A fair look at Wix, Squarespace, and hiring someone — including when DIY is genuinely the smarter call.
DIY builders like Wix and Squarespace make sense if you're comfortable spending 15–30 hours building it yourself and your leads don't depend heavily on the site ranking locally. Hiring a local designer makes more sense once your time is better spent on paid work, or once local search visibility genuinely matters to how many calls you get. Neither option is automatically the right one — it depends on what you're trying to get out of the site.
Wix, Squarespace, and similar builders hand you templates, hosting, and a drag-and-drop editor for $15–$45 a month. That's genuinely enough software to build a working site. What it doesn't give you is design judgement, copywriting for your specific trade, or an understanding of what makes someone pick up the phone instead of clicking to a competitor. If you're handy with that kind of thing, or willing to learn it, DIY can produce a perfectly good result. If you're not, the site usually looks like what it is — a template with the business name swapped in.
A local designer brings design decisions, copy written for how people actually search for your trade, and — depending on who you hire — an understanding of the local market you're in. The trade-off is cost, and sometimes turnaround time. Freelancer and agency pricing varies a lot; see our guide on website costs for tradies for real ranges. Some businesses, including ours, remove the upfront cost entirely by building for free and charging a monthly plan only once the site is live and approved — which changes the calculation, since you're not choosing between "spend money" and "spend time" anymore, just between "spend time" and "don't."
A one-person operation running mostly on repeat clients and referrals, with a spare weekend, is a reasonable DIY candidate. A trade business competing on emergency call-outs — where being the first result someone calls genuinely changes the month's revenue — usually gets more out of a site built by someone who does this daily. If you're in a regional market like Ballarat where local competition for search visibility is different again, that's worth factoring in too. The same trade-offs show up across the tradie websites we build, whichever trade you're in.
We're not going to tell you DIY is always the wrong call — for some businesses it genuinely isn't. What we'd say is: if the reason you haven't hired someone is the upfront cost, that's worth reconsidering. Our build is free, and the $199 a month only starts once you've seen the finished site and approved it — so the traditional DIY-vs-hire trade-off, where hiring means paying money you don't have yet, doesn't really apply the same way. See what should actually be included in a website package for the full checklist either way, so you know what to compare against.
Free to build, no lock-in, and you see the whole thing before you pay a cent.