Why this question is harder than it looks.
On the surface, it seems like a straightforward cost comparison. DIY tools like Squarespace run at around £13–£20 a month. A decent professionally built site in Kent might cost £1,200 to £3,500 depending on scope. So if you have time and not much money, you do it yourself. Right?
Not quite. The money is only one variable, and often not the most important one. I have watched capable, intelligent people spend six weeks on a DIY site that quietly embarrassed their business — not because they lack intelligence, but because they were making decisions in a vacuum they did not know they were in. And I have seen people pay for a built site and then do nothing with it because nobody told them how. Neither outcome is what you want.
So before you open Squarespace or WhatsApp a developer, answer three questions honestly.
Question one: what is this site actually for?
A website is not a brochure. Or rather, it can be, but if that is all it is, you are probably spending money on something that will not move the needle for your business.
Think about what you genuinely need the site to do. If the answer is "have a presence so people can check we exist before calling," then an honest, well-written one-pager — built on Squarespace or even a stripped-back WordPress — is probably fine, and DIY is a reasonable route. A plumber in Deal who wants their phone number and a Google Business Profile to point to does not need £3,000 of custom build.
If, on the other hand, you need the site to generate enquiries, convert visitors into bookings, integrate with a booking system or CRM, load quickly enough to rank on Google, or eventually sell products — the bar is higher. Not impossible to DIY, but harder. The risk of a DIY site in that context is not that it looks ugly. It is that it does not do the job, quietly, and you never find out why leads are thin.
Question two: how much is your time actually worth?
This is the one most people skip. They see the cost of a built site and compare it to zero, as if building it themselves costs nothing. It does not. A realistic DIY site — one that is genuinely good, not just technically live — takes most non-technical business owners somewhere between 20 and 50 hours. That includes choosing a template, writing copy (the part people massively underestimate), uploading photos, sorting out a domain (usually a .co.uk from somewhere like 123-reg or Namecheap), setting up Google Search Console, and fixing the ten small things that are not quite right.
If your day-rate as a tradesperson or service provider is £250, that is between £5,000 and £12,500 of your time, even at the low end. Obviously you cannot convert every hour into billable work, but the point stands: your time has value, and it is finite. Time you spend fighting with a website builder is time you are not quoting jobs, serving customers, or doing the thinking that actually grows your business.
That said, if you are early-stage, not yet generating consistent revenue, and you have genuine spare time in the evenings — building your first site yourself is not a bad idea. You will learn things about your business by writing the copy that no brief to a developer would surface.
Question three: how much does quality matter at this exact moment?
Here is something I tell people who come to me for a mentoring session: quality matters, but timing matters more. A rough site that is live next week beats a polished one that is still in progress in four months.
If you are pre-launch, validating whether there is even a market for what you are doing, a Squarespace site with a contact form and a clear description of your offer is genuinely enough. Get it live, get feedback, then invest in something better when you have revenue to justify it.
If you are an established business — say, a Canterbury independent retailer or a Faversham builder with a decent client list — and your current site is actively losing you work (loads slowly, looks like 2014, has no mobile version), then the cost of not fixing it is real, even if it is invisible. In that case, professional help makes sense sooner.
What I have seen go wrong with DIY sites.
I want to be honest here, because I think a lot of advice on this topic is either pro-DIY (from the platform marketing) or anti-DIY (from agencies who benefit from that position). I have no particular financial reason to push you one way or the other on a simple informational site.
The most common DIY problems I see are not visual. They are structural. Missing or thin page titles, so Google has nothing useful to index. No Google Search Console set up, so the owner has no idea whether anyone is finding the site organically. Contact forms that never got tested after launch and have been silently failing for six months. Copy that describes what the business does but never addresses what the customer actually worries about. Mobile layouts that technically work but feel slightly off, so people bounce.
None of these are unfixable. But most business owners do not know to look for them, because they do not know what they do not know. That is not a criticism — it is just what happens when you are learning a new discipline while also running a business.
What I have seen go wrong with hired sites.
Hired sites have their own failure modes, and I would rather be upfront about them.
The most common one is a brief that was never properly agreed. The business owner had something in their head, the developer built something technically correct, and the two things do not match. This usually happens because neither party spent enough time on the "what does this site need to do" conversation before anyone opened a laptop.
The second is handing over too much control. If you cannot log in and change your own opening hours, update a price, or swap out a photo without calling a developer and paying for the privilege, you have bought a liability, not an asset. Any professional site build should hand you something you can maintain yourself — or if it cannot, you should know that before you sign anything.
The third is buying a site and treating it as done. A website is not a sign above your door. It needs updating, it needs someone watching whether Google is sending traffic to it, and it benefits from fresh content. If neither you nor your developer have a plan for that, a beautifully built site can quietly become irrelevant within 18 months.
The middle path most people overlook.
There is a version of this that is not fully DIY and not a full agency engagement. I do it fairly regularly for Kent businesses who are somewhere in the middle: they need a genuinely good site, they do not have a huge budget, but they are capable of being hands-on once the foundations are right.
The approach is to build the core site professionally — structure, copy, SEO basics, the technical setup — and then hand it over to the owner on a platform they can actually use, whether that is WordPress with a sensible theme, Squarespace, or Webflow on its simpler settings. The owner then maintains it day-to-day and comes back for specific work when they need something more complex. It tends to cost somewhere between £800 and £1,800 for the initial build depending on scope, and it keeps the ongoing relationship sane for both sides.
This is roughly what I did for a small food producer near Whitstable last year: built the site properly, wrote the core page copy with them, set up Google Search Console and a basic analytics view, and left them with something they understood and could keep current. That is a more useful outcome than a flashy site they are afraid to touch.
So what would I actually do in your position?
If I were starting a trade or service business in Kent today with limited funds and reasonable spare time, I would build a simple site myself on Squarespace or WordPress.com to start — get it live in a fortnight, make sure the basics work, and use that to start getting customers. Once I had revenue, I would invest in something more considered.
If I were an established business whose site was genuinely costing me credibility or enquiries, I would not hesitate to hire someone — but I would have that "what does this site need to do" conversation first, in writing, before a penny changed hands. And I would make sure I could log in and edit it myself at the end.
If I were genuinely unsure which category I was in, I would talk it through with someone who has no strong financial interest in pushing me one way. That conversation is free with me, incidentally.