuine difference between DIY and hiring isn't mostly the money. It's the next section.

The real cost in hours

Ask anyone who's actually built their own site: the first honest version takes most people somewhere between twenty and sixty hours. Choosing a template, fighting the editor, writing the words (much harder than expected - more below), sourcing photos, redoing the layout that looked right until it didn't, the mobile version, the contact form. Then the ongoing hours: every price change, every new photo, every tweak, forever, done by you, usually at nine o'clock at night after the actual work is done.

Whether those hours are a cost depends entirely on you. If you enjoy it, they're free - a hobby that produces a website. If you're a tradesperson or a restaurateur whose evenings are already spoken for, price the hours at what your working time earns and the arithmetic changes sharply: forty hours at even modest trade rates buys a lot of professional web design. The most expensive website is the free one that ate six weekends and still embarrasses its owner.

There's a quieter cost too, and it's the one we see most: the half-finished site. The builder subscriptions bill cheerfully whether the site is live or not, and an enormous number of DIY projects stall at eighty percent - the placeholder text still in the footer, the "About" page unwritten, the domain never connected. Not through laziness; through the discovery, thirty hours in, that the last twenty percent is the hard part. A stalled site costs money monthly and delivers nothing, which makes it the worst deal on this entire page.

Where DIY sites quietly lose

When a self-built site underperforms, it's rarely the platform. It's a handful of predictable, fixable things - fixable by you, if you know to look:

• The words. The single biggest gap. Templates arrive with beautiful placeholder copy, and what replaces it is usually either too little ("Welcome to our website") or too much (the full history of the firm above the phone number). Knowing what a visitor needs to read, in what order, is most of what design actually is.
• The photos. Builders make it one click to fill a page with stock imagery, and visitors have learned to see straight through it. A real photo of your actual work, shop or team beats a gleaming stock model every time - a point we labour in our trades guide and restaurant guide because it decides jobs and tables.
• Search basics left in the box. The builders provide the controls; busy owners rarely use them. Page titles left as "Home", one page trying to rank for every service, the business's own town absent from the text, no Google Business Profile connected. The platform isn't bad at SEO - the unused settings are.
• Template sameness. A popular template is popular; your competitors have seen it too, and so have your customers. Fine for a hobby, less fine when the site's job is to make you look like the most established choice in town.
• Nobody to call. When the form stops sending or the layout breaks on someone's phone, you're the support department, armed with a help centre and a forum.

An honest decision guide

Build it yourself when: the site is a hobby, a community group or an idea you're testing; the budget genuinely doesn't exist yet; you have real hours to give and - be honest - you'll enjoy giving them; and it's a bonus if you're the sort who finishes projects. Do that, use the checklist in the section above, and you'll be well served. Our small business website checklist covers everything the site needs before launch, whoever builds it.

Hire when: the business is trading and each customer is worth real money, because then the website is not a craft project, it's the shop window that wins or loses work while you're busy doing the work; when you're competing for local searches other businesses also want; when your evenings are worth more to you than a subscription; or when you've already tried DIY and the site is one of the eighty-percent-finished ones. If the maths of "one extra job covers months of fees" describes your trade, the decision mostly makes itself.

Either way, own your domain. Registered in your name, renewals under your control. It's the one piece of the whole operation that must survive any platform, designer or agreement - including ours.

The middle path: professional build, builder money

The fork in the road - cheap-but-DIY versus professional-but-thousands - is genuinely how the market looked for years, and pay-monthly web design exists precisely to close it. Our version: £99 setup, then £29.99 a month, for a site designed and written professionally, hosted and maintained, with your domain, business email and unlimited edits included - send us the new prices and they're up the same day, no invoice, no nine-o'clock editor session. That's builder-subscription money for the outcome the builder can't sell you: the hours and the judgment done for you.

The trade-offs of paying monthly versus paying upfront - and the questions to ask before signing either kind of agreement, including ours - get their own even-handed treatment in our pay monthly vs upfront guide. And unlike the builders, this rented service becomes an owned asset: after 12 months the site and domain are yours, and you can cancel anytime with 30 days' notice. We've built on this model from Blackpool since 2016, we're rated 5.0 on Google, and the work is there to judge - held to the same standard this guide asks you to hold everyone to.