Should I hire a web designer? 9 pros and cons

There’s no one size fits all answer to the question “should I hire a web designer?”. It very much depends on your situation.

Table of Contents

There are several pros and cons to hiring a web designer. Usually they come down to your business needs, budget, technical expertise and time constraints.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Pros to hiring a web designer for your business

Hiring a web designer can bring a whole host of benefits to your business. For established businesses, working with a professional web designer can help you scale as a tool to generate new leads on autopilot. It can help increase your brand awareness, grow your email list and bring in new clients.

Here are a list of the potential benefits of working with a web designer.

Strategy

To most people a website’s just a website. You whack up a few pictures, some text and style using your brand colours and the sales will start rolling in.

Won’t they? No.

Anyone can build a website. All you need to do is open a new tab, search for ‘how to build a website’ and you’ll get 100, 000’s of results showing you how to do it for free.

But what most people miss is the strategy.

How to craft a client journey that takes visitors and turns them into clients. It’s the difference between your website being an asset to your business rather than an expensive thing that people visit but never take any action from.

Professional looking website

Web designers know how to take your brand’s visual identity (colours, fonts, logos and patterns) and build something that looks slick and professional. Your website could be the first contact anyone has with your brand so it’s important that it makes a good first impression.

Smooth user experience

User experience is really important not only to make sure that your website visitors can actually find their way around but for search engine optimisation (covered later) too.

If the people who visit your site can’t find the information they want quickly and easily, they’re going to head to a competitor’s website instead. Good web designers will follow best practices when it comes to designing the layout of your website.

Time saving

It will take you longer to build a high converting, professional looking website than a professional web designer.

This is especially true if you don’t have much technical experience. Web designers will have a streamlined design process that enables them to design and build websites in the most efficient way.

I would argue that it would be a better use of your time to focus on your area of expertise. Whether you’re a VA, coach or any other service business, your time is best spent focusing on serving your current clients or attracting new clients into your business.

Responsive design

More and more people are using the internet on phones and tablets. Think about your own habits.

When you need to know something, whether it’s looking up a fact you just heard on TV or how much a service will cost for your business, do you switch your laptop on or grab your phone?

With this in mind it’s really important that your website looks good and works across different devices. An experienced web designer will know which designs and layouts will translate well across different devices.

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

All you have to do is whack up a website with some words and pictures and you’ll be getting 10,000 visitors a day, am I right? Wrong.

Your website needs to be optimised for search engines to get visitors that way. You need to know what people are searching for in relation to what you do (keyword research), and then make sure those keywords are in the right place.

Not all web designers are skilled in SEO. Some will work with SEO professionals, some will do basic SEO themselves, so it’s important to ask about this when you speak to a designer you’re thinking of hiring.

Cons of hiring a web designer for your business

Hiring a web designer isn’t always the right decision for a small business. There are definitely situations where I would advise against hiring a web designer.

For any business less than 6 months old, I think hiring a web designer would be a waste of money as I would expect the brand and service offering to change a lot in the first couple of years. In this case I would say DIY with a professionally designed template would be a much smarter move. Then once it’s an established business, then hire a web designer for a bespoke website.

Here is a list of potential cons of working with a professional on your website.

Cost

This is usually one of the determining factors in deciding when you ask “should I hire a web designer?”. A web design project can cost anything upwards of £1000 depending on lots of different factors including:

how many pages it needs?
does it need to be hooked up to an email marketing platform?
do you need any complicated functionality? For example providing automated bespoke quotes

Ultimately you’re going to be restricted based on how much money you have in the bank. You may need to go with something simple initially and add more complexity later on when you have the budget.

Finding the right designer

Probably the most difficult part of choosing to hire a web designer is whether or not you can find the right one.

There are a lot of great designers around (along with a few not so great ones). But not every one will be right for you.

My advice would be to look for recommendations from your network first and foremost. Is there a name that keeps popping up that your connections had a great experience with? Do you know anyone who’s had a new website recently that you like the look of?

It can be time consuming trying to find a designer you feel a good connection with, whose previous designs you like and whose services you can afford.

Turnaround times

The most popular web designers are likely to have waitlists. So you may find that you have to adjust your initial timescales to be able to work with your preferred web designer.

This isn’t always as bad as it seems as it will allow you extra time to prepare for your new site. You’ll have more time to perfect your content or to hire professionals.