If your needs are simple, your budget is tight, and you have the time and patience, building your own website can absolutely work. Once the site has to win you customers, or the build would eat 40 to 80 hours you don’t have, hiring a web design studio is the better buy. Tools like Squarespace, Wix, and Shopify are good, and we’d rather see you with a decent DIY site than no site at all. But there’s a point where DIY stops saving money and starts costing it, and knowing where that line sits is the whole game.
When DIY makes sense
We’ll say it plainly, even though we’re a design studio: plenty of businesses should start with a DIY site. You’re a good candidate if:
- You need a simple site: a homepage, an about page, services, contact
- You’re starting out and every dollar matters
- You enjoy tinkering and won’t resent the hours it takes
- Your business doesn’t depend heavily on the website to win customers
- You need something up this week
A clean, simple DIY site beats an expensive site you can’t afford yet. No shame in it.
The cost nobody puts on the invoice: your time
The math changes minds. A “free” website builder isn’t free once you count your hours. Most first-time builders spend 40 to 80 hours getting a site they’re happy with, between learning the tool, fighting with layouts, writing content, and redoing things that looked wrong on mobile. If your time is worth even $50 an hour to your business, that’s $2,000 to $4,000 of your attention, spent on something outside your expertise, instead of on the work that pays you. For comparison, freelancers in Canada charge $1,500 to $7,000 for a full site. Sometimes DIY is the expensive option wearing a cheap costume.
Where templates hit their ceiling
Website builders are brilliant right up until the moment you want something they didn’t plan for. Common ceilings people hit:
- You want the layout to do something the template doesn’t allow
- Your site grows and the navigation turns into spaghetti
- You need a feature (booking, member areas, a specific integration) the platform handles awkwardly or not at all
- Your pages load slowly and there’s not much you can do about it
- The site looks like every other site on the same template, because it is
None of these matter on day one. They tend to show up in year two, right when your business is growing and your website should be growing with it.
When a studio pays for itself
A professionally built site earns its cost back in a few specific ways:
It converts better. Structure, hierarchy, and clear calls to action are learned skills. A site that turns 2% of visitors into enquiries instead of 1% doubled the value of every marketing dollar you spend.
It’s built on strategy, not guesswork. A good studio asks what the site needs to accomplish before anyone touches a design tool, then plans the structure around that.
It saves you from expensive rework. DIY sites that outgrow their platform usually get rebuilt from scratch. A well-built site can grow instead.
You get your hours back. You run your business. Someone else sweats the line spacing.
A quick comparison
| Factor | DIY builder | Design studio |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | $0 – $500/yr in fees | $3,000 – $30,000 |
| Your time | 40 – 80+ hours | A few hours of meetings and feedback |
| Design | Template-based | Built around your business |
| Room to grow | Limited by the platform | Built to expand |
| Best for | Simple sites, tight budgets, early days | Sites that need to win business |
The middle path
It’s not all-or-nothing. Some businesses start DIY, learn what they need from a website, and hire a studio for version two, arriving with clear goals and real data. Others hire out the design and build, then handle their own content updates afterward. A good studio will build your site so you can update it yourself, rather than keeping you dependent.
How we approach this at Eggbeater
When someone comes to us and DIY is the right call for them, we’ll say so. It’s happened plenty of times in 25 years. When a custom build is the right call, we work through our 4D process (Discover, Design, Develop, Deploy): we map out a sitemap and wireframes first, design in Figma, and build custom WordPress sites with Divi, or Shopify for online stores. We price the build as a project: one number for the scope we agree on, so you know the cost before we start, and if the scope changes along the way, we price the change before we do the work. After launch, you can update content yourself, or lean on our hosting and maintenance plans and never think about plugins again.
Not sure which side of the line you’re on?
Tell us about your business and what you need the site to do, and we’ll give you our unvarnished take, even if the answer is “you don’t need us yet.”
When you do need us, we’ll be here, ready to blend up something great together.
Still Have Questions?
How much does it cost to hire a web design studio in Canada?
Hiring a web design studio in Canada costs $3,000 to $30,000 as a market range, depending on the number of pages, the custom features and whether the site sells online. A landing page site sits at the low end, a standard small business site in the middle, and a site with online sales, member areas or custom integrations at the top. At Eggbeater we quote a fixed project price for the scope we agree on after a short scoping conversation, so the number you see is the number you pay.
Can I move my DIY website to a studio-built site later without starting over?
You can move from a DIY website to a studio-built site without losing everything, though the design itself does not carry across platforms. Your content, photos, domain name and any Google rankings can come with you, as long as the studio redirects the old page addresses to the new ones. Treat the DIY site as research: its analytics tell the studio which pages people used and where they left.
Is Squarespace or Wix good enough for a small business?
Squarespace and Wix are good enough for a small business that needs a simple brochure site, a portfolio or a basic booking page. Both handle mobile layouts and hosting for you, and both cost under $500 a year. They stop being enough when you need a custom layout, a specific integration, faster load times or a site with dozens of pages. Shopify is the better DIY tool for an online store.
Do I need to know how to code to build my own website?
You do not need to know how to code to build your own website on Squarespace, Wix or Shopify, since their editors handle layout by drag and drop. Beginners get stuck elsewhere: writing the content, choosing and cropping photos, organizing the pages and making everything look right on a phone. Budget 40 to 80 hours for a first site and expect most of them to go to content rather than code.
What if I hire a studio and still want to update the site myself?
You can hire a studio for the design and build, then update the content yourself afterward, and a good studio plans for that from the start. Ask before signing whether you will be able to edit text, swap photos and add blog posts without a developer. Eggbeater builds on WordPress with Divi so clients can make those changes themselves, with hosting around $26 a month and baseline maintenance around $60 a month for the technical upkeep.
What should I have ready before hiring a web designer?
Before hiring a web designer, have your logo files, a rough list of pages, whatever content you already have, a few sites you admire and a budget range. A studio can start without polished copy, but the raw material shortens the Discover phase and keeps the project price accurate.
…and if you’ve still got questions, let us know!
