Should I Pay Someone to Build a Website for My Business or Build it Myself for “Free”?

This is a question I come across on a weekly basis. Startups and small business owners find themselves making a decision between sacrificing their time or spending their money. Essentially, it is a question of which is more valuable.

After speaking to a business owner on Reddit — Small Business and receiving some great community input, I decided to turn the answer for this question into an article.

This is the #1 thing that I see small businesses do and it is a bad idea.

As a web developer and company owner, I can automatically tell you that it is not worth spending your time learning how to create a website and then building it. This is the #1 thing that I see small businesses do and it is a bad idea. Their perception is they are “saving money.” But after wasting numerous hours, the final product is oftentimes something sub-par by industry standards. One of two things occurs post-creation: the website, although it does not accomplish the company’s goals, is launched and essentially collects dust, or they end up hiring someone to “fix it.” In most cases, it is more cost effective to simply build something from scratch rather than utilizing the existing site built by the business owner.

There is a significant difference between working on your business and working in your business. As a business owner, you should be focusing your time and energy working on the business, not in it. Yes, hiring a web development company is costly. Charges can be upwards of $100–125/hr, which sounds like “a lot” of money. When considering the cost of hiring a web developer, you also have to take into consideration that this web developer is most likely to be 10x more efficient than you. If you are only now learning how to build a website, you are going to be much slower than someone who has years of experience. To add to this, if you were to build your own website, it is likely that your end product will be lackluster and may not accomplish your company goals. It would be more beneficial and valuable for you to spend that time working on your company.

This situation is no different than hiring an accountant or lawyer. The only reason this question comes up so much is because the average small business owner looks at a website as an “expense,” when in reality they should be seeing it as an investment. When it comes to accounting, do you try to be your own Certified Public Accountant CPA in hopes of “saving money?” Or can we all agree that hiring a proper CPA is going to pay for itself over the course of your company’s life (or rather, after the first year)? Building a website is no different than this.

There are very few situations, in business, where you should take on a learning curve with the mindset of “I want to save money” — those two things do not go hand in hand. This may work in your personal life but not in the business world.

My company can build a fairly simple website that accomplishes the client’s goals for around $1000. Highly custom work, built from scratch, is when we start looking at the $3–5K range.

Unless you are incredibly tight on money, my advice would be to hire this out. Unfortunately, even the “cheap/free” solutions for building a website will take more time than necessary. Being in this industry for 6 years now, I have become incredibly efficient. For example, adding analytics to the site, registering the site with Google Search Console, configuring all the DNS, configuring e-mail management, site hosting, etc. are all basic tasks that come with any website setup. I can accomplish most of these tasks in about 20 minutes. How sickening does that $125/hour sound now?

When you have not gained efficiency or expertise in the field, it becomes easy to laugh at the pricing. Although, you should not be thinking about “hourly” in business, you must look at the value you have received from the product/service. In this scenario, the “value” is your time that you could be spending on more necessary items. You have to take that into consideration and do a cost-benefit analysis when making these business decisions.

So much of SEO is based on copy, and more importantly, regular blog posts/content — like this post for example. Odds are the copy is going to come from you unless you are hiring a copywriter. Being an expert in your industry, regardless of hiring a copywriter, you will be using your time. Simply put, have someone else build your site and you can spend time with the copy if you truly want to cut costs and help with SEO.

I could go on forever trying to explain my workflow and web development process. Trust me when I say I would absolutely love to go into detail, but this article is for the average business owner, not a web developer.

The point I am trying to make is true for hiring a professional in any given industry. It is the sole reason why people specialize. Everyone cannot be good at everything.

Simply put, it is not worth the initial time investment for you to go out and learn the workflow for something like this. Each time you utilize what you have learned, you slowly average out your initial time investment among your clients. Is it practical to learn how to be an accountant to service one client, only one time, with their taxes? Become a doctor to simply help one patient? The learning curve and workflow you develop over many years of mastering your craft is only sensible if you can spread it over hundreds of clients and opportunities.

Personally, I have put in my 10,000 hours in this field and so a $1,000 site does not do anything for my company’s bank account. That cannot be and is not our business model. It simply is not sustainable. Although, it is a way for us to get our foot in the door and to build trust with a new client. Our goal is to build a partnership and help your company grow in various facets, apart from building a website. Businesses can evolve and become more efficient through the implementation of many different tools — CRM, VoIP, Cloud Storage, Invoicing Systems, and much more. There is a greater picture to this. So when you are looking to hire someone to build a website for you, keep in mind the company’s intentions. Be sure to do your research because there are honest companies out there that are not trying to nickel and dime you.

A comment recieved in response to this post:

I agree with this 100%, I built my Wife’s website for her beauty salon, I wish I had only wasted 30 hours and the SEO still massively weak. Our only saving grace is where we are located the competition has horrific web presence for the B&M locations in the area. I’d rather paid $1000–1500 and saved myself the time and aggravation of building, maintaining and updating the site. Ironically, she thinks it looks great and operates well…I look at it from an IT point of view as I am a System Administrator for my company and I think its a steaming pile but we are up and working so I can’t just say ‘Baby, we are redesigning!’ she’d lose her marbles. — wayneious

Please let me know what you think about this article, happy to continue on the discussion! If you have any questions, feel free to contact me on Twitter, through our website at www.cyberbytesinc.com or phone at (716) 876–1824!