Drag-and-drop website builders are everywhere, and their adverts make it look easy: pick a design, add your text, you are online by teatime. For some people that is genuinely enough. For a trade business that needs enquiries, there are costs the advert does not mention.
Cost one: your time
The builder is free to try. Your evenings are not. Writing pages, choosing photos, sorting the layout and fixing things that do not look right on a phone can easily take days. Time you could have spent quoting, working or resting.
Cost two: results
A DIY site often ends up as a few pages with generic wording. It may look fine, but:
- It may not have a page for each service and area, so it is hard to find on Google
- It may be slower than it should be
- The wording may not say what customers search for
- The structure may not push people to ring
A site can exist and still bring in nothing.
Cost three: the small print
Many builders have plans where useful things cost extra: your own domain, email, removing the builder’s branding, more pages, better support. The cheap plan often becomes a more expensive plan quite quickly.
Cost four: being locked in
Some platforms make it hard or impossible to take your site elsewhere. If you grow out of it or the price rises, you may have to rebuild from scratch.
Cost five: nobody is checking
On a DIY site, you are the web team. Nobody checks that the form still works, that the pages still load fast or that the information is up to date. See website maintenance.
When DIY is fine
If you are just starting out, have no budget and need a simple online presence, a builder can do the job for a while. Just make sure you register the domain in your own name, and treat it as a stepping stone.
When it is worth paying someone
Once you want the website to bring in work, the structure, wording and local setup matter more than the tool. A proper site, built for your trade by people who do this daily, is likely to repay itself. See how much a trade website costs and what we include.
DIY is cheap on the invoice and expensive in time and missed enquiries.