Is it cheaper to build my own campground website or hire someone?
On paper the DIY route wins by a mile. The gap closes fast once you count the hours, and it closes completely if the site never gets finished.
SHORT ANSWER
Building it yourself costs about $400 a year: a builder subscription at $16 to $50 a month plus a domain. Hiring costs $1,000 to $3,000 a year for a monthly plan, or $3,000 to $8,000 once for a custom build. So DIY is cheaper in dollars. It is not cheaper in hours. Most park owners spend 30 to 40 hours on a first build, and the two things a park website has to get right, the site map and the local search setup, are the two things builders handle worst. DIY makes sense if you enjoy the work and have a slow season to spend on it. It does not if the site has been "almost done" for two years.
The real comparison
| Do it yourself | Hire it out | |
|---|---|---|
| Year one cost | $400 to $600 | $1,020 to $3,000 |
| Your hours, year one | 30 to 40 | 2 to 3 |
| Your hours, ongoing | 1 to 2 a month | Near zero |
| Time to live | Weeks to never | 2 to 4 weeks |
| Local search setup | Yours to figure out | Should be included |
| When it breaks | Yours | Theirs |
What DIY builders do badly for a park
Three things specifically. A readable site map, because template galleries have hero photos and pricing tables but nothing shaped like a numbered campground diagram. Structured data, because the Campground schema type that puts a park in map results and AI answers is not in any builder's default. And speed on a phone, because the templates that look best are the ones loaded with sliders and video, and half your traffic is a driver on one bar of signal.
When DIY is the right call
If money is genuinely tight and the choice is a DIY site or no site, build it yourself. A plain page with your name, town, site count, hookups, rates, phone, and a booking link beats nothing by an enormous margin. Squarespace is the most forgiving for a non-technical owner. Put your park's facts in plain sentences, skip the stock photos, and claim your Google Business Profile the same week. The SEO guide walks through the rest free.
When hiring is the right call
If the site has been half-finished for a year. If you are one of four parks in town and the other three come up first. If you cannot say what your site currently says about your rig-length limits. And if your time in shoulder season is worth more spent on the park than on a page builder.
A middle option nobody mentions
Build it yourself and pay someone once to check it. A few hundred dollars for a review of the structure, the local search setup, and the technical basics gets you most of the benefit for a fraction of the cost. We do this as a one-off. So do plenty of others, and our free checker will tell you the obvious problems before you pay anybody.
Related questions.
What is the easiest website builder for an RV park owner?
Squarespace, for a non-technical owner who wants it to look decent without much fiddling. Wix gives more control and more ways to make it slow. Both need the local search work done separately.
How long does it take to build your own campground website?
Thirty to forty hours for a first-timer doing a real site, spread over several weeks. The design is the fast part; writing the content and getting the details right takes the rest.
Can I start DIY and hand it off later?
Yes, and it is common. Anyone taking it over will likely rebuild rather than inherit a template, but the writing you did carries over and that is the slow part.
Is a free website builder good enough for a campground?
No. Free tiers put ads on your page and give you an address like yourpark.wixsite.com, which reads as temporary to a guest and ranks poorly.
Want this handled for your park?
We build and run websites for RV parks and campgrounds, and nothing else. Websites from $85 a month, SEO from $250.