Should you build the site yourself or hire someone?

"It depends" is a correct but useless answer. Let us break it into hours and money, because that is what the decision usually comes down to.

The real cost of doing it yourself

• Domain: €10-25 per year
• Hosting: from €4.20 per month
• Theme (optional, premium): €50-90 one-off
• Your time: 25-60 hours for a first site, if you have never done this

That last line is the one people always forget. If your hour is worth €25, forty hours is €1,000 — which is roughly what a decent freelance site costs. The difference is that in the first case you pay with time you could have spent doing your actual job.

The real cost of an agency or freelancer

• Freelancer, simple brochure site: €400-1,200
• Small agency, several pages with basic SEO: €1,200-3,500
• Online shop with integrations: €3,000 and up
• Maintenance: €30-150 per month if you contract it

Your hours come on top of that: gathering material, writing copy, reviewing drafts. Budget 10-15 hours even when paying someone — nobody can invent your prices, references and photographs for you.

When doing it yourself makes sense

• The site is a 5-8 page brochure with no complex logic.
• You have the time and appetite to learn the basics — WordPress takes about a week to get comfortable with.
• Content changes often and you do not want to call someone for every edit.
• Budget is genuinely tight and the site currently earns little or nothing.

When paying is the smarter call

• The site is a direct revenue source — shop, bookings, lead generation.
• You need integrations: payments, inventory, CRM, shipping.
• You do not have 40 spare hours in the next two months. This is the most common real reason.
• You have multiple languages, multiple locations, or specific legal requirements.

The middle path that often wins

A hybrid: pay someone to set up the structure, design and technical foundation, then take over content and ongoing edits yourself. It costs 30-50% less than a full project and leaves you independent. The condition is insisting that everything sits in the standard WordPress editor, not a proprietary builder you cannot operate.

What stays your responsibility either way

Register the domain and hosting in your own name and your own email, not the agency''s. This is the most common problem we see: a company ends the relationship and discovers it has no access to its own domain. Ask for credentials from day one. If you are going it alone, our plans include SSL, daily backups and a CDN, so the technical base is covered without further decisions.

A two-sentence test

If you would happily build the site in the evenings after work, build it yourself. If you would put it off for three months, pay someone. A site that does not exist earns nothing, no matter how cheap it would have been.