Website builder vs freelance developer: cost and when to switch

A website builder plan on Wix costs $204 to $468 a year, and a freelance website builder (a person you hire to build the site for you) usually charges $1,000 to $5,000 once for a small business site. Stay on the DIY builder while your site is a simple brochure and your customers come from somewhere else. Switch to a developer when the site is supposed to bring in enquiries or sales and doesn't, or when you need something the builder can't do.

I'm Mohit Goyal, a freelance web developer in Gurugram, India, and I build sites for clients in India, the UK and the US. All prices below are in US dollars, because that's how Wix, Squarespace and most freelance marketplaces publish them. None of them are my prices. They're market figures, and each one links to the page it came from.

What does "freelance website builder" mean: a tool or a person?

It means two different things, and search results mix them up. One meaning is software: a website builder that freelancers use to make their own portfolio site. The other is a person: a freelancer who builds websites for businesses. This post is about the second meaning, and about how hiring that person compares with doing it yourself on the software.

Some quick definitions, so the rest is easy to follow:

• Website builder: an online tool where you pick a template and drag things around to make a site. Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy Website Builder and Hostinger are the common ones. You pay a monthly or yearly plan and the company hosts the site for you.
• DIY website: a site you made yourself on one of those tools.
• Freelance website builder or freelance developer: one self-employed person who plans, builds and launches the site for a fee. Some work inside Wix or Squarespace for you. Others build on WordPress or write the site in code.
• Agency: a company with a team (designer, developer, project manager) that does the same job for a higher fee.

The useful question isn't "which is better". It's "which one fits where my business is right now, and what will it cost me over the next three years".

How much does a website builder cost per year?

Plan on roughly $200 to $600 a year for the plan itself, then add a domain, a business email address and any paid apps. The headline monthly price is only the start.

Here are the current US plan prices for the two best-known builders, Wix and Squarespace. Both show yearly billing, which is the cheaper way to pay.

Wix's own plans page says the displayed prices are for yearly subscriptions paid in full up front, and that prices and currency change by country. So check it from where you are before you budget.

What does a website builder plan leave out?

A builder plan usually leaves out the things that make a site feel like a real business. These are the usual extras:

• Domain name (your address, such as yourbusiness.com). A standard .com is $10 to $20 a year. Builders often give the first year free, then charge. One Wix pricing guide estimates about $15 a year after that.
• Business email (you@yourbusiness.com). On Wix this is sold separately through Google, and one pricing guide lists it at $4.95 per user per month.
• Paid apps for bookings, reviews, pop-ups, forms and so on. On Wix these are usually under $10 a month each, with some reaching $20.
• Payment fees if you sell. Card payments through Wix cost 2.9% plus $0.30 per sale. On Squarespace's Basic plan there's also a 2% transaction fee on physical products on top of card processing, which goes away on Core.
• Monthly billing. If you don't pay for the year up front, the price goes up. Squarespace Core is $39 a month paid monthly against $29 on yearly billing.

A worked example: three years on Wix Core

This is my own sum, using the figures linked above. A small service business on Wix Core, with one email address and one paid app at the top of the usual range:

So a "cheap" DIY website is about $1,600 over three years before you count a single hour of your own time. That's still a fair price for what you get. It just isn't the $29 a month on the pricing page.

Freelance website builder cost: what does hiring a person cost?

A freelancer usually charges $1,000 to $5,000 for a small business website, and more once you add a shop, bookings or custom features. Hourly rates run from about $25 for a junior to $160 for a senior developer.

The published figures don't agree with each other perfectly, which is normal. Here are four sources side by side.

For comparison, one agency says a custom website built by a US agency costs $25,000 to $250,000, with most projects taking 12 to 16 weeks. That's a different product for a different buyer. If you run a clinic, a restaurant or a ten-person firm, a good freelancer is usually the right size.

What moves a freelancer's price up or down?

Five things move the quote more than anything else:

1. Number of unique page layouts. Ten pages that share one layout cost far less than ten pages that each look different.
2. Who writes the words and supplies the photos. If the freelancer has to chase or write content, the price rises. So does the timeline.
3. Design. A site built from a ready design or a good template is cheaper than one designed from a blank page.
4. Features. Online payments, bookings, a members area, more than one language or currency.
5. Where the freelancer lives. goLance lists median rates on its own marketplace of $32.50 an hour in the United States and $15 an hour in India. The work can be the same quality. The cost of living isn't.

What does a freelancer-built site cost after launch?

After launch you pay for hosting and a domain, and optionally for upkeep. Shared hosting for a WordPress site runs $1 to $25 a month. A site written in code on a modern host can sit on a plan like Vercel Pro at $20 a month. If you stay on Wix and pay someone to look after the site, one guide puts ongoing Wix maintenance at $100 to $600+ a month, with the Wix plan billed separately.

Ask every freelancer to put the running costs in the quote. A cheap build with an expensive monthly fee isn't cheap.

Wix vs hiring a web developer: which is cheaper over three years?

Wix is cheaper in cash, every time. Hiring a web developer becomes the cheaper option only when you count your own hours, or when the developer's site brings in customers that the DIY site doesn't.

Here's the plain comparison, using the figures above.

How do I count my own time?

Multiply the hours you'll spend by what an hour of your work earns. Here's a made-up example to show the method. Use your own numbers.

Say you're a physiotherapist who earns $60 for an hour with a patient. You spend 40 hours over a month choosing a template, writing pages, resizing photos and working out why the booking button looks wrong on a phone. That's 40 x $60 = $2,400 of your time. Add the first year's Wix Core plan at $348 and your "cheap" site has cost about $2,750, which is inside the range a freelancer charges for a brochure site.

That sum only works if the hours were hours you could have sold. If you built the site on quiet evenings and enjoyed it, your time cost is close to zero and DIY wins. Be honest about which one you are.

Why is my DIY website not converting?

A DIY website usually fails to bring in customers because of what's on the page, and almost never because of the tool it was built with. The headline is vague, there's no single obvious next step, the phone version is awkward, nothing proves you're any good, or the enquiry form quietly isn't reaching you.

"Converting" means a visitor doing the thing you want: calling, filling in the form, booking, buying. If you've been searching "why my DIY website is not converting", start with a benchmark. Unbounce's 2024 benchmark report studied more than 41,000 landing pages and found a median conversion rate of 6.6%. That figure is for pages built for one purpose, with paid visitors sent to them, so a general small business site will sit lower. If you get a few hundred visitors a month and almost no enquiries, though, something on the page is in the way.

These are the common causes, in the order I'd check them.

1. Nobody can tell what you do in five seconds

Most DIY sites open with a nice photo and a line like "Welcome to our website" or "Quality you can trust". A stranger still doesn't know what you sell, where, or for whom. The same Unbounce study found that pages written at a 5th to 7th grade reading level converted at 11.1%, which was 56% higher than pages written at an 8th or 9th grade level. Simple words win. "Emergency plumber in Leeds. At your door in 60 minutes." beats any slogan.

2. There's no single next step

Builders make it easy to add buttons, so DIY pages end up with six of them: Learn more, Our story, Gallery, Blog, Contact, Follow us. Pick the one action that makes you money and repeat it down the page.

3. It was built on a laptop and never tested on a phone

In Unbounce's data, 83% of visits happened on mobile devices, and desktop still converted about 8% better than mobile. That gap is the cost of phone layouts nobody checked: text over photos, tiny buttons, a form with twelve fields. Open your own site on your phone and try to enquire with one thumb.

4. Nothing proves you're real

Stock photos, no reviews, no prices or price guide, no address, no names. A visitor who found you on Google has three other tabs open. Real photos of your work, a handful of named reviews and a clear "from" price do more than any design trick.

5. The form is broken and you don't know

This one hurts the most. The form looks fine, the visitor sees "Thanks!", and the email goes to spam or to an old address. The fix is to send form entries to a second place as well as email. On the Taxocity tax services site every lead is saved to a Google Sheet, so an enquiry can't vanish because of a spam filter.

6. The wrong people are visiting, or nobody is

If the site gets twenty visits a month, it doesn't have a conversion problem. It has a "nobody can find it" problem: thin pages, no page per service, no Google Business Profile linked, page titles that all say "Home". That's search work, and it's a separate fix.

Is the website builder itself slow?

Usually not, and this is where a lot of agency blog posts get it wrong. Real-visitor data from Chrome, across 225,631 sites in the November 2026 edition of one Core Web Vitals study, shows Wix and Squarespace passing Google's main loading-speed test (called LCP, the time until the biggest thing on the screen appears) more often than WordPress sites do.

• Shopify96%
• Wix94%
• Squarespace89%
• WordPress70%

Those figures come from the same study. They don't mean WordPress is bad. A WordPress site can be very fast when someone who knows what they're doing builds it, and painfully slow when it's a heavy theme with thirty plugins. They do mean that "Wix is slow, so pay me to rebuild it" is a weak sales line. If a developer tells you speed is the reason to leave your builder, ask to see your site's actual numbers first.

What does a developer fix on a DIY site that isn't getting customers?

A developer fixes the gap between "the site exists" and "the site does a job". This is roughly what that looks like:

Notice that the first four can be fixed on Wix or Squarespace without moving anywhere. You can check your own page copy for free with my Landing Page Roaster, which scores clarity, trust and the call to action and suggests a better headline.

When should you switch from a website builder to a freelance developer?

Switch when the builder's limits are costing you more than the move would. One guide lists ten signs and suggests that if three or more apply, it's time to look at a rebuild seriously. I agree with that rule of thumb.

The signs I'd take seriously:

• The site is meant to bring in work, and it doesn't, even after you've fixed the headline, the buttons and the phone layout yourself.
• You're paying for a stack of apps to do things a properly built site does out of the box, and the monthly total keeps climbing.
• Your other tools won't connect. Your booking system, your customer list, your accounts software or your stock system has no reliable link to the builder.
• You need something custom. A members area, a quote calculator, delivery rules by distance, deposits, more than one currency.
• You can't control the search basics. Page addresses, redirects (signposts from old page addresses to new ones) or structured data.
• You've stopped updating it because every change is a fight, or the person who built it has left.
• The site matters more than it used to. You're about to spend on adverts, or you've started hiring, and the site is the first thing people check.

When should you stay on the website builder?

Stay when the site is a simple brochure, your work comes from referrals or marketplaces, and you're happy making small edits yourself. A builder is the right tool for a lot of businesses.

Stay on Wix or Squarespace if:

• You're in your first year and still working out what you sell and to whom. Spend the money on finding customers first.
• The site's only job is to confirm you exist when someone searches your name.
• You have fewer than ten pages and nothing to sell or book online.
• You enjoy doing it and have the hours.

There's also a middle path that doesn't get mentioned enough: keep the builder and hire a freelancer for a one-off tidy-up. A freelancer working inside Wix on a small business site is priced at $800 to $3,000 in one guide, and a redesign of an existing site can cost less than starting again. You keep the easy editing, and someone who does this every day sorts out the layout, the words and the phone version.

What are custom website coding services, and do you need them?

Custom website coding services means a developer writes the site in code instead of assembling it in a drag-and-drop tool. Most small businesses don't need it. A few do, and for them nothing else works as well.

There are really three levels above DIY, and it helps to know which one you're being quoted for.

For most small businesses that have outgrown a builder, WordPress is the sensible next step. You own the hosting account and every file, there's a plugin for most needs, and thousands of developers can work on it if your first one moves on. That's the bulk of what I build: WordPress websites on Bricks, Elementor and Oxygen that the client's own team can edit.

Sometimes no ready plugin fits, and that is still fine on WordPress. For Whitfield Service Station in Dover I built WooCommerce online ordering with a custom delivery radius plugin. It is a Google Maps delivery restriction checker with distance-based fees, and orders print as receipts through PrintNode. Delivery rules by distance are one of the custom needs I listed above as a sign you have outgrown a builder.

Custom code earns its price when the website is the product, or close to it. A software company's marketing site, a site with thousands of pages generated from data, a booking flow with unusual rules. For those I build in Next.js and React.

A warning that applies to both: "custom" isn't a mark of quality. A coded site that only its author can edit is a trap of a different kind. Whatever you buy, you should be able to change a phone number or add a blog post without sending an invoice-worthy email.

What happens to your Wix or Squarespace site when you switch?

The site gets rebuilt. It doesn't get moved. Your words, photos and domain come with you, but the design and layout have to be made again on the new platform.

Wix is clear about this. Its help centre says a Wix site "needs to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers", and that the content you made belongs to you. In practice that means copying the content across and rebuilding the pages.

Squarespace does a little more. It can export your content as a file made for WordPress, which carries over ordinary pages, one blog and its posts, and text and image blocks. Store pages, product blocks, video blocks, style settings and custom CSS don't come across.

The part that protects your business is what happens to your Google rankings. Every old page address needs a redirect to its new address, page titles and descriptions should be carried over, and the move should be checked in Google Search Console afterwards. Done properly, you keep your rankings. Done carelessly, traffic drops and takes months to come back. I've written a step-by-step guide to the most common route, a Wix to WordPress migration without losing SEO.

A sensible switch runs in this order:

1. 1

   List what the site must do

   Write down the one or two actions that make you money, plus every tool the site has to talk to.

2. 2

   Save everything from the old site

   Copy all text, download photos, and record every page address and its title.

3. 3

   Build the new site privately

   The old site stays live and keeps taking enquiries until the new one is tested.

4. 4

   Redirect and launch

   Point every old page address to its new one, then switch the domain over.

5. 5

   Watch for a month

   Check forms, search rankings and enquiries weekly, and fix anything that slipped.

One guide says a typical move off a builder takes a few weeks. Content is nearly always the slow part. If the words and photos are ready on day one, everything moves faster.

Related guide: Wix to Next.js migration: cost, SEO and what moves

What should you ask a freelance website builder before hiring?

Ask who will own the site, what's included in the price, and how you'll make changes afterwards. Those three answers tell you most of what you need.

My full list:

1. Who owns the domain, the hosting account and the files? The answer should be you, in your name, on your card.
2. What exactly is in the quote? Number of pages, rounds of changes, who writes the words, who supplies photos, phone layout, basic search setup, form testing.
3. What will I pay each month after launch, and to whom?
4. Can I edit text, photos and blog posts myself? Ask to be shown, not told.
5. Can I see two live sites you built for a business like mine? Open them on your phone.
6. How will you protect my Google rankings during the move? You want to hear "redirects" and "Search Console".
7. How do I measure whether it's working? There should be a plan to track enquiries, not only visits.
8. What happens if you're unavailable? Is there a handover document, and can another developer pick it up?

Red flags

• The domain or hosting will be registered in the freelancer's name.
• The quote is one line and one number.
• They say your current site is "slow" or "bad for SEO" without showing any data.
• They promise a first-page Google ranking by a date.
• There's no contract, and they want the full fee up front.
• They can't show a live site, only screenshots.

How can I help if you've outgrown your website builder?

I can tell you honestly whether you need me at all, and build the next site if you do. I've shipped more than 100 websites in over four years, mostly WordPress, WooCommerce and Next.js builds for small and mid-sized businesses.

What that looks like in practice:

• A straight answer first. If your Wix or Squarespace site only needs a clearer first screen and a working form, I'll say so. Not every site needs replacing.
• Moves off builders. I rebuilt the Aura Clips agency website from Framer, another hosted builder, onto WordPress with Bricks Builder, with service page templates, a blog and tracking set up.
• Sites built to produce enquiries. Forms that are tested and backed up, tracking so you can see what's working, and pages structured for search. On the Nortek LED store I built, post-launch analytics reported a 20 percent uplift in conversion rate.
• You own everything. Domain, hosting and files sit in your accounts. Your team can edit pages without me.
• One point of contact. If the project needs design, a mobile app or Shopify, I bring in people I trust and you still deal with me.

What I won't do: promise rankings by a date, or tell you a builder is useless. For a lot of businesses it's exactly right.

What should you do next?

Do three things this week. First, open your site on your phone and try to enquire as a stranger would. Second, add up what you pay each year for the plan, domain, email and apps. Third, count how many enquiries the site sent you last month.

If the answer to the third one is "almost none" and the site is supposed to bring in work, send me the link through my contact page. Tell me what the business does and what you want the site to achieve. I'll tell you whether it needs a tidy-up on the builder you already have or a proper rebuild, and what a rebuild would involve.