The Issues of a Free Website
I write code for a living, so I understand the temptation to build things yourself. There is a certain satisfaction in dragging a box on a screen and seeing it appear on the web. In 2026, tools like Wix or Squarespace have made this incredibly easy, promising you can “launch in hours” for the price of a few coffees.
But as an engineer who also runs a business, I have learned that “easy” is often the most expensive word in the dictionary. When business owners ask me about building their own site to save money, I don’t talk about design. I talk about mathematics.
The Time Black Hole
The biggest lie in the “No-Code” industry is that DIY platforms save you money. They don’t; they simply shift the cost from your bank account to your calendar. We call this the “Time Black Hole.”
If you are a senior lawyer or a consultant billing £450 per hour, every minute you spend resising an image is a minute you are not earning. The data is sobering. A professional spending just three hours a week maintaining a DIY site incurs an annual opportunity cost of over £70,000. You are effectively paying a junior developer’s salary to do the work yourself, but you are paying it with your most expensive hours. True economy isn’t about the software subscription fee. It is about where you invest your attention.
The Performance Penalty
My engineering background makes me obsessive about “bloat.” To make those drag-and-drop builders work for everyone, the platforms have to inject massive amounts of code that you don’t actually need. Extra JavaScript, unused CSS, and heavy tracking scripts run in the background of every empty page.
This matters because speed is revenue. In 2025, we saw that for every one-second delay in mobile page load, conversion rates dropped by approximately 7%. If your “free” website takes four seconds to load because of heavy code, you are not just losing patience. You are rejecting double-digit percentages of your potential revenue before the user even reads your headline.
The AI Visibility Crisis
For a long time, we built websites for humans. Now, we build them for machines too. We are in the era of Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO). When a user asks an AI agent a question, the AI scans the web for structured answers.
AI agents prefer clean, semantic code. They need to understand what your business is, not just what it looks like. Many DIY platforms scramble this data by prioritising the visual layer while neglecting the structured data layer underneath. If the AI cannot read your site structure easily, it is far less likely to surface your content (because it cost higher to read your site). In 2026, being invisible to AI is the same as being invisible to the market.
Security as a Liability
I often see businesses gravitate towards WordPress because it powers 43% of the web. It feels like the safe choice. But popularity attracts predators.
Because it is open-source, the vulnerabilities are public, and someone has to manage them. In 2024 alone, nearly 8,000 new vulnerabilities were discovered in the WordPress ecosystem. The vast majority of these didn’t come from the core software, but from the plugins that users install to add basic features. Managing this requires “Maintenance Debt.” You are constantly patching, updating, and praying that one update doesn’t break another.
For a law firm or medical practice holding sensitive data, this security risk is unacceptable. A website should be a fortress, not a liability.
The Solution
The best approach is not to look for a better or cheaper DIY tool. Instead, you should change your operating model. Whether you prefer working with a freelancer or an agency, the key is managed infrastructure. You need a partner who understands the underlying logic and takes full ownership of the system.
For business owners, your job is not debugging or building a website from scratch. Spending time on your clients and products is the only option that makes sense.