The Question Behind the Question
"Should I pay someone to build my website?" is really three questions:
Answer those honestly and the decision mostly makes itself. Here's the framework.
Question 1: How Much Is Your Time Worth?
A DIY website builder (Wix, Squarespace and friends) advertises "a website in an afternoon". For a one-page site, that can be true. For a real small-business website — services, areas, contact, about, photos — the realistic figure is 20–40 hours for a first-timer: learning the editor, fighting the layout, writing the copy, sourcing images, and redoing the bits that look wrong on mobile.
If you bill £40/hour as a tradesperson, 30 hours of evenings is £1,200 of your time — spent doing badly what someone else does well. If you're pre-revenue and time-rich, that trade might still be worth it.
DIY makes sense when: you have more time than money, enjoy fiddling with software, and your standards are "good enough".
Question 2: How Good Does It Need to Be?
Customers judge businesses by their websites, fairly or not. The specific things visitors notice:
A professional build wins on all three — that's largely what you're paying for. If your work comes from recommendations and your website only needs to not embarrass you, DIY clears the bar. If the website needs to *win* customers against competitors, it probably doesn't.
Question 3: What Can You Afford — Upfront AND Ongoing?
This is where the comparison usually goes wrong, because people compare upfront prices and ignore ongoing ones:
We've built a free website cost calculator that compares all four over 3 years for your specific spec — pages, design level, shop, copywriting.
For the full decision framework, see our detailed DIY vs done-for-you comparison.
The Option Most Comparisons Miss
The classic advice assumes two choices: do it yourself, or pay a big lump sum. The third option — a done-for-you website on a monthly subscription — changes the trade-offs:
That's our model: £19.99/month, nothing upfront, with the design, hosting, domain, AI chatbot, CRM and unlimited updates included — and a 10-day free trial so you see the finished website before paying anything. You can judge the quality yourself on our real client sites.
The Honest Summary
Whichever way you go, decide on the 3-year totals and the ownership terms — never on the headline price.