Should I build it on Wix or hire someone?

The math that actually matters

Wix and Squarespace are not free: about $200 a year, every year, and the first year goes into learning where everything is.

Our page is $299 one time, which in your trade is 1 job of yours: a punch list around the house runs $100 to $500.

Over four years the Wix route is at $800 and still charging; this one is at $299 and charging nothing. But that is the small part, because the cost of doing it yourself is not the subscription.

The expensive part is time, and yours is already spoken for

Ten to thirty hours is normal to get something live and decent the first time. With a punch list around the house at $100 to $500, those hours cost more than the site.

And it does not end there. Every price that moves, every new term and every question you keep getting asked has to go in again by hand.

Build it yourself if any of this is you

• You enjoy tinkering and a Sunday afternoon at a screen does not bother you.
• You are starting out and right now you have more time than money. That is a good reason and there is nothing to argue about.
• You only need somewhere for the Instagram link to land, with no ambition of ranking in Google.
• Three property managers already fill your week. In that case neither one: do not spend.

Have it built if this is you instead

• Your time is already sold. Every hour in the editor is an hour not spent on a punch list around the house.
• You tried once and it stalled halfway. That is the most common outcome and it is not your fault: templates are designed to look good empty.
• You need the list of what you do and what you do not, so nobody wastes a call to be visible, which is what decides the call and what templates put in the wrong place.

What goes wrong almost every time it is done at home

It is that there is not one price or one timeline anywhere on the page, text that talks about the business instead of to the customer, and having to pinch on a phone. Color is almost never the problem.

Three concrete things, fixable in any template. If you are building it yourself, fix those and you are already ahead of most.

The detail that gives away who built it

A page put together in an afternoon from a template gives itself away one way: it repeats a list of twenty things you do, without a single photo of any of them. The template knows nothing about handyman and gives you what it gives everyone.

It is not that Wix cannot do it right. It is that you have to know that needs fixing, and that in your trade what closes the job is the list of what you do and what you do not, so nobody wastes a call, not whatever the template shipped with.