██████╗ ██╗██╗ ██╗███████╗██╗ ██╔══██╗██║╚██╗██╔╝██╔════╝██║ ██████╔╝██║ ╚███╔╝ █████╗ ██║ ██╔═══╝ ██║ ██╔██╗ ██╔══╝ ██║ ██║ ██║██╔╝ ██╗███████╗███████╗ ╚═╝ ╚═╝╚═╝ ╚═╝╚══════╝╚══════╝ ███████╗████████╗██████╗ ███████╗███████╗████████╗ ██╔════╝╚══██╔══╝██╔══██╗██╔════╝██╔════╝╚══██╔══╝ ███████╗ ██║ ██████╔╝█████╗ █████╗ ██║ ╚════██║ ██║ ██╔══██╗██╔══╝ ██╔══╝ ██║ ███████║ ██║ ██║ ██║███████╗███████╗ ██║ ╚══════╝ ╚═╝ ╚═╝ ╚═╝╚══════╝╚══════╝ ╚═╝
# Plain-text mirror. Same words as the human page, minus everything a browser needed.
If your website is a business card, build it yourself. A one-page or five-page site with your services, your proof, and a way to contact you is well within reach of a beginner on Wix, Squarespace, WordPress.com or Carrd, and you will get it live in a weekend. If your website is a sales channel, meaning revenue depends on it ranking, converting, or looking different from your competitor, DIY becomes the expensive option, because you end up paying for a redesign later on top of everything you already paid.
I run a web design studio in Kolkata. This post explains how to build a website without me.
That sounds like a bad business decision, so let me explain it. A large share of the people who ask about a website do not need an agency yet. They need one page, a domain, a working contact form, and something to send people to. Charging design fees for that is how studios get a reputation for selling things nobody asked for, and it is why I would rather tell you plainly where the line sits.
So here is the honest version of the DIY guide. Which builders are worth your money in 2026, what they actually cost on the day I checked, which one is quietly dying, and the specific point where doing it yourself stops saving money and starts costing you customers.
If your website is a business card, build it yourself. A one-page or five-page site with your services, your proof, and a way to contact you is well within reach of a beginner on Wix, Squarespace, WordPress.com or Carrd, and you will get it live in a weekend. If your website is a sales channel, meaning revenue depends on it ranking, converting, or looking different from your competitor, DIY becomes the expensive option, because you end up paying for a redesign later on top of everything you already paid.
The dividing line is not budget. It is whether the site has a job that can fail.
The rest of this guide is the how, with prices I read on each company's own pricing page on 30 July 2026.
I will argue against my own invoice here, because pretending builders are toys is how agencies lose trust.
If any of those describe you, stop reading comparison posts and go build the thing. Seriously. You do not need us.
The reverse is just as specific, and this is the part most DIY guides will not tell you because they earn a commission on the builder signup.
The template versus custom decision has its own trade-offs, and I have laid them out honestly in template versus custom web design. Either answer can be correct. Choosing without knowing which one you picked is the mistake.
[IMG: The dividing line is not budget, it is whether the site has a job that can fail. Build it yourself when you are testing whether the business works, the site is a formality, you are the product, or you enjoy it. Stop and hire when you look identical to your competitor, the site has to sell something complicated, search and AI visibility are the point, or you have outgrown the plan.]
Every price below was read on the company's own pricing page on 30 July 2026. Builder pricing moves faster than any blog post, so treat this as a snapshot and check before you pay.
One thing worth knowing before you compare: some of these companies show Indian pricing and some do not. Squarespace, WordPress.com and Framer served rupee prices. Wix, Webflow, Weebly and Carrd showed dollars. Wix states on its pricing page that prices and currency vary by location, that the dollar figures are shown for reference only, and that the final price appears on the purchase page before payment. You will not know what Wix costs you in rupees until you are at checkout.
| Builder | Cheapest paid plan | Free tier | Actively developed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wix | Light, $17/month billed yearly | Yes, with Wix branding | Yes |
| Squarespace | Basic, Rs 630/month billed yearly | No, 14-day trial only | Yes |
| WordPress.com | Personal, Rs 200/month billed yearly | Yes, shows WordPress.com ads | Yes |
| Weebly | Personal, $13/month billed yearly | Yes | No, see below |
| Framer | Basic, Rs 361/month billed yearly | Yes, 500 credits | Yes |
| Webflow | Basic, $15/month billed yearly | Yes, webflow.io domain | Yes |
| Carrd | Pro Lite, $9 per year | Yes, up to 3 sites | Yes |
Read that last row again. Carrd's Pro Standard plan, which includes a custom domain, forms and analytics, is $19 for a whole year. Wix Light is $17 a month, which is $204 a year. That is more than ten times the price for a one-page site. If all you need is one page, the cheapest correct answer is embarrassingly cheap.
[IMG: wix homepage]
If you read an older guide that told you to buy the Wix Combo plan, throw that guide away. There is no plan called Combo on Wix's pricing page today. The lineup is Free, Light at $17 a month, Core at $29, Business at $39 and Business Elite at $159, with an Enterprise tier on request. Those are yearly-subscription prices paid in full up front, before tax. WebsiteBuilderExpert's Wix pricing guide, updated 3 February 2026, lists the same four plans at the same four prices, which is a useful second reading.
Wix now advertises over 2,000 templates and an AI builder that generates a site from a single prompt, then hands you the drag-and-drop editor to fix what it got wrong. That second half matters more than the first. The generated site is a starting point, not a finished one.
Wix is the most capable of the mainstream builders and the one I would pick if I had to bet on longevity. It reported $541.2 million of revenue in the first quarter of 2026 and $1.903 billion of annual recurring revenue, both up double digits year on year. It is not going anywhere.
What it is not: cheap at the top, or portable. Business Elite works out to $1,908 a year, and there is no meaningful way to take your design somewhere else when you leave.
[IMG: squarespace homepage]
Squarespace still has the best templates of the mainstream builders, and that has been true for a decade. The Indian pricing page shows three tiers billed annually: Basic at Rs 630 a month, Core at Rs 720, Advanced at Rs 1,100. Every site starts with a 14-day free trial and no card required. There is no permanent free plan.
The detail that catches people out is the transaction fee. Basic charges 2% on online store sales. Core and Advanced charge 0%. If you sell anything at all, Basic is the expensive plan.
Two things worth knowing about the company. It was taken private by Permira in October 2024 in a deal worth about $7.2 billion and is no longer listed on the New York Stock Exchange, which is why nobody can quote you a current subscriber number. And in July 2026 it raised prices on its US annual plans by up to 26%, according to PetaPixel's report of 17 July 2026, with Core going from $23 to $29 a month. Squarespace did not publish a memo about it. Customers found out by email.
That is the builder subscription model showing its teeth. Your rent went up and you were told after the decision was made.
[IMG: Weebly]
Do not start a new website on Weebly in 2026. I know older versions of this guide recommended it as the budget pick. That recommendation has expired.
Weebly is still on sale. The pricing page lists Free, Personal at $13 a month billed annually, Professional at $15 and Performance at $32, and the footer still reads Square, Inc. Signup still works, though it now routes you through creating a Square account rather than a Weebly one, which tells you where the product sits inside the company.
What has changed is that Square is not building it any more. SiteBuilderReport's review, updated 7 January 2026, documents the state of it: no new feature in over a year, no new theme in years, the Weebly community forum folded into Square's forum, and dormant social accounts. On Square's own community forum, a Square staff member responded to shutdown rumours in April 2025 with a line that is more revealing than reassuring: "Weebly is NOT suddenly closing or shutting down. Square is managing a gradual migration process." Existing sites keep working. The direction of travel is Square Online.
A platform in gradual migration is a fine place to keep an old site running and a poor place to start a new one. You would be building on ground the owner has already decided to leave.
Four more worth knowing about, because the Wix-Squarespace-Weebly trio stopped being the whole market years ago.
WordPress.com starts at Rs 200 a month for the Personal plan billed annually, Rs 350 for Premium and Rs 800 for Business, before tax. The free plan exists but shows WordPress.com's own ads on your site. Its pitch now includes a guided AI builder that, in its own words, lets you skip the blank screen and launch a site by chatting with AI. Business unlocks plugins, which is the tier where it becomes a real CMS rather than a blog host. If you want to understand the platform trade-offs before committing, our comparison of CMS platforms covers them.
Framer is the designer's builder. Free to try with 500 credits, then Rs 361 a month for Basic and Rs 1,084 for Pro, billed yearly. Its AI features run on a credit system, so heavy use costs extra on top of the plan. Beautiful output, steeper learning curve than Wix.
Webflow is the closest thing to real code without writing it. Starter is free on a webflow.io domain, Basic is $15 a month billed yearly and Premium is $25. Then it jumps, hard: the next tier up is Team at $2,500 a month on an annual contract. Webflow is excellent, and it is not a beginner's first website.
Carrd is the one nobody mentions and half of you actually need. Free for up to three sites, $9 a year for Pro Lite, $19 a year for Pro Standard with a custom domain, forms and analytics, $49 a year for Pro Plus. One page, done properly, for the price of two coffees a year.
If you last built a website three years ago, the opening of the process is unrecognisable. You no longer start with a template gallery. You start with a text box asking what your business does.
Wix generates a site from a single prompt. WordPress.com sells a guided builder as the way to skip the blank screen. Squarespace meters AI tools by credits across its plans. Framer runs agents on the same credit model.
This is genuinely useful and it is also where most DIY sites go wrong. The generator produces a complete-looking site in ninety seconds. It has a hero, an about section, three services and a testimonial slot. It looks finished. It is not finished. It is a filled-in template wearing your business name, and every competitor who typed a similar prompt got a similar site.
Treat the AI pass as the first draft that saves you an afternoon of layout work. The value you add is everything after it. Your actual photos instead of stock. Your actual prices. The objection your customers really raise, answered on the page where they raise it. That part has never been automated, and I do not think it is close.
[IMG: In ninety seconds the generator hands you a hero, an about section, three services and a testimonial slot. What you add after it is your actual photographs instead of stock, your actual prices, and the objection your customers really raise answered on the page where they raise it.]
Skipping this is the single most common reason a DIY site has to be rebuilt. It takes twenty minutes.
Not "to have a website". Pick one job. Get enquiries. Take bookings. Sell twelve products. Prove you are real to someone who already got your name from a friend. A site with one job can be judged. A site with no job cannot be improved, only redecorated.
Someone who searched your company name needs different things from someone who searched your service. The first needs proof, the second needs an explanation. If you only have the budget to write one page well, write it for whoever arrives most.
Open their sites. Note what every single one of them says, because that is the sentence you must not use. Note what none of them say, because that is your opening. This is fifteen minutes of work and it is the highest-return fifteen minutes in the whole project.
Most first websites need four: home, services, proof or portfolio, contact. Adding a blog you will not write and a team page with one person on it makes the site look smaller, not larger.
If the answer is you, choose the builder with the editor you find easiest, not the one with the best reviews. An easy site that stays current beats a beautiful one that freezes. Our web design process guide goes deeper on the planning stages if you want the full version.
Use the table above and pick on constraints, not on features. One page and a link in bio, Carrd. A portfolio or a shop with beautiful templates, Squarespace. Broadest capability and the largest app ecosystem, Wix. Wanting to own a real CMS and eventually move the content elsewhere, WordPress.com on the Business tier. Design-led and willing to learn, Framer.
Nearly every builder has a free tier or a trial. Build the same homepage twice on two of them before paying anyone. Two hours of that will teach you more than a week of comparison articles, including this one. If the whole idea of not writing code appeals, our no-code development guide maps the wider tool landscape.
Short, sayable over the phone, and spelled the way it sounds. Keyword-stuffed domains stopped helping years ago and they make you sound like a directory listing. If you are the brand, use your name.
Buy it separately from your builder if you can. A domain registered at an independent registrar is yours and can be pointed anywhere. A domain locked inside a builder subscription is one more thing tying you to a platform you might want to leave. Most plans throw in a free domain for the first year and then charge renewal at their own rate, so check the renewal price, not the introductory one.
If your first choice is taken, change the word rather than adding a hyphen or a stray extension. Hyphens get lost every time someone says the address out loud.
[IMG: template based web design]
Choose a template by its structure, not its photos. Those photos are not yours and the site will look markedly worse the moment you swap in your own. Ask instead whether the layout has room for what you actually have. If you own four good photographs, a template built around twelve is a template that will always look half empty.
Pick the one closest to the content you already possess. Then delete a section. Almost every DIY site is one section too long.
Fonts, colours, spacing and photography. That is the entire kit for making a template look like it belongs to you, and it is where beginners overreach.
Resist the urge to restyle every button. Consistency is what reads as professional.
This is where most DIY projects stall, and it is worth naming why. Design is fun and writing is not, so people spend three evenings on a colour scheme and then paste in placeholder text that stays there for a year.
Write these first, in a plain document:
Keep paragraphs short, use real subheadings so a scanner can find their answer, and cut every sentence that would be true of your competitor as well. Sentences that are true of everyone persuade nobody, and increasingly they do not get quoted by AI assistants either.
Every builder has an app store, and every app store is designed to make you spend more. Four are usually enough at the start.
Live chat, pop-ups, loyalty widgets and review carousels can wait until you have traffic to justify them. Each one slows the page and adds a monthly fee.
Modern builders output responsive layouts by default, so this step is no longer about writing media queries. It is about catching what the automatic layout got wrong: headlines that wrap into four lines, buttons too small to tap, tables that overflow, images cropped through someone's face.
Preview mode lies slightly. Publish, then open the site on your own phone on mobile data rather than office wifi, and try to complete the one action the site exists for. If you cannot do it in under a minute with your thumb, neither can your customer. Our guide to responsive web design covers what to look for in more detail.
Click every link. Submit the form and confirm the email arrives, including in spam. Check the phone number is tappable. Read the page aloud once, because you will hear the awkward sentences you cannot see. Ask one person who is not you to find your price without guidance and watch where they hesitate.
Before you publish, set the page titles and descriptions. Builders default to something like "Home" and "Untitled", and that is the text that shows up in search results and when someone shares your link.
Publish is a button. The part people skip is what comes after. Put a recurring reminder in your calendar for a month from now to fix the one thing you already know is weak. Websites do not fail on launch day. They fail by being abandoned four weeks later.
I said at the top that most small enquiries do not need an agency. That is true, and here is the other half of it.
The thing a studio sells is not the pixels. It is the decisions before the pixels. What are you selling, who is the competitor, who is the audience, what must this page communicate, where does that communication happen. A builder answers none of those questions. It executes an answer you supply. When the answer is thin, the site is thin, and it renders beautifully.
So the honest test is this. If you can answer the five questions in this guide clearly, build it yourself and put the money into photography and advertising instead. If you cannot answer them, no amount of subscription buys you the answer, and that is the moment a designer earns their fee. If you want to see what that costs before you enquire, we have published price ranges in our breakdown of web design costs in Kolkata, and the questions worth asking any studio are in questions to ask before hiring a web design agency.
One more thing, from experience I would rather not have. I lost two companies before Pixel Street, and the lesson that survived both is that you should never build your main asset on ground someone else controls. Every builder on this page is rented land. Squarespace raising prices by email in July 2026 and Square quietly parking Weebly are the same story told twice. Rent it while you are proving the idea. Own it once the idea is proven.
Yes, for a small site. A four-page business site on Wix, Squarespace or WordPress.com is achievable in a weekend by someone who has never done it before, and AI onboarding has cut the hardest part, the blank screen, down to a few minutes. What experience buys is not the building. It is knowing what to leave out. If you want to learn the craft properly rather than just ship one site, we keep a list of the best places to learn web design.
On the prices I checked on 30 July 2026, Carrd Pro Standard at $19 a year is the cheapest route to a one-page site with a custom domain, forms and analytics. For a multi-page site, WordPress.com Personal at Rs 200 a month billed annually was the lowest rupee price of the builders I checked. Free plans work for practice, but they put someone else's branding or advertising on your site.
No. There is no plan called Combo on Wix's pricing page as of 30 July 2026. The current lineup is Free, Light at $17 a month, Core at $29, Business at $39 and Business Elite at $159, all billed yearly and paid up front. Any guide still quoting Combo pricing is at least a full plan generation out of date, which is a decent test of whether a comparison article has been checked recently.
Not for a new site. It is still sold and existing sites still work, but Square has it in gradual migration towards Square Online, and independent reviews in January 2026 found no new features for over a year and no new themes for years. If you already run a Weebly site that works, there is no emergency. If you are starting today, start somewhere with a future.
The building is the short part. Expect a weekend for a small site if your content is ready, and several weeks if it is not, because writing the words and gathering photographs is what actually takes the time. That is the honest sequence: content first, then design, then launch.
When the website has a job that can fail. If lost enquiries cost you more per month than a designer would, or if you are stacking paid apps onto a top-tier plan to work around limitations, DIY has stopped being the cheap option. That is the point to talk to a web design company rather than buy another add-on.
Every figure in this article traces to one of the following. Publisher and publication date are recorded so a claim can be checked against its origin, and re-checked when the origin changes.