DIY Squarespace vs Hiring a Squarespace Designer: Which Is Better?
Squarespace was built so that people could do this themselves. They can. Where self built sites fall down is almost never how they look. It is structure, page count and whether a stranger knows what to do next.
Yes, You Can Do This Yourself
That is what the platform is for. Squarespace exists so that somebody with no design training can produce a professional looking website without hiring anybody, it does that job well, so thousands of businesses trade perfectly successfully on sites their owners built.
An agency page burying this near the bottom would deserve to lose you in the first paragraph.
It is almost never the appearance. Self built Squarespace sites usually look fine. The platform is unusually good at preventing the visual disasters that other tools allow, which is the whole point of its design.
What goes wrong sits underneath it, in decisions about structure, emphasis and what a visitor is supposed to do. That is block three, worth reading even if you never hire anybody.
One thing this guide deliberately does not do is teach you to build a site. Every block names what is involved without explaining how to do it.
What An Owner Can Genuinely Achieve
A tidy, coherent, professional looking site with the right pages on it. Said without qualification, because it is true and because most guidance on this subject understates it.
The platform does the hard visual work. Type at sensible sizes. Consistent spacing. Colours applied site wide rather than page by page. A layout that behaves on a phone. On other tools each is something you can get wrong. Here they are largely handled.
What an owner can put together. A home page, pages describing the offer, something about the business, proof of the work and a way to make contact. A form that arrives in an inbox.
None of it requires design training. It requires patience, some evenings and a willingness to leave things alone once they are adequate.
What that produces is better than the industry admits. A self built Squarespace site is generally not something everybody can identify as amateur. It is a competent website. The gap between it and a designed one is real and not visible on the surface, which is why the next block matters and why it is so easy to conclude there is no gap.
Where Self Built Sites Actually Fall Down
Six failures, recurring with remarkable consistency across businesses with nothing else in common.
Too many pages. Every subject that came up got a page, so attention is spread across fifteen pages when four would carry it.
No hierarchy. Nothing on the page is more important than anything else, so a visitor has to work out what matters rather than being shown.
The offer is buried. What the business does, plus for whom, appears mid paragraph rather than at the top in plain terms.
No obvious next step. An interested visitor reaches the end of a page and there is nothing to do, so they leave and intend to come back.
Content written from the inside out. Organised around how the business thinks of itself rather than around what a customer arrived wanting to know.
Everything given equal weight in the navigation. The page that wins work and the page nobody reads sit side by side, identically.
Now the important part. These are close to impossible to see in your own site. The reason is not inexperience.
You cannot arrive at your own website as a stranger. You know what you do, so nothing reads as unclear. You know where everything is, so the navigation works. Every page felt necessary when you made it. And you read your own words as meaning what you intended rather than what they say. That does not fade with practice, because it comes from being inside the business.
Is It Worth Paying Somebody
We are not going to tell you a designer produces a particular increase in enquiries. Nobody can know that about your business. Anybody quoting a figure has taken it from somewhere that was not your market.
What can be offered is a way to work the answer out for yourself, using numbers you already have.
Start with what a client is worth. Your average job value, then how many times a typical client returns or refers somebody. That total is what one new client is actually worth rather than what one sale is.
Then how many enquiries become clients. Most owners know this roughly. One in three, one in five, whatever yours is.
Now divide the fee by the value of one new client. That tells you how many additional clients the work has to produce to have paid for itself. Multiply by your enquiry conversion and you have the number of extra enquiries required.
Then set it against a period. A website is not a one month asset. Judge it across two or three years, which is how long it works.
For a business where one client is worth a few hundred pounds, the number that comes out is usually small enough to be uninteresting. For a business where one client is worth several thousand, it is frequently under one. That arithmetic, rather than any claim we could make, is what decides whether this is worth paying for. It is why the answer differs so much between two businesses of identical size.
The Real Cost Of Doing It Yourself
Three costs. Two are obvious once stated. The third is the largest and appears on no invoice.
Your own time, valued properly. Not at nothing, which is how it usually gets counted. If your attention is what the business runs on, evenings adjusting spacing are evenings not spent selling or delivering. For some owners that makes building it yourself the most expensive option.
The learning curve you will barely reuse. You learn the platform intensively for a few weeks to touch it lightly for years. The parts learned hardest are setup parts you never repeat.
The enquiries not captured while you learn. The one nobody counts. A site going live in month five could have gone live in month two. Whatever those three months would have produced never happened. It appears nowhere, because it was never earned.
Now the fair reading of the same three, since both are true and only one applies to you.
For an owner with genuine spare capacity, no urgency and an interest in the work, all three costs are close to nothing. The time was available. The learning is enjoyable rather than a burden. And the site was not going to launch sooner regardless, because nothing was waiting on it. Which of those two readings describes your situation has nothing to do with how technical you are.
When Doing It Yourself Makes Sense
Four situations. In each one building it yourself is the right decision rather than the affordable one.
A simple business with a simple offer. One service, perhaps a small set of related ones, explicable in a sentence. There is little for structure work to improve when the structure is obvious.
Few pages. Where the site is five or six pages, most failures in block three have no room to develop.
An owner with time and reasonable taste. Both, since the second matters as much as the first. Somebody who enjoys the work keeps going past the point where difficult decisions appear. Somebody resenting every evening stops exactly there.
Testing whether an idea works. Finding out whether anybody wants the thing before investing properly is the correct order. Paying for a considered site to answer a question you have not asked is the wrong one.
In all four the money is better spent elsewhere. It is worth naming where. Photography, which this platform is built around and unforgiving without. Writing that answers what customers actually ask. And being findable at all, since a beautifully designed site nobody reaches produces exactly as much as a plain one nobody reaches.
When It Does Not
Four situations, turning on consequence rather than capability.
The site is the main way people find and contact you. Where enquiries arrive through the website rather than through referral or repeat trade, the failures in block three stop being cosmetic. Each one is costing something continuously, quietly, without ever announcing itself.
The structure is genuinely complicated. Several distinct services, distinct audiences, locations, perhaps an offer needing explanation before it can be bought. This is where structure work earns its fee, since the decisions are no longer obvious.
You have an existing site with traffic worth protecting. The risk changes character here. It is no longer that the new site underperforms. It is that you lose visibility you already had, which is slow to rebuild and easy to damage without noticing.
You have no time. Said plainly, because it is the most common of the four. A site half built over eleven months is worse than either alternative. It occupies the position a finished site would hold while doing none of its work.
One test covers all four. If the website not working properly would cost the business real money, do not build it in the evenings. Not because you could not. Because it will be finished at whatever point your patience runs out.
The Middle Ground
The question gets framed as two options when most businesses belong between them. A designer establishes the structure and the styling, then the owner runs the site from that point onwards.
Why it suits this platform particularly. On Squarespace the work divides cleanly. Deciding what pages exist, what each is for, how a visitor moves through them and how the whole thing is styled is a defined piece of work with an end. Adding a page afterwards, updating text, swapping an image and posting news is simple once the rules are set.
On a platform assembled from parts that division is harder, since the ongoing work includes maintenance. Here it does not.
What it costs. Considerably less than a full arrangement, because the continuing work stays with you. Considerably less than rebuilding in two years, which is what the block six situations produce when they were actually block seven situations.
Two narrower versions. Paid advice at the structure stage alone, where somebody spends a few hours on the page plan and you build the rest. And a designed site with content written in house, splitting the work along the line of who knows what.
We say this openly because pretending it does not exist would be a poor way to earn anybody's confidence. It is a real arrangement and we are happy to work that way. For a great many small businesses it is the correct answer.
If You Start Alone And Want Help Later
Outgrowing a self built site is success rather than a mistake being corrected. Knowing in advance which parts of the effort survive makes the earlier decision a better one.
What carries over. Your written content, if it says something. Your photographs, if they are consistent. Your domain and your account. Any search visibility the site has earned, which is genuinely valuable and easy to overlook. And everything you have learned about which questions customers ask before buying, which exists only in your head until somebody writes it down.
What gets redone. The page structure, if it grew rather than being planned. The styling, since it is quicker to set properly than to unpick. And the arrangement of sections on each page.
Which produces the most useful advice on this page. It costs nothing to act on.
Invest in what survives. Do adequately what will not. Photography, written content and the accumulating knowledge of what customers ask are worth real effort from the first day, because every future version of the site inherits them. Section arrangement and styling are worth doing to a reasonable standard rather than a perfect one, since a later rebuild replaces them regardless of how many evenings went in.
Owners routinely do the reverse, spending weeks adjusting spacing while the words on the services page remain the first thing they typed.
Structure only,
if that is all you need.
We are happy to be engaged for the page plan, the navigation and the styling, then leave you to run it. It is the best value arrangement on this page and almost nobody asks for it.
What a Squarespace project covers:
Ongoing management afterwards sits inside our fixed monthly fee. Project work is quoted per site.
Fourteen guides.
One platform.
This page covers whether to hire anybody. The rest of the series covers the role, cost, timescales, templates, what good design looks like, designing for enquiries and the platform comparisons.
