Who to build your website with: agency, freelancer or DIY

In short: DIY, freelance and agency aren’t three versions of the same thing at three different prices. They’re three answers to three different problems. If the website is a business card, a builder can be enough. If it has to bring in customers, a lot of skills come into play, and choosing a supplier means looking at ownership, content and maintenance, not just the figure at the bottom of the quote. The argument of this piece: before asking “how much does a website cost”, it’s worth asking how much the website that doesn’t work is costing you, every month.

AutoRoyal Company is a long-established car dealership in Rome, with six locations and a line-up of premium automotive brands. When they got in touch, they already had a website: built with a page builder, online for years, formally complete. And yet the loading times were excessive, the navigation unclear and the contact forms almost invisible. The site existed, but it wasn’t working.

It’s the most common story we hear at a first meeting: the company has already invested in a website, made in-house or handed to the fastest supplier, and a few years on it discovers that the saving had a hidden cost. How high that cost was, in AutoRoyal’s case, we’ll get to later with the numbers. First it’s worth bringing some order to the alternatives, because “who to turn to for building a website” is a question that deserves an honest answer even from someone who, like us, is biased by definition.

The three roads to having a website (and what they really buy)

The first road is DIY with a website builder: Wix, Squarespace, a ready-made WordPress theme. It costs little, it gets going fast and for certain projects it’s a sensible choice. We say it without irony: if you need to validate an idea, publish a personal portfolio or give a web address to a business that has just opened, a builder does its job and does it straight away.

The second is the freelancer. A good professional brings real expertise, a direct relationship and lower costs than a studio. For projects with a clear scope, one dominant skill set and a client who already knows what they want, it’s often the best choice. We’re happy to write it: some of the most carefully made work we’ve seen online carries a single person’s signature.

The third is the agency, or the studio, as we prefer to call ourselves. Here you’re not just buying a website: you’re buying a process and a set of skills that work together, from strategy to design, from development to content, from SEO to accessibility. It costs more and it takes more time. That’s exactly why it isn’t always the right answer: the point is understanding when it is.

What changes when the website stops being a brochure

As long as the website is an institutional presence, the three roads resemble each other more than our industry likes to admit. The differences emerge when the site becomes a commercial asset, that is, when it has to get found, persuade, and turn visits into contacts. At that point three factors come into play that you rarely see in a quote.

The skills involved

A website that generates contacts holds together information architecture, user experience, copywriting, development, technical SEO, accessibility and integration with the company’s systems. For AutoRoyal we mapped search intent with keyword research and proto-personas, designed pages able to intercept specific queries like “Toyota service Rome”, and connected the forms to the client’s automotive CRM using the ADF format, the industry standard for lead tracking. These are different crafts, with different tools and different timelines, and they rarely all sit in the hands of one person.

Ownership: domain, hosting, access

We’ve had clients come to us with the domain and hosting registered to the previous supplier. Knowing the procedures, you recover everything you need in order to work, we’ve done it many times, but it’s weeks of red tape that a single line in a contract would have avoided. Who owns what is a question to ask before signing, not after the breakup.

Content, the silent hostage

Page builders have a side effect that’s rarely discussed: the content stays trapped in the tool’s shortcodes. When the relationship with the supplier ends, exporting it cleanly is complicated. In our migrations we’ve used different approaches depending on the case: import and export plugins, manual re-entry on staging sites, tools built ad hoc to extract the content. Often, though, the technical migration is only half the work, because the project involves rewriting the copy and the navigation tree, and therefore also managing the redirects so as not to throw away the ranking built up over the years.

The agency isn’t always the right answer (and DIY is never free)

Here’s the part an agency usually doesn’t write. If your website has to present a CV, a personal project or a business in its testing phase, you don’t need a studio: you need a builder and an afternoon of patience. If you have a defined scope and a good freelancer you trust, hold on to them. Paying for a multi-handed process to solve a problem that doesn’t call for one is a waste, and waste doesn’t build trust in any industry, least of all ours.

The picture flips when the website is a commercial channel. AutoRoyal’s old site, the one built with the page builder, formally worked: it was online, it was complete, it had cost little. When we started, in September 2024, it generated around 180 leads a month. By January 2026, with the new site and the SEO strategy at full speed, monthly leads reached 413, growth of more than 120%. In between: +32% in technical performance, +50% in SEO score, 94 accessibility issues fixed. The difference between those two numbers, repeated every month, is the real cost of the “cheap” site. It appeared on no quote, but the company was paying it.

That’s why the question “how much does a website cost” is incomplete. The right one is: how much is the website that doesn’t work costing me?

How we work when a project comes into the studio

Every project starts from a path of strategic co-design: workshops with the client to define goals, audiences and priorities before drawing a single page. For AutoRoyal this phase produced the industry benchmark, the keyword research and the information architecture on which everything else was built. It’s also the moment when we decide what to keep from the existing site and what to rewrite from scratch.

Development happens on Flying, the WordPress framework we maintain in-house. No page builders: the backend is a modular system the client’s team uses on its own without writing code, and the markup is looked after on a semantic level. It’s a choice that pays off twice, because a solid semantic foundation serves SEO and accessibility in equal measure: the 94 issues fixed on the AutoRoyal site come from the same work that grew the SEO score by 50%. Performance follows the same logic: hosting on Kinsta and an attention to page weight that starts from the design, not from the caching plugin installed at the end.

The AutoRoyal project, from co-design to going live, took three months.

A real limitation: three months aren’t three days

That number deserves honesty. A website builder promises the site in a weekend and keeps the promise; a fast freelancer delivers in a few weeks. We don’t. Three months is the time for analysis, design, development, content and testing done by different people who hand the work over to one another, and during those three months the client works with us: workshops, reviews, materials to provide, decisions to make. A structured process has costs and timelines that one person doesn’t, and for many projects that process is simply oversized. If speed is the main constraint of your project, it’s right to know that before you ask us for a quote.

The red flags to look for in a quote

When a client shows us a quote from another supplier, the first thing we look at isn’t the price: it’s how maintenance is described. Often it’s dealt with superficially, or it doesn’t appear at all. It’s the most reliable signal we know, because it tells you what will happen to the site after delivery: skipped updates, abandoned plugins, security left to chance. Many of the sites we rebuild from scratch were born exactly there. On what a properly done maintenance covers, we’ve written a dedicated article.

The second check concerns the registrations: domain and hosting must be in your name, always, even when the supplier manages them. The third concerns access, and here an honest clarification is needed. We too give clients editor credentials and reserve administrator access for those who genuinely need it, because we handle the maintenance and the technical work, and a full access used badly can compromise a site. The red flag isn’t that the supplier keeps admin access to themselves: it’s that the arrangement isn’t declared, justified and reversible. If you ask “what happens if one day we part ways?” and the answer is vague, you already have your answer.

The last question is about content: ask which tools the site will be built with and how complicated it will be, one day, to take copy and images away. As we saw with page builders, certain tools make the exit far more expensive than the entrance.

Where to start

Define the problem before the budget. “I need a website” is not a goal; “I need to generate quote requests from my area” is. On how the budget itself breaks down, we’ve opened up a quote line by line in our piece on how much a WordPress website costs.

Write a brief, even just one page: what the company does, who it speaks to, what needs to happen on the site, which systems it has to integrate with.

Ask every supplier who will be the registrant of domain and hosting, who will have which access and what happens when the relationship ends.

Read how maintenance is described in the quote. A vague line today becomes a concrete problem in two years.

Check past projects: not the mockups in the portfolio, but live sites with measurable results and recognisable clients.

If you’re making this choice, let’s talk

We don’t know whether your project needs a studio like ours: sometimes the honest answer is no, and in that case we tell you. If you want to get a sense of how we think, you can look at how we design websites and the projects we’ve worked on. Fifteen years of inherited sites have taught us to ask the right questions, even when the answer doesn’t bring us a client.