Website builder, or someone who builds it for you?

When a builder is the right answer

Wix, Squarespace and the rest are good products. Millions of businesses run perfectly well on them, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. Use one if:

• The budget really is zero. A builder plan costs a few pounds a month. If that is what is available, it is a long way better than no website, and you should not let anybody shame you out of it.
• You need it this weekend. A trading name, a phone number and a list of services, live by Sunday. No designer will beat that.
• The website is not how you get customers. If your work comes entirely from a contract, a wholesaler or a single referrer, and the site exists so people can check you are real, a builder is sufficient.
• You actually enjoy it. Some people like tinkering with their own site, and a designer takes that away. If you will keep it current because you find it satisfying, that is worth more than any amount of technical polish.

In any of those four cases, go and use one. We mean that.

Where it starts to cost you

The case against is not that builders produce bad websites. It is that the costs show up somewhere other than the invoice.

• Your time, which is the real price. A tradesperson who spends twenty evenings building their own site has spent the cost of a professional build in hours they could have billed or had back. The monthly fee looks cheap because the largest input is not counted.
• Speed, especially on a phone. Builders have to carry a page editor, a theme engine and a general-purpose framework into the browser. That is why a builder site typically arrives in several seconds on mobile data where a hand-built page arrives in under one. On a trade where people decide in four seconds, that is not a technical detail.
• Everybody chose the same template. There are a limited number of good ones and your competitors are looking at the same gallery. Visitors cannot name why three local firms feel interchangeable, but they feel it.
• The structure that wins searches is hard work in a builder. A real page per service, correct headings, internal linking, proper structured data. It is possible, it is just fiddly enough that almost nobody does it — which is the actual reason builder sites tend to rank poorly, not some penalty.
• Getting out again. This one is worth checking before you start. Wix does not give you an export you can host elsewhere — leaving means rebuilding from scratch. Squarespace exports some of your content but not the site. Your words, pictures and domain are always yours; the website itself is not portable.
• It stops being maintained. Not the platform — your site. The prices stay as they were, the form quietly breaks, the new service never gets added, because the person responsible is also running the business.

What you are actually buying from us

Not better taste. Three specific things:

• Someone else does it. You answer questions for about an hour, review a design, and the thing appears. That is the whole of your involvement.
• It keeps being looked after. Changes are included every month, and they happen because you sent a text, not because you found an evening.
• It is built for how your trade gets found. A page per service because that is what people search, structured data for the local map results, and copy written around the way customers in your industry actually choose. That is the part a template cannot do, and it is most of the value.

We charge from £45 a month with nothing upfront, which includes hosting, support and the changes. The honest arithmetic against buying a site outright is on the pay monthly page.

If you are already on one

Then the question is narrower: is it costing you work? Three things tell you, and you can check all of them this afternoon.

• Open it on your phone, on mobile data, away from the wifi. Count the seconds until you can read something and tap the phone number. If it is more than three, visitors are leaving before your homepage has finished arriving.
• Search for the thing you most want to be found for. Not your business name — the service plus your town. See whether you appear at all.
• Look at when it was last changed. If the prices are a year old, the site is not a marketing asset, it is a business card with a hosting bill.

If all three are fine, you do not need us, and we will say so if you ring. If they are not, moving does mean a rebuild — which is work, but it is our work, not yours.