Short answer: use a website builder, at £0 to £30 a month plus 20 to 60 hours of your own time, if you have more time than money and the site is a brochure. Hire a designer, from £495 one-off, once the site has to bring in work, or once your own hours are worth more than the fee. The honest test is not the price. It is what your time costs and what one customer is worth.
The two costs nobody puts side by side
| Website builder | Hiring a designer | |
|---|---|---|
| Cash | £0 to £30/month | From £495 one-off |
| Your time | 20 to 60 hours, realistically | 2 to 3 hours of answering questions |
| Result depends on | Your eye and patience | Their skill |
| Getting found | You learn SEO too | Built in |
| Changes later | Free, if you remember how | Ask, or use the CMS |
| You own it | No, you rent | Yes, outright |
Twenty to sixty hours is the number people leave out. At even £25 an hour of your own time, a “free” builder site has cost £500 to £1,500 before the subscription starts.
Do this sum first
What is one new customer worth to you over a year? Not one job, one customer.
- Under about £100 and you win most work by word of mouth: a builder is genuinely sensible. Spend nothing, spend an evening.
- £500 or more: the site only has to bring in one extra customer a year to have paid for itself. At that point doing it yourself is the expensive option.
- £2,000 or more (extensions, treatment plans, commercial work): the question is not whether to hire someone, it is why you have not already.
Where builders hit a wall
Builders are genuinely good now. They still stop at the same four places:
- Being found. Templates give you pages, not the structure and local signals Google needs. This is the most common reason a self-built site quietly wins nothing.
- Speed on a phone. Drag-and-drop tends to ship a lot of weight. Most visitors arrive on mobile, often on a poor signal.
- Anything that transacts. Bookings, payments, anything joined to software you already run.
- Looking distinct. Template sites look like template sites, which matters most in trades and professional services where trust is the whole sale.
Where a designer is not worth it
Genuinely: if you need three pages saying who you are, you have the photos, and nobody searches for what you do because your work arrives by recommendation, a builder is fine. Paying £495 for that is not a scandal but it is not necessary either. We would rather tell you that than take it.
The middle option most people miss
You do not have to choose between doing everything and handing over everything. A built site with a CMS means someone else does the build, structure and SEO, and you still edit your own text and prices afterwards. That is what our Business package is, and it is usually the right answer for anyone who wanted a builder for the control rather than the price.
If you already built one yourself
Do not rip it up on principle. Plenty of self-built sites need three things fixed rather than replacing. Send it to us and we will tell you which, and whether a rebuild is actually justified. Related: redesign or rebuild, cheap vs professional, and the full three-way comparison.
Send the link. We will tell you the three things stopping it bringing in work, and whether that is a fix or a rebuild. Free, no obligation, and we will say “keep it” when that is the truth.
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