Wix advertises websites from £8 a month. Squarespace from £12. Compared to a one-off professional build that might run from £250 to a few thousand pounds, those numbers sound unbeatable. They are also misleading.
The advertised price of a DIY platform is the start of the cost, not the end. Once you add the time you will spend building and maintaining it, the recurring fees for the features you actually need, the leads you will lose to a slow site, and the rebuild cost when you outgrow the platform, the long-run economics flip. For most Devon small businesses a professional build pays for itself inside two years.
Here is how the maths works.
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Contact HereHidden cost 1: your own time
If you build the site yourself, you become — for the duration of the build and forever after — the designer, the copywriter, the SEO specialist, the content updater and the support technician. Conservative estimate for a five-page DIY site: 40–60 hours over the first month, then 5–10 hours a month forever after.
If you value your own time at even £30/hour, that is £1,200 of your time burned in month one and £180–£300 a month from then on. For most business owners the real opportunity cost is much higher because those are hours you could have spent winning new work.
A professional build takes that off your shoulders. You provide the brief, the photos and the brand input, and we do the rest.
Hidden cost 2: the upgrade ladder
The £8/month plan never includes what you actually need:
- Want to sell anything online? Upgrade to the e-commerce tier — £25–£40/month
- Want a custom email address (yourname@yourdevonbusiness.co.uk)? £4–£10/month per mailbox
- Want booking forms, appointment scheduling, advanced contact forms? Either a higher subscription or paid third-party plugins
- Want to remove the platform's branding from your site? Higher tier
- Want decent SEO tools? Higher tier still
- Want priority support? Top tier
The "£8 a month" website easily becomes £50–£100/month, and you are still doing all the work yourself.
Hidden cost 3: a bad first impression
Most DIY templates are recognisable. Customers visiting your site for the first time may not be able to articulate why, but they can tell when a site looks like one of fifty other sites built on the same template. The signal is "this business is not investing properly".
For a Devon professional service business — a solicitor, an accountant, a financial adviser — that perception costs real customers. For a retailer or a holiday let it costs bookings. The cost is hard to measure but it is real and it is ongoing.
Hidden cost 4: search visibility
DIY platforms have improved on SEO basics in recent years but still lag well behind a properly optimised WordPress build. Page speed scores tend to be lower (DIY platforms ship a lot of unused JavaScript), schema markup is restricted to what the platform offers, technical SEO controls are limited, and the URL structure is often clumsy.
The cost shows up not as a bill but as the absence of organic search traffic that should be arriving. A Newton Abbot trade business that cannot rank for "[their service] Newton Abbot" because of platform limitations is losing 10–30 enquiries a month it could otherwise have for free.
Hidden cost 5: the inevitable rebuild
Most DIY sites get rebuilt within 2–3 years. Either the business outgrows the platform's feature set, the branding evolves and the template will not flex, or the limitations of the SEO and integration story become impossible to ignore.
When the rebuild comes, every penny of what you paid in monthly subscriptions is gone, none of it transfers to the new site, and you start from scratch.
What a Shout Websites build costs over the same period
Starter site: £250 one-off. Optional retainer with hosting, security, updates, monthly performance and SEO reporting: £300/month. Over five years that is £18,250 with full hands-off management.
A Wix or Squarespace business plan over the same period, fully loaded, runs roughly £4,000–£6,000 — not counting the time you spend doing your own admin or the inevitable rebuild. Send your URL or your brief to 07887 988780 and we will do the maths for your specific situation.