Built to order, template, or do it yourself?
There are three ways to end up with a website, and the marketing for all three is designed to make the other two look silly. They all work. They suit different people.
Doing it yourself
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy’s builder. £15–30 a month and you build it.
It genuinely works and the results can look fine. What the adverts leave out is the time: two full weekends for a first attempt is realistic, and every change afterwards is an evening because you have to remember how it works.
Suits: someone starting out with more time than money, or a business where the website is genuinely a formality.
A template someone sets up for you
£300–800 and a few days. Somebody takes a ready-made design, drops your text and photos in, and hands it over.
Faster and cheaper than built to order, and perfectly respectable. The catch is that the template decides the shape — if your business does not fit the layout, the layout wins, and you can usually tell.
Suits: a straightforward business with clear content and no unusual requirements.
Built to order
£800–3,000 for a small firm. Somebody starts from what your business actually is rather than from a layout.
The difference is not really the visuals. It is that the front page can be arranged around the thing you most want to sell, and that awkward parts of your business — two trades under one roof, emergency work priced differently — get handled instead of squeezed in.
Suits: anyone whose site needs to bring work in rather than just exist.
The honest comparison
Over five years, doing it yourself costs roughly £900–1,800 in subscriptions plus perhaps forty hours of your own time. At £40 an hour that is another £1,600.
A built-to-order site at £1,490 plus £249 a year comes to about £2,735 over the same period, and takes a couple of hours of your time.
The money is close. What differs is whose evenings get spent.
The question that actually decides it
Not what it costs. Whether you will do it.
A DIY site half-finished in a drafts folder has cost you nothing and earned you nothing. If you know yourself well enough to know it will sit there, that settles it regardless of the price comparison.
Common questions
Can I start with Wix and move later?
Yes, and plenty do. You cannot export the site itself, but you keep the domain, the words and the photographs, which is the part that took the time. Just make sure the domain is registered to you and not only inside the builder’s account.
Are templates bad for Google?
No. Google does not know or care what a site was built with. What it cares about is speed, whether it works on a phone, and whether the page says something. A tidy template beats a slow bespoke site.
How can I tell if a quote is really 'built to order'?
Ask what the process is before any building starts. If the answer includes a conversation about your business, it probably is. If it goes straight to 'pick a design from these', it is template work, which is fine at template prices.
Is a one-page site enough?
For most one-person trades, yes — done properly it will out-perform a five-page site that nobody thought about. Go to more pages when you genuinely want to be found separately for separate things.
Want to see what yours would look like?
Send me a few lines about your firm and within a few days you will have a mock-up of your site, with a price on it. Free.
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