What does a DIY website really cost?

Your DIY Website costs more than $23/mth

….and here’s why.

You decide that you need a website for your business, so on a Sunday afternoon filled with good intentions, you open Squarespace or Wix, or Showit, maybe even Shopify. The platform doesn’t matter. Your good intentions do. You set out with one goal: a website done by Wednesday, maybe Friday at the latest…or so you thought.

It’s now a few months later. The homepage has been rewritten four times. You’ve googled font pairing more often than you ever planned to. The site is still sitting at “almost done”, and the tab has been open on your laptop so long it feels like a houseplant you keep needing to water.

I’m not saying this to be smug, because I’ve lived it. It’s taken me a year to rebrand my own website, and I do this for a living. I get it. Building your own website is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and for some businesses it’s the right call. But almost nobody adds up the whole bill before they start, because the part that costs the most doesn’t show up on a credit card statement.

So let’s add it up.

How long does it actually take to build your own website?

Longer than the tutorials suggest.

Even Wix says a small business site takes 20 to 40 hours on its own platform, and they’re the ones selling it.

When I started out on Wix, I had NEVER used the platform before. I picked it after researching which platform would be best for my brand. I’d been designing websites in Figma for a couple of years and was doing design work for an agency. How hard could it be, right?

Well, it took me a couple of months. Most of that went into the mobile layout, learning how to move things around, and guessing whether I should be working in the Editor or Studio. The layouts aren’t ideal for spacing if you don’t realize how they respond on different screens. Something that looks lovely on your laptop can fall apart on your phone. Not to mention I changed layouts three or four times out of sheer indecisiveness.

And after all that? Six months in, I moved to Squarespace. Every time I went into Wix to add a new blog post or a testimonial, I’d get frustrated all over again. Add in the SEO, responsiveness and accessibility I wanted for my brand, and starting over felt easier than staying. Which is the most DIY website thing that could possibly happen.

So what does that look like for you? If you’re a coach, a practitioner or a studio owner, those hours come from somewhere. Usually they come from evenings, weekends, or time you would have spent with clients. At even a modest hourly rate, a 30-hour build isn’t free. It just gets paid in a different currency.

What are the hidden costs of a DIY website?

The learning curve is the obvious one. It’s also exactly what my clients tell me when they ask me to redo their DIY sites: too many tutorials, an interface that feels overwhelming, and phone layouts that need fixing by hand. Then there’s customization. If you don’t know how to add a dash of CSS to make your site yours, YouTube becomes your second job.

Then there’s the stuff you can’t see while you’re editing. Before any site I build goes live, I check it on a laptop, a desktop, a tablet and a phone. Tablet is the one most people skip. Squarespace’s editor, for example, has no simple tablet preview, so odd spacing is easy to miss and hard to diagnose if you’re not a designer. You publish, you feel proud, and somewhere a visitor on an iPad is looking at a page that’s slightly off and quietly deciding what that says about you.

And yes, I use AI here. Once a build is done, I ask it to go over the site and make sure I haven’t missed anything, like SEO, meta descriptions, image alt text and links. I’m human, and that second set of eyes catches things. But here’s the catch: most people don’t know to do this, so it gets overlooked. Or now you’re trying to learn AI on top of your website builder, and that’s another YouTube tutorial. This isn’t your niche. It’s mine.

And then the delay. Every month your site isn’t live is a month it isn’t bringing in enquiries. When I ask why it isn’t live yet, almost everyone gives me the same answer: there just isn’t time.

Is a DIY website accessible?

This is the cost nobody puts in the spreadsheet, so I’ll spend a minute on it because I am incredibly passionate about building accessible websites.

WebAIM scans the top million home pages every year. In 2026 they found detectable accessibility problems on 95.9% of them, averaging 56.1 errors per page. The most common issues were low contrast text, images with no description, and form fields with no labels. None of those are exotic. They’re the everyday things a site owner controls.

Why does that matter for your business? About 27% of Canadians aged 15 and older, roughly 8 million people, have a disability that limits their daily activities. For women it’s 30%.

If you run a wellness business, the people most likely to need a calm, clear, easy-to-read website are often exactly the people you want to help. A site that quietly makes them work harder tells them this space wasn’t built with them in mind. Most people never mean that. They just didn’t know to check. This is a real cost, even if it never appears on an invoice.

What does it cost to keep editing a DIY website?

Here’s the one that sneaks up on people. Once the site is live, it needs looking after. You update a service, fix a typo, add a testimonial, rewrite a page because it feels heavy or unclear. Each edit is small. Together they become a quiet part-time job. I know this one firsthand. It’s the reason I left Wix.

If you add that to the pressure to stay relevant online with social media, newsletters and blogs, consistently editing your site feels heavy because it is. It’s an added layer to something you don’t want to do during your downtime.

So should you build it yourself?

Sometimes, yes. If you’re brand new, your budget is truly tight, and you have the time and the patience, a simple DIY site can be a fine place to start. I’d rather you launch something clear than wait for something perfect.

But if you’re a few months in and still tinkering, or you’re losing track of your evenings, it’s worth asking a different question. Not “can I do this myself?” but “is this the best use of my time?”

I built a free calculator to help you answer that with real numbers. It starts with a few sensible defaults, like Wix’s own 20 to 40 hours, and you can swap in your own hours, your own rate and your own client value. Nothing you enter is saved or sent anywhere. [CALCULATOR LINK]

If the number surprises you, that’s useful information. If it doesn’t, that’s useful too.

So yes, the plan on the pricing page might be $23 a month. That’s the part you can see. The evenings, the second-guessing and the visitors who quietly click away are the part you can’t, and that’s the real bill.

And if you’d like to hand the whole thing over, I’d love to help. I’ll build a site that’s clear, kind to read and easy to look after, so you can get back to the work you actually opened your business to do. You can book a free 30-minute call here. [BOOKING LINK] 🧡