How to make a business website: website builder, freelancer, or agency

There are three ways to get a business website: build it yourself on a website builder, hire a freelancer, or hire an agency. A builder is the fastest and cheapest way to start. A freelancer costs less than an agency, but everything hinges on one person. An agency costs more, but it’s responsible for the whole journey, from site structure to your first leads. The right way to make your website depends on the job it needs to do for your business.

Below are honest pros and cons of each path, a look at Google Business Profile, how to move off a website builder, and what you can do on your own to get started.

Where to get a website made: three paths

Here are the three paths side by side. There’s no single right path for everyone: it comes down to your goals and budget.

Factor	Website builder	Freelancer	Agency
Who builds it	You	One person	The agency runs the whole cycle
Upfront cost	Lowest, then a subscription	Medium	Highest
Time to launch	Fastest	Depends on the person	Longer: review, concept, design, development
Design	Template blocks	Depends on the person	Built for your business
SEO and marketing	Limited by the platform	Depends on the person	Planned from the start
Who’s accountable	You	The freelancer, as long as they’re reachable	The agency, under contract

Website builders: making a website yourself

Wix, Squarespace, and similar builders work like a set of ready-made blocks. You pick a header, a services section, a contact form, then swap in your own text and photos. You don’t need a developer, and you can put together a simple site or landing page over a weekend.

Pros:

• Fast: you can show a first version within a couple of days.
• Little money upfront: you pay for a subscription, not for development.
• You edit everything yourself, without a contractor.

Cons:

• Templates: the same blocks are used on countless other sites, and yours is easy to mistake for the next one.
• SEO limits: part of the code and markup stays under the platform’s control, so you can’t set up everything SEO needs.
• Speed: builders load a lot of code just in case, and these sites often open slowly on mobile data.
• The subscription: the site lives as long as you keep paying, and you often can’t move it to your own hosting as is.
• A ceiling on features: a custom 3D scene, a calculator for your specific service, or a CRM integration is hard or impossible to build.

A builder is a good way to test an idea, launch a page for a promotion, or start selling before you have a development budget. It’s a perfectly fine first step, as long as you remember that you’ll outgrow it eventually.

Freelancers: cheaper than an agency, but it all hinges on one person

Pros:

• Cheaper than an agency.
• You can find a strong specialist with a good portfolio.
• You talk to them directly, with no account managers in between.

Cons:

• One person is rarely equally strong at design, development, copywriting, and marketing.
• They can disappear: they get sick, take on a bigger project, stop answering.
• Skill levels vary wildly, and it’s hard to check in advance.
• Support after launch often isn’t part of the deal.

How to reduce the risk: a contract with milestones and payment by milestone, the domain and hosting in your name, access to the code and admin panel in your hands, and Google Analytics and Search Console under your own account. Open portfolio projects as live links, and do it on your phone, instead of looking at screenshots in a slide deck.

Agencies: more expensive, but accountable for results

Pros:

• The whole journey in one place: getting to know your business, a structure based on search demand, design, development, copy, analytics, launch, and marketing.
• A contract and a clear process: you know what you’ll get and when.
• The site is built for SEO and ads from the start, not reworked later.

Cons:

• More expensive than a builder or a freelancer.
• Slower: there’s a discovery stage before design, and revisions take time.
• At a big agency, there’s often an account manager between you and the people doing the work, and details get lost along the way.

We show you a homepage concept before any contract is signed, for free. You see what your site will look like before you pay.

Whoever you choose, ask four questions before you sign. Who exactly will build the site, and who will you be talking to? What’s included in the price: copy, photos, analytics setup, moving the old site? Who will own the domain, the hosting, and the logins? What happens after launch if something breaks? Specific answers tell you as much about a contractor as their portfolio does.

Google Business Profile or your own website

When people ask whether Google can make them a website, they usually mean one of two things.

A free Google Business Profile. Google used to build a simple free website from your profile, but it shut that feature down in 2024. The profile itself is still free: it shows your services, prices, photos, contact details, and reviews in Google Search and Maps. But the layout is the same for everyone, there’s little room to explain why customers should pick you, and there are no separate pages for different services and searches. You can’t add your own design, a calculator, or 3D.

The profile is a solid place to start, and you need one no matter what: it’s how people find you on Google Maps. Your own website doesn’t replace it; it complements it. We explain how to grow your profile on our Google Business Profile page.

Your own website that shows up in Google Search. To get there, you add the site to Google Search Console, verify ownership, and make sure the right pages get indexed. Google Analytics 4 goes in on day one, so you can see where visitors come from and what they do on the site.

When it’s time to leave your website builder

Signs your site has outgrown the builder:

• you need to rank for lots of searches, and each service needs its own well-built page;
• the site loads slowly on phones, and phones are exactly where your customers come from;
• the site looks like your competitors’ sites, built from the same blocks;
• you need something the builder can’t do: a 3D scene, a calculator, a customer account, a CRM integration;
• a year of the subscription plus paid add-ons now costs as much as proper development.

Moving off Wix or Squarespace: what to keep

A common question is how to move a site from Wix or Squarespace to your own hosting. Moving it exactly as is isn’t always possible, and there’s no need to: a move is a chance to make the site faster and easier to use. The main thing is not to lose what already brings in search traffic and leads.

• Page URLs. The safest option is to keep the old ones. If a URL changes, set up a permanent 301 redirect from the old address to the new one. Otherwise Google loses the page along with its rankings.
• The text that brings people in. Search Console shows which pages get clicks from search. Their text and headings move over without unnecessary edits.
• Title and description. They move together with the text.
• Analytics. Keep the same Google Analytics property so your history carries over, along with all your conversions. Your Search Console access stays in place, too.
• Forms. Inquiries should go wherever they went before: email, CRM, messenger. After the move, every form gets checked with a test submission.
• Domain. It should be registered in your name, not the contractor’s.

For the first few weeks after the move, keep an eye on Search Console for errors and pages that dropped out of search.

What you can do on your own to get started

Whichever path you choose, nobody can do this part for you:

1. A goal. The one action a visitor should take: call, send an inquiry, book, buy. Everything on the site works toward that action.
2. A structure. A list of pages: home, a page for each service, pricing, past work, contact. Use Google Keyword Planner to see what customers call your services. We cover how in our article on keyword research.
3. Copy. Write the way you’d explain things to a customer on the phone: what you do, what it costs, how long it takes, why they can trust you, how to order.
4. Photos. Only real ones: your work, your production, your team, your space. Stock photos of people in suits don’t convince anyone.
5. Website design examples. Save three to five sites you like and write down what exactly you like about them: the colors, the presentation, the way prices are shown. Our projects are in the Work section.

What every business website needs

The path can be anything, but the must-haves are the same:

• A clear first screen. Who you are, what you offer, and where to click. People should get it in a couple of seconds.
• Prices. At least a “starting at” figure. A page with no prices scares people off.
• Past work. Photos and examples, with an explanation of what was done.
• Contact details on every page. Phone, messenger, form. An inquiry should be one step away.
• Business details and address. Both people and Google need them: they show there’s a real company behind the site.
• A privacy policy and consent to data processing. If your site has a form, privacy law in many countries requires them.
• Google Analytics with conversions. Without it, you won’t know where your inquiries come from or which pages are working.

What a website costs with us

A landing page with us starts at $490, a corporate website at $590, and an online store at $990. We give you an exact price after reviewing the project: it depends on the number of pages, the complexity of the 3D scene, and any extra features. We write the copy ourselves, and it’s included in the price. We show you a homepage concept before any contract, for free. And the site itself is built for SEO from day one: keyword research, page structure, speed, Google Analytics with conversions.