I’ve spent 17 years arguing the case for hiring a developer. I’m going to spend this post making the case for the times you shouldn’t.

That’s a strange thing for someone running a web agency to write. But the truth is I’ve watched a lot of small businesses pay us, or pay our competitors, for websites they didn’t really need yet. I’ve also watched a lot of people try to DIY a site that absolutely needed professional work, and discover eighteen months later that they’ve spent more fixing it than the original quote would have been.

The honest answer to “should I build my own website?” is that it depends on three things. And the deciding factor is almost never your budget. It’s whether the site is load-bearing for the business.

Here’s how to tell which side of the line you’re on.

The three questions that actually decide it

1. What is the website actually for?

There’s a real difference between a site that’s a brochure for something you do, and a site that is the front door of the business. The first kind tolerates a lot. If your beautifully written words are on a slightly off-the-shelf template, your customers won’t care, because they came in through a different door anyway: a referral, your name, your work. The site confirms what they already think.

The second kind doesn’t tolerate much. If the site is where customers find you, where they decide whether to trust you, where they actually book or buy or get in touch, then everything from how fast it loads to how well it ranks to how it handles a busy week is part of the product. Cutting corners there is the same as cutting corners on the product itself.

Be honest with yourself about which one yours is. The DIY platforms make a perfectly fine brochure. They struggle to make a working front door.

2. What is your time worth, and have you got any?

DIY isn’t free. It’s never been free. The cost is your time, and your time has a number on it whether you put one there or not.

I’ll come back to this with proper figures further down. For now: an honest first attempt at a five-page Squarespace site is 30 to 50 hours of real work, not the weekend the marketing suggests. If the hourly value of your time is meaningful, multiply it out. The conversation looks different.

3. Will you actually keep it up to date?

The optimistic answer is yes. The honest answer, for most people I’ve known who’ve built their own sites, is no.

This isn’t a moral failing. It’s that running a business takes up the time you’d otherwise spend updating the site. Eighteen months in, the photos are out of date, the prices are wrong, the contact form has stopped working because something it relied on got deprecated, and nobody’s noticed because nobody’s looked. The DIY site doesn’t fall over loudly. It quietly stops being useful.

If the answer to question three is no, you don’t necessarily need a developer. But you do need someone whose job it is to look after the site, even part-time, because nobody else will.

When DIY is the right call

The clearest case I’ve seen in recent years was a small craft brewery local to me. The owners were good designers. They were already drawing the artwork that went on every beer can, and the artwork was the point of the brand. What they wanted was a site that gave their work the room to breathe and let people see what they were making.

They built it themselves. One page, done well, with their own design sensibility coming through. It worked, because the site was an extension of their craft and not a different discipline they were pretending to have. Hiring an agency to design it would have produced something more polished and less interesting, which is the opposite of what their customers wanted.

The pattern there is worth naming. DIY works when:

  • The website is supporting evidence for the business, not the engine of it
  • The person doing it has a genuine eye, even if they’re not a developer
  • The scope is small enough that you can keep it small
  • It doesn’t need to scale, because nothing is going to depend on it scaling

A personal portfolio, a hobby site, a side business that’s still working out what it is, a one-pager for something visual and creative. All fine. Build the site yourself. Save the money.

When DIY is the wrong call

The cleanest example of the other side I’ve seen was a property management company for holiday lets.

When they started, they had one property. The site they’d built themselves was perfectly fine for one property. As the business grew and they took on more lets for more clients, the site couldn’t keep up. It got slow. Search rankings started slipping. They tried to patch it by hiring a cheap freelancer, who made things worse rather than better, partly because they were working on top of a foundation that wasn’t built to handle what was now being asked of it.

By the time the work came our way, the site was costing them customers. Not theoretical lost customers, real ones. People had abandoned the booking process because pages were taking too long to load, and the holiday-let owners they were trying to recruit as clients were quietly going elsewhere because the site didn’t look like a serious operation.

The rebuild cost them several times what a proper build would have cost in the first place. There’s a rough rule I’ve seen play out repeatedly: a DIY site that has to be redone by a professional usually costs around 1.5 times what a clean professional build would have cost from the start. Sometimes more, because we’re not just building, we’re unwinding. Removing what was there. Migrating what’s worth keeping. Working out what was always broken and what only broke recently.

The pattern there is worth naming too. DIY is the wrong call when:

  • The site is how customers find, judge, or transact with the business
  • The business is going to grow, and the site has to grow with it
  • SEO matters, because templates produce sites that look the same as every other site on the same template, and Google has noticed
  • Anything beyond the absolute basics is involved (booking systems, member areas, integrations, multi-step forms)

If your business is going to depend on the site, the site has to be built for what it’s going to do, not what it’s doing today.

The middle ground people miss

There’s a sensible compromise: build the first version yourself, hire a developer for the second version once the business has proven itself.

I’ve seen this work. I’ve also seen it go wrong, and the way it goes wrong is consistent. People build a passable five-page Squarespace site, run it for a year, get used to it, and then can’t bring themselves to spend on a replacement that “doesn’t really do anything different”. The DIY site stops being a temporary measure and becomes the permanent thing, despite never having been built to be the permanent thing.

My honest view on the middle ground: it works for situations where the website genuinely doesn’t need to scale, like your own personal portfolio. If you can already see that the site will need design work, more functionality, or proper SEO at some point, it’s worth getting it done right from the start. A solid foundation is what makes long-term success cheaper, not more expensive. The cost of replacing a temporary site with a permanent one is almost always higher than the cost of doing the permanent one first, because what gets thrown away wasn’t free to make either.

If you’re going to use the build-then-replace approach, build something deliberately small. The temptation to make it nicer than it needs to be is the trap.

What “DIY” actually means in 2026

The DIY landscape has moved on. Quick honest take on the main options.

Squarespace

Easiest end-to-end experience for a non-technical user. Templates that look fine. Limited beyond a certain point: SEO is workable but not deep, customisation hits walls, the editor that felt fluent at five pages feels clumsy at fifteen. Good for the small brochure case. Not the answer for a business site that needs to grow.

Wix

Hugely flexible. Genuinely good in the right hands. The flip side of that flexibility is that beginners build sites that look DIY in a way Squarespace’s templates protect them from. Wix sites also tend to get heavy quickly, which hurts performance, which hurts ranking. Use it well or don’t use it.

Webflow and Framer

Closer to professional tools than the others on this list. The output can be excellent. The catch is that the learning curve is real. People underestimate how much there is to learn before you can produce something that looks deliberate rather than just functional. Worth it if you’re willing to put the hours in. Wrong choice if you wanted DIY because you didn’t have the hours.

AI website builders

The newest entrant and the one most likely to be oversold to you. They produce a working site quickly. They also produce a site that looks like every other AI-built site quickly. The output is fine for genuinely throwaway purposes. For anything that needs to be different from the next business in your category, the limitation is the same one I wrote about in my piece on 17 years of WordPress: the tools are getting good, but they have a flatness to them that comes through the moment you put two of them next to each other.

WordPress, built yourself

Possible. Harder than the others to do well, easier than the others to do badly. WordPress runs around 43% of the web for reasons I’ve gone into elsewhere, but those reasons are mostly accessible to people who already have technical instincts. If you don’t, the gap between what’s possible on WordPress and what you’ll actually achieve on it is wider than the gap on Squarespace.

The hidden cost most people forget

I said earlier I’d come back to time. Here’s the version with numbers.

A first DIY site, done properly, for a small business that needs five to eight pages with original copy and reasonable photography, takes most people somewhere between 30 and 60 hours over a few weeks. That number assumes you write your own words, source or take your own photos, learn the platform as you go, and don’t rebuild the whole thing partway through after deciding the templates aren’t quite right. Which you will.

If your time is worth £30 an hour to your business, the site costs you £900 to £1,800 in your time. If it’s worth £60 an hour, it’s £1,800 to £3,600. That doesn’t include the ongoing time, which for a site that’s actually being kept up adds another five or ten hours a month.

Compare that with the cost of a hired build, which I’ve covered separately in our piece on what websites actually cost in the UK in 2026. The numbers aren’t always as far apart as people assume going in. They’re often closer than the sticker shock suggests, particularly once you factor in that you wouldn’t have spent your own hours on it.

None of this is an argument that DIY is always more expensive than it looks. It’s an argument that DIY is rarely free, and the hidden cost is the one that actually decides whether the maths works.

When you’re not sure

If you’ve read this far and you still don’t know which side of the line you’re on, that’s a signal worth taking seriously. The cases at either end of the spectrum are easy. It’s the middle that’s the difficult call, and the middle is where most small businesses actually live.

If you’re on the fence and you’d like a straight answer for your specific situation, tell me about it and I’ll have a look. Sometimes the right answer is “do it yourself for now”. That answer’s free.