Should I Hire a Developer or Handle Website Updates Myself?

The right answer depends on your time, your tech comfort level, and what your site is actually worth to your business.

DIY makes sense in limited situations: you are on a platform like Squarespace with a simple drag-and-drop editor, your site is a brochure with rarely-changing content, and you are comfortable enough to make edits without breaking things. Even then, you are still responsible for monitoring and security.

Most small business owners hit the wall quickly. Modern sites, especially those built on Next.js, React, or WordPress with custom configurations, are not friendly to non-developers making updates. One wrong edit can take a page offline. Plugin conflicts after updates can break the whole site. These are not hypothetical risks. They happen regularly.

The real calculation is time cost. If an update takes you two hours of fumbling and research, and you bill $100-300/hour in your own business, you have spent $200-600 in opportunity cost to avoid a $50 task. That is a bad trade.

A developer on retainer handles updates in minutes because they know the stack. They also catch problems proactively that you would never notice until a customer complains.

The middle path, a dedicated maintenance plan, gives you professional management at a predictable monthly cost. You do not own the time burden and you do not pay agency rates.

Freedman Systems handles everything for $199/month: updates, security, performance, content changes. No long-term contract.

See what is included at freedmansystems.com.