Build it yourself if you have design experience, marketing experience, and the time. Most owners have none of the three, so for most owners the answer is hire someone. A DIY site usually costs you 20 to 60 hours and still looks like a template, and the broken bits are the ones you never notice. This is what I see when I open them, from the ones I’ve looked at around Georgetown and Halton Hills this year.
The site that looked fantastic
The most recent one wasn’t even DIY. A contractor I work with had a site that was only a couple of years old, built by a professional company, and they were paying that company a monthly fee to look after it. They thought it was great, and it did look great.
And then I clicked around, and several links went nowhere. The Instagram feed on the home page was supposed to refresh on its own and instead showed a loading circle, permanently. The phone number was wrong, and nobody had noticed, and the company being paid to notice hadn’t either.
I’m starting with that one because it’s the fairest way to say that a site can look fine and be broken. Looks are the part everyone checks, but links, phone numbers and forms are the part customers hit.
What DIY sites usually look like
I’ve seen a lot of Wix sites owners built themselves, and the pattern is the same. They look generic, with the same template as a thousand other businesses, colours that don’t quite match the logo, stock photos, and a few links that don’t work. You can tell it was done at the kitchen table at 11 pm.
These are some real ones I’ve opened this year, with no names.
- A cleaning company’s site where the Facebook and Instagram icons in the footer went to Wix’s own accounts and not hers. The site was getting about 13 visits a month and she joked most of them were me.
- A general contractor on Wix. It was clean enough to look at and worked on a phone, and Google scored it 54 out of 100 for search basics. There was no service area on it, no trust pages, and three social links that led to dead accounts. It looked like it was built in 1990 and it was built in 2024.
- A kids’ program studio on Canva, built between clients as “the last thing I get to,” with broken links and a blank purple block where the programs should have been.
- A smart-home installer who built his with an AI tool, and it was the same story with different errors.
Every one of those owners is good at what they do, and the site just wasn’t their job.
How long does it actually take?
I asked myself this because I didn’t have a number, only a feeling. Estimates from web designers put a DIY site at 20 to 60 hours, and that matches what I hear. You have to learn the platform, then pick colours, then find words, then get the logo in, then look at it and not like it and tweak it, and tweak it again. And then you’re 30 hours in and it still looks like a template.
With the right information from you, your first draft is on your phone within a week of me getting your photos and logins, and it’s live in about two weeks. I do this every week, and you’d be doing it once.
What does a real site cost?
It depends, and I mean that, because a cleaner needs a different site than a builder does. So I build one plan and one price for your business, and I tell you the number before you decide anything. What I don’t do is build the website and leave the Google side alone, because the stranger sees both, and I wrote about that in why your Google Business Profile isn’t showing up.
Is there anyone I’d tell to build it themselves?
I went back and forth on this. If you’ve done design work and marketing work and you can build without leaning on a Wix template, then sure, you could. Then I think about what that costs you in hours and I’m not even sure I’d say that.
What changes when it goes live
A lot of it is vibes, and I’m fine saying so. Someone finds you, opens the site, and goes “okay, I like this.” You come across as a real business before they’ve spoken to you.
Some of it is practical. The kids’ studio site went live at the start of September on her own domain. The contractor’s site launched at the end of August, and every page, every form and the booking worked on day one. Both sites are on my website design page if you want to see what a service business website looks like when it’s done properly.
The 30-minute rule
If building your own site is eating more than 30 minutes of your day, stop, because your time is better spent on the work people pay you for. Hand it off, get a result that’s usually better than you were picturing, and go back to your customers.
Not sure what you need? I build websites for service businesses in Georgetown, Halton Hills, Erin, Milton, Oakville and Guelph, and I’ll look at what you have now for free and walk you through it on a call. It’s called the Free Online Audit. You can also read how I do website design in Georgetown.