Should you build your own small business website, do your own Google Business Profile, take your own photos, run your own Instagram, and wire up your own bookings? Honest answer: for some of it, yes. For the rest, no.
We'll lose work by telling you this, but the cost of watching Saltaire and Shipley business owners burn 100 hours on the wrong bits is worse than the lost retainer.
The average small business owner who tries to set up their full online presence themselves spends somewhere between 60 and 120 hours on it over three months — typically in evenings — and ends up with something that works for about six months before breaking. The hourly cost of that time is almost always more than the cost of having it built properly.
Things you should absolutely do yourself
- Google Business Profile — the content. Nobody knows your business like you do. Fill in the fields yourself. Write the description yourself. Upload the photos yourself. It's free, it takes an hour, and it's the single highest-ROI thing you can do. Our full guide is here.
- Ask for reviews. You, personally, in person, at the moment someone is happy. A team member can't do it as well as you. Nobody can automate this without it feeling automated. Print a card, keep it on the counter, hand it over with the change.
- Reply to reviews and DMs. Personally. In your voice. Not with templates. Customers can smell a canned response from across the internet.
- Post your own stories. The real-time stuff. Today's bake, the new arrivals, the finished job. Nobody else can do this authentically — and authenticity is the whole point of stories.
- Write the words nobody else can write. The story of why you started. The thing you're proud of. The bit about your grandma's recipe. These don't come from an agency.
Things you almost certainly shouldn't DIY
- Your website. Not because you can't — you can, there are drag-and-drop builders everywhere. Because the website is the one thing customers judge you on in under two seconds, and the gap between “fine” and “this business is legit” is the difference between a £49/month template and a properly built site. Also: SEO, mobile speed, accessibility, and security headers are a full day of work on their own, and builders don't give you most of them.
- Photography. Unless you already have a decent camera and know what you're doing, phone photos taken at 9am in winter will cost you more in lost customers than a shoot would have cost. Pay someone once, reuse the photos for years. Here's how that looks.
- Payments and booking integrations. Anything that touches money needs to be done right. A broken booking link or a payment that fails silently is the kind of thing that costs you £500 by the time you spot it. This is a one-off paid setup, not something to learn on the job.
- Hosting, SSL, backups, security. Boring, invisible, critical. If your site gets hacked or goes down on a Saturday, you'll wish you hadn't saved £15 a month. Managed hosting with monitoring is the one thing you should never self-host.
- Your content calendar. Not the posting — the calendar. Thinking up 12 ideas a month, writing the hooks, finding the angles. This is what burns people out by month three. Have someone else do the planning; you do the execution.
The split that actually works
The businesses we see do well run their online presence as a split: someone else builds and maintains the infrastructure (website, hosting, booking, integrations, content pack), and the owner does the human bits (reviews, replies, stories, relationships). Both are necessary. Neither works without the other.
If you try to do the infrastructure yourself, you'll burn out. If you pay someone to do the human bits, they'll sound like a template and customers will feel it.
Where to start if you're doing none of it
- Spend one hour on your Google Business Profile this week. Just you. It's free.
- Put a system in place for asking for reviews. Today. A card, a QR code, a line you say.
- Get the website and the photos done properly in one go, once. Starts at £349.
- Decide whether you're going to post consistently. If yes, get a content pack so you don't quit in month three. If no, don't start — focus on reviews and Google instead.
Closing
The honest version: DIY where you have the unfair advantage (you, your voice, your customers, your story). Pay someone where they have it (design, speed, SEO, integrations, consistency). That's the whole thing.
If you want the full picture of what a local business actually needs online, we wrote the full list here, and what it actually costs here. No up-sell.