Stuck on Your DIY Website?

When I decided to get back into the website design and development business again earlier in 2026, I was freaking terrified. I guess I’d heard enough CEOs cheer my profession’s inevitable uselessness that I began to believe it.

I honestly didn’t know if there was a market for people like me anymore. But I took the leap anyway, because even a failed attempt was something different than what I was doing.

I’ve been running CCG Labs for a couple of months. How do I feel about it now?

I’m not scared anymore. For now, anyway.

Small business customers are arriving at my door differently than they used to. Sometimes they are arriving at a different point on their journey, but they are still arriving.

Small business owners still struggle to build and maintain their own sites.

In 2018 when I stopped freelancing, most of my clients wanted me to build and maintain their site for them. Very few had tried to do it themselves, or expressed any inclination to go that route. There were exceptions, but not many.

As I say that I realize my subjective experience may have some survivorship bias. I’m never going to hear from business owners who built their own sites successfully.

My subjective observations: site builders still leave people stuck.

Here’s why I’m not scared anymore: what I’ve observed in 2026 is that I am getting lots of web design and development opportunities. Neither the threat of AI nor the economy has caused the work to dry up, but folks are showing up at a very different stage in their journey. I am seeing more who:

• Built their own site in a site builder and didn’t like the results.
• Built their own site in a site builder but aren’t getting results.
• Built their own site in a site builder, but got stuck and don’t know how to move forward.
• Built and then promptly broke their own site and don’t know how to move forward.

I’ve gotten 5 leads like this in about as many days.

To be fair, mine is a skewed sample. The people whose Squarespace or Wix site works just fine have no reason to call a web developer. I only hear from the ones who got stuck. But there are a lot of them.

What I don’t see yet: small businesses building their own sites with AI.

I feel like I’d be omitting an important piece of information if I wrote this article and didn’t mention them: small business owners building their own sites with AI agents instead of site builders.

They are not calling me. I guess they’re the dog that didn’t bark. I don’t know what this means, but it could be:

1. They don’t exist. They’re not using AI to build their sites, so I’m not getting calls to fix their slop.
2. They don’t need help. They’re so successful they don’t need help improving their agent-built sites. Also: if an agent built your site, when it breaks, you probably ask the agent to fix it before you call a human.

Another possibility: When you step away from corporate and enterprise you find a lot of people hate AI. I find this especially true in the small business community and the buyers they serve. It’s a space where human authenticity matters, and AI is seen as not delivering.

Again, this is pure conjecture. I really do not know the answer.

Some recommendations for small business owners that want to DIY their site.

If you’re set on building it yourself, awesome!

I’m a programmer that keeps livestock, carves spoons, and loves to patch his own drywall. I admire your tenacity.

From a position of decades of industry experience, here are a few suggestions to give you the best shot at doing it right.

1. Embark on a journey of “self-discovery”

Most agencies don’t just start writing code the moment the down payment clears. They do Discovery.

Discovery just means they ask you questions to learn about your company, your product, your problems, your goals, and what it would mean to you for the project to be successful.

It helps identify all of the features the site needs to have, all the pages that need to be developed, any third-party systems it should integrate with. This helps them not only give you the most accurate quote they can but also helps them choose the right technology to solve your problems.

I recommend you do this for yourself, too. You can’t make an informed decision about the right way to build your website if you don’t even know what you need it to do, or what goal it’s supposed to achieve. Start by answering questions like these:

• What do you want a visitor to do on your site? Call you? Book an appointment? Buy something?
• Do you need to sell online? How many products, and how do you ship them?
• What other tools does it need to work with? Your scheduling app, your email list, your point of sale?
• Who’s going to update it, and how often?
• What does success look like six months after launch?

2. Consider paying for a few hours of consulting up front.

Don’t be too proud to seek an expert opinion.

Will most agencies and web designers be willing to have this conversation for free? Probably not, and you shouldn’t expect them to.

But will they be willing to exchange a few hours of expertise for dollars? I can’t speak for anyone else, but I am happy to. My goal is to help you as much as I can under whatever constraints you have. If your budget constrains you to building the site yourself, it’s not ideal, but if you’re willing to pay for my time, I’m willing to help you select the right platform for your project.

(But if I think you’re out of your depth or being unrealistic, I will be honest about it.)

3. Be ready to invest time if you still want to do this right.

Can a small business owner build their own website? Using a “no-code” site building platform? Sure. Absolutely.

Small business owners are typically smart people with a ton of grit that can figure just about anything out for themselves, given enough time. Your website isn’t any different.

If that’s you: great! Be prepared to put a ton of time into learning and refining your site.

“No code” and “AI” site builders can help you build a good-looking site pretty quickly. They intentionally hide the technical details of building a website, and that’s a double-edged sword. They prevent you from pushing buttons and turning knobs that might cause problems. But also: the devil is in the details. When something goes wrong, it’s usually a detail like:

• Nobody can find it on Google
• It can’t do the thing your business needs it to do
• It looks fine on your screen but not on mobile
• The contact form isn’t sending email

(One thing that’s usually not the problem: speed. Google’s own real-world data shows Wix and Squarespace sites pass its speed and page-experience benchmarks more often than most platforms. Credit where it’s due.)

You’re a nontechnical person using a tool to build a piece of technology. You don’t have deep knowledge of how it works, the platform doesn’t expose its inner workings, so when something goes wrong, you’re just stuck.

That clever, gritty small business owner I mentioned? They go learn a bit about SEO. They go learn how to use tools like their browser’s Dev Tools and Google Lighthouse to troubleshoot their site. They dig into their platform’s help docs and forums to find out what it can and can’t do. They learn how to optimize mobile experiences in their site builder of choice. They learn about how email works and how to figure out where communication broke down.

Or they acknowledge that all of that takes away from the doing, building, making, growing, fixing and creating that they do in their business, and they make it someone else’s problem, just like I do when my truck acts up.

4. Be ready to walk away

Here’s the pattern I keep seeing: once small business owners have spent money on a website platform, they’re scared to change course.

Part of the problem is how we choose a platform in the first place. In a late-2025 survey by All About Cookies, small business owners ranked price as their top priority when choosing web hosting (72%), and scalability nearly dead last (7%). We pick what’s cheap and easy today, and find the ceiling later.

Mind the Sunk Cost Fallacy

This is what economists would call Sunk Cost Fallacy. Or what old timers around here call “throwing good money after bad.”

You might feel like because you invested some money into a platform, you should invest more money and stay on it. But if the platform is the problem getting in the way of achieving your goals, it’s better to admit that as early as possible.

If you buy an ’87 Ford Escort, no amount of money and effort is going to make it a Tesla Model 3.

A recent example from my own work:

I had a client who bought a year of Squarespace and started building a site himself. A few weeks later, he hired me to do a redesign, build some landing pages, and do some search engine optimization. After getting his e-commerce shop fully set up, we very quickly hit the limits of what Squarespace supports, and we’re already thinking about rebuilding the thing on another platform.

Not ideal for anybody. Not for him, because he’s going to feel like he paid for the same site three times: once when he built it himself, once for the redesign, and once more for the rebuild. Not ideal for me, because I don’t want to build it twice, either. I did what I was asked to do, but I feel like I missed my shot to serve him better.

From most ideal to least ideal:

1. Ideal: Understand the project requirements up front and choose the right platform for the project before spending money. Could not happen because we didn’t know each other yet.
2. Next Best: Make that decision before the redesign, and just rebuild the site on a platform that would better serve his long-term needs. Could not happen because staying on Squarespace was a project requirement. (He’d already paid for a year.)
3. Where we are: Deal with Squarespace for a while. Keep a list of everything we can’t do, or that’s clunky. Use that to inform a future re-platforming conversation.

Hedge your bets

If you decide to build your own website, I’d recommend:

• Don’t put a ring on it. Spend a little time living in sin with your site builder. Cohabitate and get to know each other before you get married.
• Take advantage of free trials. If they give a trial period, use it. And when you feel friction, take it seriously. If your trial expires before you’re done building your site, ask support to extend the trial. You’ll be surprised how often they will.
• Pay month to month. Most of these site building platforms will offer a better rate if you buy a year of service up front. Don’t take the bait. Pay month to month until you’re confident you made the right decision. That will make it easier to walk away if you need to, and leave you feeling more confident about making that annual investment later if you don’t.

Summary

As the owner of a company that builds websites, of course I want to build your website. But if you are absolutely hell-bent on doing it for yourself, just keep the following things in mind:

1. Know what you need before you pick a platform. Do your own discovery first.
2. Get an expert opinion early. A few paid hours up front costs less than a rebuild later.
3. Budget your time, not just your money. The details are where DIY sites get stuck.
4. Don’t marry your site builder. Pay month to month, and be willing to walk away.

And if you’re already stuck, get in touch. That’s what I’m here for.