DIY Website Builder or Hire a Designer? Here's How to Actually Decide

I'm not going to tell you every coach needs a custom website. That's not true, and you'd see through it anyway.

If you're testing a new offer, just starting out, or you genuinely enjoy building it yourself, a template can be a perfectly good starting point. There's no shame in Squarespace while you're still figuring out if the offer even sells.

Where it stops making sense is when the website becomes the thing standing between you and the next stage of growth — when you already have testimonials, already have a working offer, already get referrals, and the site is the weakest part of an otherwise solid business.

A few honest signs it's time to hand it off:

You've rebuilt it three times and it still doesn't feel like "you." That's rarely a template problem — it's usually a messaging problem, and most builder templates aren't designed to fix that. They're designed to look nice, not to make the case for working with you.

You know it's not working but can't pinpoint the fix. If you can feel the site isn't landing but every change you make just shifts the problem somewhere else, that's usually the moment a second set of trained eyes actually pays for itself.

Every hour on the website is an hour not spent coaching, or selling, or filming content. DIY isn't free — it's your time, priced at whatever your hourly rate already is. For a lot of coaches booked out on 1:1s, that math stops working fast.

There's no universal right answer. But if the site's been "good enough for now" for over a year and you're still tweaking it instead of promoting it, it's probably not free anymore — it's just a cost you've stopped noticing.

If any of this sounds like where your site's at right now, I run free 45-minute clarity calls for coaches and practitioners — no pitch, just an honest look at what's working, what isn't, and what I'd fix first. Book yours here.