Should a New Hampshire Small Business Use Wix, Squarespace, or Hire a Web Designer?

Wix and Squarespace are good. They've gotten better every year. You can build a clean, decent-looking site on either one without writing a line of code, and it'll have most of the technical pieces a website is supposed to have.

So if anyone tells you "you can't do SEO on Wix" or "DIY sites always look bad," they're behind the times or they're selling you something.

The tools are easy to get. Knowing what to do with them is the job — and that's the part nobody hands you.

That's the whole thing in one sentence. The rest of this article is just showing you where that gap actually lives, so you can decide whether it matters for your business.

Be honest with yourself about where you are. DIY is the right move when:

• You're just getting started and budget is near zero. A simple site you built yourself beats no site at all, by a mile. Get something up.
• You need something temporary. You're testing an idea, or you just need a placeholder while you figure things out.
• The website isn't really how you get customers. If most of your work comes from referrals, repeat clients, or a job site where people already know you, the website is a business card. A business card you make yourself is fine.
• You actually have the time and the interest. Building and maintaining a site is real work. If you genuinely enjoy that kind of thing and have the hours, you can learn it.

If that's you, go build a Wix site and don't feel bad about it. Seriously. Come back and hire someone when the business outgrows it.

The problems with a DIY site usually aren't the ones people warn you about. The site looks fine in the editor. It's the stuff you can't see — the stuff you don't know to look for — that costs you customers. Here's what that actually looks like.

The fields are there. Knowing what goes in them is the job.

Every website has a few invisible pieces of text that tell Google what each page is. The most important one is the page title — that blue clickable headline you see in Google's search results.

Wix and Squarespace both let you set it. The problem is they don't tell you what to put there, and they don't warn you that leaving it wrong is costing you.

A DIY site usually ends up with a page title like this:

Here's what it should say:

The second one puts the service and the city right up front — the exact thing someone types into Google when they need you. A contractor would never write that, because nobody told them Google reads that line, that your town belongs in it, or that there's a length limit before it gets cut off.

Same story with the description — the sentence under the headline in search results. Leave it blank and Google grabs a random line off your page, usually something like "Welcome to our website." Write it on purpose and it becomes a tiny ad:

And then there's the part most DIYers never even find: every page needs its own title and description, mapped to what that page is about. A five-page site where every page says "Home | My Business" is competing against itself and ranking for nothing.

None of this is hard to do. It's just hard to know about. (If you want the full breakdown of what your website costs and what you actually get at each level, we wrote about that here.)

Your photos are probably what's making your site slow

Images are almost always the heaviest thing on a page, and a slow page loses calls. We've written before about how a slow website might be costing you calls — and image handling is the number one reason sites end up slow.

Here's the usual story. You take a photo on your phone — it's 4,000 pixels wide and several megabytes. You upload it straight to your site. Now every visitor's phone has to download that giant file before the page shows up, and on a so-so cell connection that's six seconds of staring at a blank screen. Most people don't wait.

The platform let you upload it. It didn't warn you. The builders do some automatic shrinking now, but they can't fix a fundamentally oversized photo well, and the parts that need a human — picking the right image, cropping it well, writing the alt text — don't happen on their own.

Looking good and getting calls aren't the same thing

The DIY platforms make genuinely nice-looking sites — especially Squarespace. So we're not going to tell you DIY looks bad. It doesn't.

But pretty and effective are two different things. A good-looking template with the phone number buried, no clear next step at the top of the page, and no reviews or licensing shown will look great and still not ring the phone. Looking trustworthy to a customer and looking nice are different jobs.

And there's a quieter problem: a template makes you look like everyone else. You pick a popular one, so does every competitor down the road, and now three businesses in the Seacoast have the same site. Polished, sure. Forgettable, also yes.

Here's where hiring earns its keep, and it's not the technical stuff above — that you could learn if you had to. It's this: there's no single right way to build a service website. What works for an emergency plumber actively hurts a remodeler. The right layout depends entirely on what's going through your customer's head the moment they land on your site, and that changes a lot from one trade to the next.

Most templates won't help you decide that. And when you build your own site, you build the one you like — not the one your customer needs. Here's what that means in practice.

If you're an urgent trade — plumber, HVAC, garage door, water damage — your customer has a problem right now and they're on their phone. The phone number needs to be big and at the top, with tap-to-call on mobile. A contact form matters less here — nobody wants to fill out a form while their basement is flooding. Words like "same-day" and "24/7" do real work. The whole job of the site is to remove every step between "panic" and "your phone ringing."

If you're a visual service business — reglazing, remodeling, painting, landscaping, florals, event work — it's the opposite. Your customer is imagining a result and comparing options. Before-and-after photos are your best salesman, because they're buying a transformation and you need to show it. Reviews matter more here, because it's a bigger, scarier spend and they're vetting you. And a quote form actually works, because they're not in a hurry — they'll trade their info for a real estimate.

If you're a recurring, relationship trade — lawn care, cleaning, pest control — what sells is clarity and dependability. What's included, what it costs, how easy you are to schedule, and reviews that say you show up every single week without being chased.

If you're a bigger-ticket or research-heavy business, people decide slower, usually at a desktop, comparing a few options. Proof and process win here — case studies over a wall of photos, and a clear explanation of what working with you is actually like.

A plumber who thinks a big photo gallery looks impressive buries his phone number behind it and loses the emergency call to the guy whose number is right at the top. A remodeler who copies that "CALL NOW" plumber layout never builds the trust a $40,000 kitchen needs. Both made a reasonable-looking choice. Both got it wrong, because they matched the wrong intent — and the platform let them.

That judgment — knowing which layout fits how your customers actually decide — is the thing you're really paying for when you hire. A template won't make that call for you. It comes from having built across a lot of trades and watched what makes the phone ring.

Build it yourself if the website isn't really how you get customers, the budget's near zero, you're testing something, or you've got the time and the itch to learn it. No shame in it. A DIY site beats no site.

Hire someone if customers judge whether to trust you by your website, you want the phone to ring from people searching in your town, speed and mobile actually matter to your business, and you'd rather spend your hours on the work you're good at than fighting templates, plugins, SEO settings, hosting, and forms.

That last part is really the whole decision. You could learn all of this. The honest question is whether twenty-some hours figuring out meta titles, image sizing, conversion layout, and local SEO is a better use of your time than paying someone who already knows it — the same way you probably don't do your own taxes or wire your own panel.

If you're somewhere in the middle and not sure, that's a normal place to be. We're happy to take a look at what you've got and tell you straight whether it's worth changing. And if it makes sense, we can put together a simple demo so you can see what a better version could look like — before you decide anything. No pressure, no sales pitch.

Dog Byte Web Design builds fast, clean websites for contractors and local service businesses across the Seacoast, southern New Hampshire, southern Maine, and northern Massachusetts. Clear scope. Clear price. No pressure.