How to Build a Successful Web Design Business: 30 Honest Truths
I have taught thousands of website designers how to build successful businesses. My students have done all of those headline things you see in the ads — six-figure years, businesses built in a matter of weeks, 25K dream projects. They create the most incredible websites for clients, and they build businesses that let them actually prioritise time with family, joy and flexibility.
Today I thought it would be fun to condense down 10 years of experience — everything I've learned from helping students do this — into one single post. Thirty honest truths about building a web design business. Some of these you'll nod along to. Some of them might sting a little.
Both are useful.
Prefer to watch? Catch the full video below, or keep reading.
Truth #1: You can book yourself solid on any platform.
I cannot tell you how many times I've seen this play out. Someone is building websites on Wix, or WordPress, or Squarespace, or Showit — and they're not fully booked. And their conclusion is that the problem is the platform. That if they also offered Shopify, or learned Webflow, or added whichever new thing everyone's talking about, that would solve their client booking problem.
It won't.
On every single one of these platforms there are millions of potential clients. As a designer, you're probably looking at taking on 20 to 30 projects a year — that's roughly all you can manage at a healthy pace. The pool of potential clients on any one platform is so vastly larger than that number that "not enough clients on this platform" is genuinely never the actual problem.
Learning a new platform takes weeks. It also means completely overhauling your website and your entire marketing messaging. That is a huge amount of effort — and it is not solving the actual problem. The actual problem is that you need better marketing on the platform you already have.
So don't believe the lie. If you're not fully booked on one platform, it doesn't mean you need a second. It means you need to get better at whatever your marketing strategy is right now.
Truth #2: If you hate your marketing strategy, that's your actual problem.
The most common reason designers aren't booking clients isn't that they're bad at design — it's that they're bad at marketing they dread. And you're never going to be consistent at something that drains you every single time you sit down to do it.
I've seen so many designers who absolutely hate and dread social media — and their marketing strategy is posting on Instagram Stories every day. That is not going to fly if you don't enjoy it. It absolutely works beautifully for people who love it. But if you don't? It's going to be inconsistent, it's going to feel like torture, and your audience will feel the reluctance through the screen.
Same thing if you're a complete introvert forcing yourself to go to local networking events. That's not going to go well long-term either.
The thing is, there is a marketing strategy that fits your personality and your natural way of showing up in the world — you just might not have found it yet. And giving yourself permission to stop doing the thing you hate and switch to something that actually fits? That is not giving up. That is smart business.
Truth #3: You can build a business that barely requires marketing at all.
If you genuinely cannot stand any form of marketing — even after giving yourself permission to find a strategy that fits — there is another path. You can pick your offering strategically in a way that almost eliminates the need for constant marketing altogether.
A few of my past students are developers who work for other web designers rather than for end clients. A web designer typically has around 30 projects a year and tends to work with the same developer consistently. So for that developer, instead of constantly marketing themselves to find individual end clients, they just need two or three designer relationships that funnel them work on an ongoing basis. Once you have those, the marketing is essentially done.
Offering ongoing SEO services works similarly — you book a client, and they stay with you for months or even years. Significantly less marketing than a designer who has to fill their calendar with fresh clients every few weeks. It's worth thinking about, especially if the idea of constant marketing makes you want to close your laptop forever.
Truth #4: If you change your offering, your marketing method needs to change too.
This catches a lot of designers off guard when they make the shift from one-to-one services into something more scalable.
When you're doing custom website builds, you only need 20 to 30 clients a year. Even if you only close every third or fourth person you talk to, that means maybe 80 conversations a year to fill your calendar completely. That's entirely achievable through relationship marketing — reaching out individually, building genuine connections, showing up where your ideal clients already are. You don't need to reach thousands of people. You need to reach dozens.
But the moment you switch to selling templates, or plugins, or some other lower-priced, higher-volume offering — the math changes completely. A lower price point means you need far more buyers to hit the same revenue. Reaching enough buyers requires mass marketing: social media, ads, something that gets your message in front of tens of thousands of people at once.
Many designers make the switch to templates and then wonder why their old relationship marketing approach isn't working anymore. It's because you changed the model without changing the method. The two have to move together.
Truth #5: If you're trying to be the "best," you've handed someone else your finish line.
I find so many designers — honestly, business owners in general — constantly looking at their competition and trying to keep up or get ahead. I understand the impulse. But the people who are genuinely most satisfied in their businesses long-term are not the ones trying to be the best in the industry. They're the ones who set their goals based entirely on the lifestyle they want and the income they want to make.
When you decide your goal is to be the best in the industry, you've handed over your freedom to someone else — because however far your nearest competitor goes, you have to go further. Your finish line is no longer yours.
Whereas when you decide your goal is to make X amount, have your weekends free, take six weeks off a year, and live where you want to live — that's entirely within your control. Nobody else can move that finish line on you. Stay in your own lane. Define your own version of success.
Truth #6: Niche or no niche — both work.
This is the thing I see new designers agonise over more than almost anything else. Should I niche? Which niche? What if I pick the wrong one? What if I'm missing out? And then they spend so much time agonising that they never actually start their business — which is the worst possible outcome.
Having a niche will help you grow faster. It makes everything cleaner — your portfolio is more focused, your marketing message is sharper, you know exactly where to find your ideal clients. That is the real benefit of niching: speed, efficiency, and clarity from day one.
However. If you are killing yourself trying to figure out your niche, then it's not actually helping you move faster — it's slowing you down. I have seen students be incredibly successful with the most hyper-specific niche you could imagine, and I've also seen students be incredibly successful with the broadest possible description of who they serve.
So: if the niche is clear, use it. If it's genuinely not clear and it's causing more problems than it's solving, just accept that you're going no-niche for now, get started, and niche down later when it becomes obvious. A business that exists beats a perfectly niched one that never launched.
Truth #7: There's no such thing as no time. There's only misaligned priorities.
When someone tells me they have no time to work on their business, I always want to gently ask — have you genuinely not watched Netflix, scrolled Instagram, or spent any five-minute window doing something unproductive in the past year? Because I don't know if I believe that.
I have watched people build successful designer businesses while working full-time jobs. I've seen people find the most creative windows of time — lunch breaks, early mornings, stolen 20 minutes while kids are napping — because they were genuinely committed. I built my own first website while working another job.
When something is truly your number one priority, you find the time.
And here's the other side of it: sometimes the honest answer is that building a design business just isn't your top priority right now, and that is completely fine. There are different seasons of life, and you can't have five number-one priorities at once. If it genuinely isn't your top priority, you don't need to beat yourself up about not making progress — you can just acknowledge that something else is taking the top spot right now. What doesn't help anyone is pretending the obstacle is time when the actual obstacle is priority. Name the real thing, and you can actually work with it.
Truth #8: Most businesses are killed by their owners, not by the market.
This is something I've observed over and over across years of watching business friends and people I've known in the industry. When a business goes down, it is almost always an inside job. The external factors — the economy, the competition, the platform changes — are rarely the villain in this story.
Here's what actually tends to take businesses down:
Designing a business model you hate.
If you hate dealing with humans, do not start a web design agency. That is a terrible idea, because you are going to have a lot of humans to deal with every single day. Build something that fits who you actually are.
Too much pivoting.
Constantly having new ideas, constantly launching new offerings, constantly changing direction — until your audience is genuinely confused about what you actually offer. Consistency matters enormously for trust.
Personal life upheaval.
This is probably the most frequent one I see. Deaths, divorces, depression, mental health crises — something terrible happening in someone's personal life that takes the business down with it, especially when the business hasn't been built to a point where it can withstand the owner taking time away. If you're going through something like this, please give yourself enormous grace. Very few people can manage to keep running a business through a genuine personal crisis. Plan for it financially as best you can, and don't compare yourself to anyone online during those seasons.
Getting overwhelmed by your own complexity.
When you've said yes to every shiny object and now have 15 different offerings, it becomes so hard to maintain all of it that some people just… can't open their laptop anymore. The to-do list feels too enormous to even look at. Keep your business as simple as you possibly can, especially while you're growing.
Losing the trust of clients or collaborators.
The internet feels enormous, but within a specific industry it's a surprisingly small world. If you start gaining a reputation for compromising on integrity — cutting corners, making promises you don't keep, treating people poorly — your clients hear about it and your collaborators hear about it. A short-term gain is not worth a long-term reputation problem.
Truth #9: Efficiency is just as powerful as raising your prices.
Everyone talks about raising their prices. Far fewer people talk about the other lever — doing more work in less time. And honestly I think this second lever gets massively underestimated.
Think about it this way: if you currently take on 20 projects a year, and you got so efficient — through better processes, through a productized service, through template-based work — that you could comfortably take on 30 projects at the same rate, that is a significant revenue jump without changing a single number on your pricing page.
Both raising your prices and increasing your efficiency are legitimate paths to making more money. But most designers only ever think about the first one. Having really excellent processes and quick turnaround times are a key factor in how much you make — not just what you charge.
Truth #10: Don't chase AI tools just because everyone else is.
When new tech comes out, I see so many people hear about it, get excited, hop on it immediately, and start thinking about how they can offer something AI-related — because they want to be cutting edge and modern. And I get it. It feels like you'll fall behind if you don't.
But the better question is: does this tool help me do what I'm already trying to do, faster and better? If yes, absolutely use it. If the answer is no, you can genuinely just ignore it.
Use AI and new tools to speed up and improve the work you're already doing. What you don't need is a new AI-based service bolted onto your business because it felt like the moment's shiny object. I see designers making themselves make work projects because they feel like they should be using some new thing. Sometimes you should — but only if it relates to the plan you already had for this year.
Truth #11: Focus is genuinely the fastest path to your goals.
One offer. One ideal client. One marketing method. Scaled.
I have students hitting multi-six figures with exactly that setup. No bells and whistles, no elaborate suite of services, no presence on every platform. Just one really good thing, offered clearly to one type of person, marketed consistently in one way.
Every time you add a new offering, you're adding complexity. Every time you add a new platform, you're splitting your focus and your messaging. Every time you add a new niche, you're making it harder for people to know if you're right for them. And all of that complication tends to slow you down rather than speed you up.
You can make six figures with one offer. You can make a million dollars with one offer. And until you've genuinely maxed out what's possible with one offer to one person, you probably don't need anything else.
Truth #12: People have an irrational love of bundles.
If you have multiple services that genuinely complement each other — website design and copywriting, for example — those can absolutely be two separate standalone offerings. But they can also be a bundle, offered with a small discount. And people love it.
They love feeling like they're getting a deal. The combination makes natural sense to them. This is one of the easiest ways to increase your average project value without raising the price of any individual service. If your offerings pair well together, it's worth trying a bundled option and seeing how your clients respond. More often than not, they'll go for it.
Truth #13: There is no hack. There is no shortcut.
I know. Not what you wanted to read.
But I was having a conversation with a business friend recently and she put it perfectly — she said she sometimes gets people who are basically just asking her for the hack. What is the shortcut to get the result? And her answer was: there isn't one. If you are actively looking for the shortcut, you are probably not going to find the success you're looking for, because success doesn't work that way.
The path to success is doing the right things, putting your time and effort into the right work, and doing that work well. The closest thing to a hack I've ever found is getting really, really good at decision-making — knowing what is actually worth your time and what isn't. But even that is a skill you develop over time through experience, not a shortcut you stumble across on the internet.
Stop looking for the shortcut and start focusing on doing good work. That is what builds a business.
Truth #14: Better decisions are worth more than any time-saving tool.
Let's say you do get distracted by a shiny object. You add another platform, or you launch 12 new offerings, and then six months later you realise — you still can't book yourself, you're still not hitting your revenue goals, and now you've spent months on things that didn't move the needle.
Each one of those distractions takes an enormous amount of time. Learning a new platform. Creating new offerings. Redoing your marketing message. Building a new sales page. Trying to grow a new audience.
And if you had just made a better decision at the beginning — "I'm going to spend the next six months going deeper on this one marketing method rather than learning a new platform" — you could have reached your goals so much faster by just doing the right things.
I know this is especially hard at the start, when you don't yet have a circle of business-savvy friends to bounce ideas off. That was one of the things I struggled with most when I went full-time in my web design business — sitting at my laptop with no clients, genuinely not knowing what I should be working on. If that's where you are right now, find a resource or a person who can help you figure out what to focus on first, because getting that right from the beginning changes everything.
Truth #15: The most important business decision is who you marry.
I know this one might feel like it came out of left field in a blog post about web design. But stay with me.
Your partner is the person you spend the most time with. They influence your thinking, your confidence, your energy, and your willingness to take risks more than almost anyone else in your life. The whole idea of "you are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with" — your partner is that principle on steroids.
If your partner isn't supportive of your business or your dreams, it will hold you back. Not because they're a bad person, but because you will be constantly second-guessing yourself, and that makes following through on your goals so much harder.
I actually got to talk about this with Richard Branson — yes, really, I met him on his island, we played tennis — and he brought this up himself before the game. He's been happily married to Joan for over 40 years. She isn't there at everything. She doesn't go on every business trip or attend every event. She's much less social than he is. But she is fully, genuinely supportive of him chasing his dreams and doesn't hold him back from anything he wants to do.
You don't need a partner who wants to be on your podcast or help run your business. You just need someone who is genuinely, wholeheartedly on your side.
Truth #16: Great team members need both a skill fit and an interest fit.
As you grow and start bringing on team members or contractors, you need both. Not one. Both.
Skill fit means the person is actually good at the thing you need them to do. If you need someone to write copy, and they're not good at writing copy, that's a skill fit problem. It sounds obvious, but I see people keep team members in the wrong seats because they like the person or feel guilty about the alternative.
Interest fit means the person genuinely wants to do the thing you're hiring them for. If they have zero interest in managing social media and you've hired them to manage social media, that's going to show up in their output and their consistency.
Here's the harder truth: if someone isn't performing well from the start, they very rarely get significantly better over time. It might be a wrong-seat problem — their skills are great but the role doesn't suit them, and maybe there's another role in your business that would. But if there isn't, it's unfortunately better for everyone involved — including that person — to part ways quickly rather than dragging it out hoping things improve.
Truth #17: Your business model is the most important choice you'll make.
Agency owner. Solo designer. Template shop. SEO consultant. Someone who does intensive day-rate builds. Someone who only works with other developers. There are so many different business models within web design — and none are inherently better than the others. But they are wildly different in terms of what your day-to-day life actually looks like.
An agency means team, which means management, which means a very different daily experience than being a solo designer. A template business means mass marketing, which means spending a huge portion of your time on audience-building rather than on design. A consulting model means calls and strategy — perfect if you love that, exhausting if you don't.
Before you choose your model, think carefully about:
→ What brings you joy in a day?
→ How much team do you want, if any?
→ How much client interaction suits you?
→ Do you love designing but hate marketing?
Because if you hate marketing and you pick a model that requires you to spend most of your time on mass marketing rather than designing, you are going to burn out — not because you were bad at design, but because you picked the wrong model for who you are.
Truth #18: Templates are a brilliant business — but only if you have an audience first.
I talk about this more than almost anything else, and I will keep talking about it because I see people get this backwards constantly.
Everyone wants to build templates. Nobody wants to build an audience.
Two things need to be true for someone to buy your template: one, the design needs to be good. And two, they need to actually be able to find it. Imagine the most beautiful template shop in the world, sitting on a street with tumbleweeds blowing past. Nobody's buying because nobody's seeing. That is the same as spending all your time building perfect templates and none of your time marketing them.
Build the audience first. Then build the templates. Every single time.
Truth #19: Complementary services are completely optional.
I get this question constantly in our monthly Q&A calls. A student will say a client has asked if they also do copywriting, or branding, or CRM setup, or SEO — should they learn it and offer it too?
My answer is always the same question back: would you actually enjoy doing that?
If yes — brilliant, go for it. If the answer is anything less than genuine enthusiasm, the answer is no. There are enough clients in the world for you to work only on the things you actually want to do. When you enjoy what you do, you do it better — and that's good for everyone.
Truth #20: Stop switching software.
Every software switch costs weeks. Sometimes months. And half the time, after you've done all the work of migrating everything over, you land on the new platform and discover it has a different problem you didn't anticipate — and then you consider switching back. That is the absolute worst possible outcome.
In ten years of running my business, we have switched software exactly twice:
→ Email marketing: Mailchimp to Kit, very early on.
→ Course hosting: Teachable to ThriveCart, just this past year.
Both times, there were very specific, genuine reasons we couldn't do what we needed to do on the old platform. A slight inefficiency or minor annoyance? Not a good enough reason. We actually sat with a Teachable inefficiency for a long time — setting up course bundles was complicated and took extra hours every launch — because we calculated that migrating our entire student database would take a team member weeks of work. The slight ongoing inconvenience was worth it.
Can you still achieve everything you need to achieve on your current platform? If yes, sit with the minor annoyance. Only switch when there's something you genuinely cannot do — and even then, do a thorough test before you commit.
Truth #21: Your lowest-priced clients are your most price-sensitive clients.
If you're charging $300 or $500 for a website and everyone you talk to tells you that even a $50 increase is out of the question, that doesn't mean you've hit the ceiling of what the market will pay. It means you are in a corner of the market where price sensitivity is extraordinarily high — and those clients are always going to tell you your prices are too high, because that's the nature of who they are.
There are designers out there charging $10,000, $20,000, $50,000 for a project. Those clients are real. So if those price points exist and everyone you're talking to is telling you that you can't raise your rate from $500 to $600, the problem is not that high-value clients don't exist. It's that your current marketing is only reaching deeply price-sensitive ones.
The solution: change your messaging, change your positioning, and stop doing marketing that only attracts budget-conscious buyers. Get out of that part of the market altogether, rather than trying to squeeze a higher rate from people who were never going to pay it.
Truth #22: The biggest thing between you and higher prices is probably your mindset.
When you work for yourself, nobody gives you a raise. There's no performance review, no boss deciding you deserve 10% more. You are the person who has to make that decision.
Your past experiences with prices — how clients have responded, whether a price increase went well or badly, what you've been told about money over your lifetime — all of that is sitting in your brain influencing the number you put on your services page. And a lot of the time, the number is lower than it needs to be not because the market won't pay more, but because something in your head is stopping you from asking.
Start paying attention to what happens in your mind when you think about raising your prices. What are the thoughts? Are they actually true? Run them by a trusted friend. Question them out loud. Because the decision to charge more starts entirely in your head, and until something shifts there, the number on your pricing page is likely to stay right where it is.
Truth #23: The second biggest thing is probably your design skills.
Sometimes the mindset is fine — you've done the work, you feel good, you've raised your prices — and you're noticing that you're not booking at the new rate. Before you spiral, consider honestly: is the work at the level you want to be charging?
There is a real, significant difference between the quality of strategy, SEO thinking, and actual visual design between someone charging $1,000 and someone charging $20,000. Those aren't arbitrary numbers attached to the same work.
If you have a gut feeling that your work isn't quite there yet for the price point you want — that is not a reason to give up. Design skills are learned. They are not something you're born with or not. Get honest feedback from people who will tell you the truth, compare your work to designers charging what you want to charge, identify the specific gaps, and go work on closing them. That's the path.
Truth #24: More income won't create financial freedom if your desires always grow to match it.
So many people start a business because they want financial freedom. But then they make more, and more, and more — and somehow they're still spending everything, still feeling behind, still not free.
The reason: there will always be someone with more. There will always be something fancier, a bigger house, a more expensive version of whatever you want. If your inner sense of "enough" is always set just above whatever you currently have, you will never reach financial freedom no matter how much you make.
The approach that actually works: identify what you genuinely value spending money on, go all in on those things, and be unapologetically frugal about everything else. Not trying to have the best of everything in every category — but knowing deeply what matters to you and spending accordingly.
I start every year's business planning by asking: what is this money actually for? What does the life I want to live actually cost? And then I work backwards from that to what the business needs to generate. If the answer to that question is ever just "as much as humanly possible" — that's a sign it's worth going a bit deeper on what you're really after.
Truth #25: If you can't stop comparing yourself, start unfollowing.
The comparison trap is real, it is pervasive, and nearly everyone who spends time on social media deals with it. And the most direct, effective solution is simply to stop seeing what other people have.
If certain accounts make you feel inadequate, unfollow them. If the overall experience of being on social media sends you into a spiral of comparison and self-doubt, get off it. I have an entire video about running a business without being on social media — it might be more relevant to your situation than you'd expect. Your mental health and your ability to show up for your own business are worth protecting.
Truth #26: A professional photoshoot is worth every penny.
You know better than anyone what bad photos do to an otherwise beautiful website. You've had clients send you terrible images and thought — how am I supposed to make something polished out of this?
Don't do that to your own website. Good photography is part of good design. Invest in it.
Truth #27: Good education is worth the money — at the right moment.
The right moment is when you're genuinely confused about what to work on next, or when you're getting contradictory advice from seventeen different directions and the puzzle pieces won't fit together. When you're reading article after article and everyone seems to be saying something slightly different and you're more confused than when you started — that is when a good course or coaching programme can genuinely transform things.
But I want to be honest: courses and coaching have been some of the best investments I've ever made and also some of the worst. The only difference between the two was whether the course was solving a real problem I actually had at that moment — or whether I bought it because it was on sale and seemed vaguely relevant.
Find one person whose business you genuinely admire, whose approach makes sense to you, and go deep with them. Don't buy every course that could possibly relate to your situation. Buy the one that solves the specific problem you're facing right now.
Truth #28: You don't always need a coach. Sometimes you need support, not direction.
At the beginning of your business, you almost certainly need guidance — someone above you who can help you figure out what to do and in what order. The confusion is real and the value of good mentorship at that stage is enormous.
But here's what I realised at some point in my own business: I kept hiring coaches year after year, almost out of habit, because every year it had been a great decision. Until I sat down one year and realised — I already know what I'm doing. I know my direction. I know my plan. What I actually need is not someone above me giving me instructions. It's someone below me helping me execute what I've already decided to do.
Early in your business: you probably need education and direction.
Later in your business: you probably need support and execution help.
Both are valuable, but they're very different things — and buying the wrong one at the wrong time wastes money and time.
Truth #29: Read Profit First.
That's it. I'm not going to elaborate. Just read it. Your future bank account will thank you.
Truth #30: Your audience will look a lot like you.
This one I find genuinely fascinating to watch play out. I was in London a while back and went to two events in the same day — one hosted by a business friend who is a British mum in her 40s, and one hosted by Ali Abdaal, who is a former doctor turned YouTuber with an Indian background.
I walked into the first room and it was full of British mums in their 40s — same socioeconomic world, same energy, same vibe. I walked across town to Ali's event and the room was filled with well-educated, science-leaning guys who looked exactly like him. I was very obviously not the target demographic in that second room.
The point: whoever you are — your story, your aesthetic, your values, the small details of your life — that is what attracts people to you who are like you. And it works. My students, when I get on calls with them for success story interviews, are often strikingly similar to me in personality and life story. I find myself thinking: I would absolutely get a cocktail with this person.
Share your story. Share the personal details that might feel irrelevant to business. The detail that you moved to Europe for a relationship, that you love French markets, that you built your first business from an apartment in Switzerland — those details are not beside the point. For the right person, they are exactly the point. Lean into who you are. It is your best marketing.
Knowing these truths is one thing — acting on them is another. The designers who actually build the businesses they want aren't the ones who found some secret information. They're the ones who stayed focused, made good decisions, and kept showing up.
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