Build your own website or hire a pro? What to do yourself and what to delegate

If you run a business, your best bet is to split the work: do the parts only you can do and hire someone for the rest. Your part is deciding what you want the website for, explaining what makes you different, gathering the raw material for the text and photos, and making sure the domain (your address on the internet, like yourbusiness.com) is in your name or will be transferred to you when you ask. The design, the coding, the legal side and the maintenance are worth hiring out. Building your website yourself from start to finish only pays off in a few cases: a personal project, an idea you want to test or a budget of zero.

Anyone can put a website together today with template builders, drag-and-drop tools or artificial intelligence. The question worth asking is whether it pays off, because every hour you spend wrestling with the tool is an hour you don't spend serving customers, selling or resting. In this guide we go through the seven steps to creating your business website, who should do each one and what building it all yourself costs you in hours.

When it makes sense to build your website yourself

Building it yourself makes sense in these cases:

• It's a personal project or a hobby, and there are no customers involved.
• You want to test an idea before investing money, and you accept the website will be temporary.
• Your budget is zero and the alternative is having no website.
• You have time to spare and you enjoy technology.

If one of those is you, go ahead. If you have a business that makes money, or you want it to, keep reading, because the maths changes quite a bit. And if you're still unsure whether you need a website because you already have social media, read when you need a website even if you have Instagram.

What to do yourself and what to delegate: the 7 steps to creating your business website

Whoever builds it, every website goes through these steps. What changes is who does each one.

1. Deciding what the website is for: you do this

You might want people to call you, book with you, see your menu or trust you before they walk in. A website without a clear goal ends up as decoration. Only you can decide this, and it's the most important part of the whole process, because it determines which button goes at the top, what gets said first and what gets left out.

2. Knowing what makes you different: you do this

There's a reason a customer should choose you and not the business down the street: your years of experience, the way you treat people or that service only you offer in your area. Whoever builds your website can help you organise it and tell it better, but only you have the raw material.

3. The text: you provide the substance and the writing can be delegated

Nobody knows your business like you do, but writing for the web is a craft: you have to be clear and brief, think about the words people use to search for you on Google and make sure a customer in a hurry understands what you do at a glance. Ideally, you tell the story and someone with the craft writes it. What's best avoided is copying a competitor's text or leaving the Latin placeholder text that comes with templates (the famous “Lorem ipsum”) on the live website.

4. The photos: yours or a photographer's, better than stock photos

Stock photos downloaded from the internet, like those of people smiling in an office in another country, make customers doubt there's a real person behind the business. Photos of your premises, your team and your work, even phone shots in good light, show customers what they'll find when they arrive. If you can pay a photographer for a couple of hours, it's one of the best investments you'll make in your website.

5. The domain: in your name or with the transfer in writing

The domain is your address on the internet (yourbusiness.com) and part of your brand, so the safest option is to have it registered in your name or your company's. If whoever builds your website registers it in theirs to manage it, as we do, what matters is that they commit in writing to transferring it to you when you ask or if you leave. It's the one technical step we recommend you oversee personally: ask whose name it's registered in; if it's yours, keep the login details, and if it isn't, ask for that commitment in writing. Setting it up, on the other hand, can be delegated.

6. Design, coding and getting ready for Google: delegate this

This covers making the website load fast on mobile, look right on any screen and get Google to understand what you do and where, so it shows you when someone searches for your service in your area, and making sure the contact form reaches your inbox. Speed matters more than it seems: according to Google (2016), 53% of mobile visits are abandoned if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load. Almost none of this is visible at first glance, but it's what decides whether the website brings you customers, and it's the kind of work a professional does in days and that would take you weeks to learn. If you want to understand how Google decides who to show, we explain it in what SEO is and what it's for.

7. Legal pages and maintenance: delegate this

A business website needs a legal notice, a privacy policy and, if it uses cookies (the small files a website stores in the visitor's browser), a cookie policy. They're required by the LSSI, the Spanish law on internet services, and the GDPR, the European data protection regulation. Then comes maintenance: backups, renewing the domain on time and the changes you need along the way. If the domain expires, the website goes offline and, once the grace period for renewing it is over, the domain is released and anyone can register it. Maintenance is tedious work, and doing it yourself adds little to your business.

Look at the list and the pattern is clear: what only you can do has to do with knowing your business and making sure the website is yours. The rest is execution, and execution can be delegated.

What building it yourself costs: the maths in hours

Whoever decides to build it themselves to save the money is only looking at one side of the scale. Let's look at the other with an example in round numbers.

Let's say learning to use a template builder takes you about 15 hours, and building the website, changing things, undoing them and changing them again takes another 40. Add the odd hours you'll spend during the year fixing whatever breaks and trying to understand why you don't show up on Google, and call it 60 hours in total in the first year.

Now put a price on your hour. If you're self-employed and your working hour is worth €30, that “free” website has cost you €1,800 of your time, and if it's worth €50, €3,000. On top of that, add whatever the tool charges if you choose a paid plan.

With half of the first figure you can pay for a €450 landing page or a €900 corporate website at a studio like ours: the landing page is a single-page website and the corporate one has up to 5 pages, and both prices include IGIC (the tax that takes the place of VAT in the Canary Islands). While we build it, you carry on serving your customers. If you want to compare prices and know what every quote should include, it's all in how much a website costs in 2026.

There's a cost that's harder to measure: the weeks or months you spend without a website, or with a half-finished one, while you find the time to finish it. During that time, whoever looks for you on Google will find another business.

Why “saving” by doing everything yourself ends up holding you back

At the start of a business, doing everything yourself makes sense: money tends to be short, every euro counts and time seems to stretch to cover everything.

The problem comes when it becomes a habit, because nobody grows a business by doing everything alone. Your day has the hours it has, and if you spend them building the website, doing the invoices, designing the flyer and answering emails, you're left with few for what grows a business: winning customers and serving them well.

Delegating means trading hours on a task someone else does better and faster for hours on the task only you can do, which is usually the one that earns you the most. Besides, when you stop carrying what you haven't mastered, you work more calmly, and your customers notice that too.

How to delegate your business website well

Delegating badly is expensive too. To get the website you want, keep this in mind:

Prepare what only you can provide. Have to hand what you do, who it's for, what sets you apart, your photos, your logo if you have one, your contact details and your opening hours. With that, whoever builds your website has what's hardest to get and can start working from day one.

Ask for a fixed price and a deadline in writing. That way you know from the start how much you'll pay and when you'll have the website, and any change you want later is discussed and quoted before it's done.

Ask whether it's custom-built or template-based. Ask them to tell you plainly, because a template website may be fine to start with, but it makes no sense to pay custom-build prices for it.

Make sure you can take the website and the domain with you. Ask whose name the domain is registered in, whether they commit in writing to transferring it to you when you ask and from what point the code becomes yours, so you can switch providers whenever you want. We explain it in who owns your website's code and why it should be you.

Ask who will answer you. Ideally, it's the same person who designs and codes your website, because they know how it's built inside and can tell you straight away whether a change is simple.

Ask what the price includes. Check whether it covers the domain, the hosting (the space where the website is stored so it can be seen online), the legal pages, maintenance and changes. If the price seems very low, also ask how many hours of work are behind it.

Where Zelerix comes in

Zelerix is a Tenerife studio, founded in 2026, that builds websites and does local SEO, that is, the work that gets you found on Google in your area. We focus on exactly the part worth delegating.

The split is simple. You bring what only you know: you tell us what you do, for whom and what makes you different, and you send us your text and your photos. We bring the rest: we code your website from scratch so it loads fast on mobile and Google understands what you do and where. The person who designs and codes your website is the one who answers when you message us.

This is what you get:

• A fixed price, IGIC included. A landing page (a single page) costs €450; a corporate website of up to 5 pages, €900; and the corporate website with SEO, €1,150. The packs include the domain, hosting, the basic legal pages, the website in two languages and 2 months of maintenance. The SEO pack adds the SEO setup (getting the work under way so you show up on Google and Google Maps in your area) and 2 months of SEO, which then continues at €200 a month until you cancel.
• Timelines. The landing page is ready in 3-5 working days and the corporate website in 5-8, from when we have your text and photos.
• A free demo before you pay. We build a demo of your website for you to see on your phone. If you like it, we finish it, and if you'd rather leave it there, you owe us nothing.
• The website is yours. The code is yours from delivery. If you'd rather pay in instalments, it's 6 to 12 payments with a 40% surcharge on the price of the website, and the code becomes yours once you finish paying. We register, renew and manage the domain ourselves, so you don't have to worry about it, and if you leave, we transfer it to you; it's in writing in our terms.
• Maintenance with no commitment. After the 2 included months, it costs €19 a month or €180 a year and covers hosting, domain renewal, backups and small changes, like text or photos. Bigger changes, like a new section or page, are quoted separately at €40 an hour, before we start. If you ever drop it, we give you the website so you can host it wherever you like.

If your business is in Tenerife, we come to see you; with the rest of the Canary Islands and Spain, we work remotely, by WhatsApp, phone, email or video call. We've built websites for a hair salon, a tattoo studio, a restaurant in La Laguna and a demolition company on the island, and for a patisserie and a restaurant in Mataró. You can see them in our website portfolio. The one for Pollo Frito Chino, the buffet in La Laguna, scores over 90 out of 100 for mobile speed and 100 for SEO in Lighthouse, Google's tool for measuring a website's technical quality (September 2026). And with the new website we built for them, Demoliciones Tenerife reached 4th place on Google for “demoliciones tenerife” in under 4 months (September 2026), ahead of companies with more than 30 years in the business, as we explain in the Demoliciones Tenerife case.

In other words, the 60 hours in the example become one conversation to tell us about your business and a few days' wait, and you spend that time on what puts food on the table.

In short

Creating your business website takes seven steps. Four things depend on you: what you want the website for, what makes you different, the raw material for the text and photos, and making sure the domain is in your name or will be transferred to you when you ask. Design, coding, getting ready for Google, the legal side and maintenance are craft work, and that work can be delegated.

Building it all yourself saves you money, but it costs you hours, and if you have a business, those hours are worth quite a lot. If you'd like us to take care of the part that can be delegated, tell us what you have and what you need and we'll tell you what can be done, what it costs and when you'd have it.