Who should you hire to build and run your business website?

Most owners ask “who builds my website?” and stop there. The better question is “who builds it and then keeps it working?”, because those are two different jobs.

Who you hire depends on your budget and how much you need run for you: a freelancer for one-off builds, an agency for big projects, an in-house hire for constant work, or a managed service for a small business that wants the whole presence handled. The deciding question isn’t just who builds the site. It’s who runs it afterwards, because a built-and-abandoned site stops bringing in customers fast.

Let’s go through each route honestly, what it’s good at, where it falls down, and who it actually suits.

What are your four options?

You have four routes, and they split by how much ongoing work you need done for you. A freelancer is one person for hire. An agency is a team. An in-house hire is your own employee. A managed service runs your whole presence for a monthly fee. Each fits a different stage and budget.

Most small businesses overthink the build and underthink the running. The build happens once; the running happens forever. Google itself frames SEO as ongoing upkeep rather than a one-time task (according to Google Search Central), which is exactly why who runs the site matters as much as who builds it. Match your choice to the running, not just the build, and you’ll pick better. Freelancer vs agency vs in-house compares the first three in detail.

How do the four compare?

Here’s the honest side-by-side for a small business. The big variable is whether ongoing running is included or left to you.

The freelancer and agency are build-led; running is an add-on or an afterthought. In-house gives you full control but full cost. The managed service is the only route built around running it for you at a small-business price.

When does a freelancer make sense?

A freelancer is the right call for a one-off build on a tight budget. They’re usually cheaper than an agency, easy to brief, and fine for a simple site. The catch is the day after launch: most freelancers build and move on, so the running, updates, security, SEO, content, falls back to you or means hiring them again.

Freelancers also have single-person risk: when they’re ill, busy or unreachable, your site waits. For a one-off build that’s tolerable. For something you depend on daily, it’s a gap.

Picture a real version of this. A cafe owner pays a freelancer $2,200 for a lovely site with an online-ordering page. Six months later the ordering plugin breaks during the Saturday lunch rush. The freelancer’s now on a three-week project for someone else and replies on Monday. That’s two lost weekends of online orders, the busiest trading window, gone because there was no one on call. The build was excellent. The “who fixes it now” question was never answered. That’s the freelancer trade-off in one story: brilliant for the build, thin on the after.

When does an agency or in-house hire fit?

An agency suits bigger or ongoing projects where you need a team’s range of skills and can afford agency rates. They bring depth, design, dev, SEO, ads, and don’t disappear when one person’s off. The cost is higher, and small accounts can feel like a low priority.

An in-house hire only makes sense once your needs are large and constant enough to justify $38,000+ a year plus tools and management. For most small businesses that’s overkill. In-house vs managed service cost runs the numbers if you’re tempted.

There’s also the hidden cost people forget with one employee: range. A single marketer is rarely brilliant at design and SEO and ads and copywriting and technical fixes. They’ll be strong at two of those and patchy at the rest, so you end up topping up with freelancers anyway, on top of the salary. A team, whether an agency or a managed service, spreads those skills across several people. One employee is a generalist; the work usually wants specialists. That’s why in-house tends to make sense only when there’s enough volume to justify two or three hires, which is well beyond most small businesses.

Where does a managed service fit?

A managed service suits a small business that wants both the build and the running handled for one predictable fee. Instead of hiring a builder, then arranging hosting, then finding someone for SEO, then chasing reviews, one team does the lot. You brief once and the work happens, month after month.

That’s our model: website, branded email, Google profile, SEO, content, reviews, security, and on the top tier ads and email campaigns, all for $49-$199/mo (about £40-£160 or €45-€185), no setup fee, no contract, and you own your domain and content. It’s built for owners who want customers coming in, not a project to manage.

What to check before you hire anyone

Whichever route you lean towards, ask the same handful of questions before money changes hands. They’ll save you the expensive surprises.

1. Who owns it? Confirm in writing that you own the domain, the website and the content. If a provider keeps ownership, leaving later means rebuilding from scratch. This is the single most important question and the one people skip.
2. Who runs it after launch, and at what cost? Get the ongoing arrangement in writing, not a vague “we’ll sort it”. “That’s separate” is a fair answer, you just need to know before you commit, not six months in.
3. What’s the response time when something breaks? A freelancer might be days; a managed service should be same-day. Match that to how much your site costs you when it’s down.
4. Is the SEO and content ongoing or one-off? A site optimised once and never touched again slides. Ask whether someone keeps publishing and refreshing, or whether that’s on you.
5. Can you cancel, and what happens if you do? No-contract is gentler on risk. Find out whether you walk away with your assets or lose them.

If a provider gets twitchy about any of these, that’s your answer. Good ones expect the questions and answer them plainly.

A quick decision guide by situation

To make it concrete, here’s how the routes usually shake out by where a business actually is.

The pattern is simple. The less time you have to run the thing yourself, and the more you want it handled as one job rather than several, the further down that list you go. There’s no prize for picking the cheapest box if it leaves the running undone.

So who should you actually hire?

Match the route to your real need. One-off simple site, tight budget, time to maintain it yourself? A freelancer. Big project, bigger budget, need a team? An agency. Large, constant marketing needs and deep pockets? In-house. Want the whole presence built and run for you at a small-business price? A managed service.

Whatever you pick, decide who runs the site after launch before you commit to who builds it. The build is the cheap, easy part. The running is what brings in customers, and it’s the part most owners forget to budget for. See what a fully-run option looks like on the pricing page.