Wix vs hiring someone: the real cost compared

Building it yourself is cheaper in cash and rarely cheaper in total, because your hours never appear on the invoice. Most first-time owners spend a working week getting a five page site live, then a few hours a month keeping it current. Price those hours and the comparison changes completely.

A driving instructor told me he had built his own site “for free” over a couple of weekends. Then he mentioned he had cancelled four lessons to finish it. At his lesson rate that site cost him well over a hundred pounds before he had paid for a domain. He had not counted it, because nobody does.

The three real options

Three different shapes of cost, not three different sizes of the same cost. That is why comparing monthly figures alone tells you almost nothing useful.

Count your own hours honestly

This is the step everyone skips, so do it properly.

Take your hourly rate. If you are a tradesperson it is your day rate divided by eight. If you are a salon owner it is what a chair earns per hour. If you genuinely have empty evenings and no alternative use for them, your rate for this exercise is zero, and DIY wins outright. That is a legitimate answer.

Now estimate the build. Twenty to forty hours is realistic for a first attempt at five pages, and the copy is what eats it. Everyone assumes design will be the slow part. It is writing the words that stalls people for weeks.

Then the ongoing bit. Two to four hours a month if you keep up. Considerably more if you let it slide and then face a catch-up session. Multiply by 36 for three years.

What hiring someone actually gets you

A freelancer builds you something better looking than you will manage, faster, and with the copy written by someone who has written service pages before. That is worth real money and I would not talk anyone out of it.

What it does not include is what happens next. A one-off build launches and then sits there. Six months later your prices have changed, you have added a service, and the site still shows last year’s business. Every change is a new invoice at an hourly rate, so most owners stop asking and the site drifts.

A managed service is a different trade entirely. You pay every month and the work happens every month: updates, security, new pages, the Google Business Profile kept alive, reviews chased. It costs more over three years than a one-off build. It should, because more happens.

Which one fits you

DIY if you are testing an idea, the budget is genuinely zero, or you like fiddling with things and have the evenings. A rough site you control today beats a perfect one you cannot afford. Just check back in eight months and be honest about whether you are still updating it.

One-off build if you are established, your work comes from referrals, and the site exists so people can check you are real. It does not need to change much. Pay once, add cheap hosting, redo it in five years. Perfectly sensible.

Managed monthly if you want the site to bring in work you do not currently have, and you already know from experience that you will not keep it current yourself. That second half is the honest test. Plenty of people intend to and do not, and there is no shame in buying your way out of a job you will never do.

The longer version of this split, with the ownership questions covered too, is in DIY vs done-for-you.

The comparison nobody makes

Everyone compares build costs. Almost nobody compares what the site earns.

A website that appears when someone searches for your service and answers their question in ten seconds is worth a great deal more than one that looks nicer. That is where the money should go, and it is mostly ongoing work rather than a one-time build. Whether it delivers a specific number of enquiries is not something anyone can promise you, and be sceptical of anyone who does.

What I can say is that the sites bringing in steady work are, without exception, the ones someone is still touching. Platform barely matters. Attention does.

If you want it handled

Our plans are £49, £99 and £199 a month with no contract, covering the site, hosting, updates and the work of getting found. That is the option for people whose hours are worth more spent on their actual business.

If you would rather build it yourself, do that, and use the three-year sum above to check it is genuinely the cheaper choice for you. If you want a second opinion on which route fits, tell us your trade and how much time you realistically have and we will say plainly which one we would pick in your position, including when that is DIY.