$100k/year as a Squarespace Website Designer: How it's done EXPLAINED!
Making $100k/year as a web designer is something that a lot of designers dream of when they get started. But it can seem so mystical or out of reach. I am super excited to share this blog post with you because I had the chance to sit down with none other than Paige Brunton, OG Squarespace Guru to pick her brain about how exactly to turn your web design business into a 6 figure business.
For those of you who don’t know Paige, she is a Squarespace Expert turned online educator for entrepreneurs.
She started out as a Squarespace Website Designer and when her waiting list of clients became longer than she possibly had the hours for, she decided to start creating courses on designing in Squarespace and then eventually on building a business as a Squarespace Website Designer.
She now focuses on being an online educator who helps aspiring entrepreneurs learn how to build successful online businesses.
In this video, we get into the nitty gritty around how to make $100k/year as a Squarespace Website Designer. Is is possible? How possible? How exactly do you do it? … and more!
What's the difference between a designer who charges on the lower end and a designer who’s making six figures?
I've helped thousands of people to become website designers. A new group of students would come in and some would just immediately start killing it. And we're like, what is consistent with all of these people who are just like busting out the gate and just getting a ton of bookings, booking out months in advance, getting really high-priced projects, like what do they all have in common? We found a few things.
They had really incredible design skills.
Now this did not always start off that way. They often built up over time to get these really great design skills or maybe they had a background, some of them had a little bit of an advantage because they had already done some design work in a past job or maybe they had a graphic design degree, not all by any means. But people who are doing really well, who are making six figures often have incredible design or…
They had a really solid niche.
It was tends to be like one of the two. So they're getting projects because people look at their work and they're like it is the most unbelievable, beautiful thing in the world or this really identifies with my personal design style. Alternatively, they had some sort of like very specific slice of the market that they were trying to talk to as opposed to trying to talk to everyone.
That's something which personally took me a really long time. I was so against the whole like niching thing and everything and I just like didn't know what to pick and it was so painful.
I want people to know, you don't need to start with a niche. You don't need to start with incredible design skills.
If you saw my work at the beginning, believe me, you would not be like, that's incredible design. It takes time, but those are the two things which I noticed tends to be very consistent with people who are surpassing the six figure mark every year. They have nailed one of those two things over time.
The other thing I noticed, and this was interesting. I remember I was on a Q and A call with a bunch of students once and there was a girl who was like, okay, bought the course and I just finished university last week. I'm not going to apply for any jobs. I'm just going to do this. And I was like, okay, like some people have like a sink or swim mentality. For me, I was like, that sounds so unbelievably stressful to me.
I did find that like something consistent with the ones who are doing really, really well. They didn't all do to that extent by any means. But at some point they decided. Sometimes it was right when they started, sometimes it was a little bit in, but they're like, I am going to figure this out. I am going to be successful with this. I am not going to have 27 backup plans. I'm just gonna keep at this until I get there and that was also really consistent with the ones who are doing exceptionally well.
The other thing I would say is….marketing strategy.
The difference between someone who's stuck on Fiverr making $500 a project versus someone who's making $15,000 a project is they have picked a marketing strategy and they're implementing it and they're not relying on Upwork or Fiverr or any of those sort of platforms or Etsy. I started on Etsy. They're not relying on those platforms to get their clients. They're really doing a marketing strategy which gets their clients to come to them.
Rebecca: I think it's important that the marketing strategy has to be authentic to you as well. I remember when I first started out and I was trying blogging and social media and all of those things, but a lot of those are long-term strategies. And so I was really slow to start out. And so I was like, okay, I want a short-term strategy. And what had kind of come up with somebody who was doing a course on cold pitching. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna do that. Well, that's just, that's not me. I am not a cold pitcher. I am not somebody that can, I just don't, it doesn't feel authentic to me. I think it didn't come across because they knew I was almost like, sorry to bother you, but can I have a moment of your time? Like, it just wasn't me. It just didn't work and then I'm thinking l'm doing something wrong, but it just it just wasn't me and so I ditched that real quick. I think having a marketing strategy that works but is part of you and is something that you're going to feel comfortable putting the time and effort in because it does take a huge amount of time and if you're not into it and it's not for you then that's just going to make your life horrible. It's going to not be enjoyable.
Honestly, it’s so true. I had the same lesson that you had there. I always struggled to get myself to go to the gym. I just don’t want to do it, I just hate going to the gym. No part of me enjoys that. So, I was listening to a fitness podcast once and the guy was like “stop trying to force yourself to do exercise that you hate”. and I was like, oh thats a good point. He was like “anything that is moving your body counts as exercise”. So if you like going for a hike, then go for a hike. Stop trying to get yourself to like pump a barbell in the gym. And I was like, oh, good point.
I definitely had that experience when it came to business. I'm just personally not somebody who wants to post my life on Instagram every day. I don't want to show up on any social media every day. That's not for me. I want to create content and then I want to schedule it to go out when I want it to because that just works better for me. So same thing in the business is like, I tried to force myself into doing things I didn't wanna do and that didn't go so well. All the shoulds, like that doesn't work. So even if, as I talked about like a really solid niche, don't should yourself into a niche. If you're like, no, I'm not finding anything that I wanna niche into, that's fine. You can still be successful without a niche.
Again, as I said, the students who I'm noticing are like smashing six figures every year, they either really worked on their design skills or they really worked on niche or they really worked on getting so good at a marketing strategy that just like they were so in demand. When you are in demand, when you are getting way more inquiries and you have space, that's what enables you to up the price.
I started with a few things but eventually got rid all the ones I didn't like and eventually was just blogging. I love writing blog posts and that was really easy to me and then got to the point where I was getting an inquiry a day from people going from Google to my blog and then inquiring through my website. I'm one human. I do not have time for 365 web design projects in a year and so it's like when you get to the point where you just have so many inquiries, suddenly your price can go way higher and so that's I mean that's supply and demand, I guess.
How much can you charge? How do I know how much I can charge? How do I price my services?
Let's start with normal-ish pricing to higher end pricing, just to like give some ballpark ideas.
Average price per web design project charged by freelance web designers (USD) - paigebrunton.com
Starting Out ($2500 - $3000): All of my students, because you invested in yourself, you took a course, you know what you're doing when it comes to building websites. I don't wanna see you charging a hundred or a few hundred or even a thousand dollars. If you want to do a project or two for free to build a portfolio, no problem. But from there you shouldn't be charging a thousand dollars for like the skill and expertise and level of quality of websites that you'd be building after you know what you're doing.
Middle Range/Average ($4000 - $6000): We're talking about a Squarespace website; five, six, seven pages, just the website, no branding, no e-commerce, no to those other things.
Higher Price Projects ($8000 - $15000+): I'm noticing for students who are like really doing well, really nailing marketing strategies, creating incredible work for their clients, those sorts of things. Something really interesting, which one of my past students did, and she's definitely on the higher end of pricing. I think her pricing might be around $15,000 right now per project. She actually built someone, not just a website, but kind of an entire business. She created what she calls the City Living Network. What she does is she builds people a location-specific blog, and then she educates them. She writes them a few blog posts, she gets the website set up, she educates them on like how to work with local businesses and how to write content that ranks in Google and so it's kind of bigger than just a website package.
So you can always up those prices if you wanna add on copywriting or you wanna add on brand design or if you're doing any sort of like e-commerce through the website, any integrations. I know people setting up courses is like a really huge thing that website designers are all often being asked to do now. So those things can all obviously bring the project up like to a much higher rate as well. So I'd say realistically, you're ranging from like, in terms of like experience, skill, in-demand-ness, whatever, from starting at maybe like $3000 all the way up to like $15,000 for like website projects. And again, it could go higher than that if you're adding on some other things too.
Do I have to have a portfolio? Do I need to do some designs for free to build a portfolio?
Great question. So you can or you cannot, either one is fine, either one works. It really depends on your comfort level. So for example, when I started, I was still in university, so I was still doing a full-time degree, had a part-time job, and then I was also building some of the website on top of it. And so I was like, I don't know if I can promise finishing it within this timeline, which I wanna do. I want to do websites in two weeks, but I wasn't 100% sure. It was someone I knew who I was gonna build this website for, it was a nonprofit. I wanna like just kinda test this out. I wanna treat this like a real client project, like with like deadlines and all these things, but I wanna do it for you for free because I'm testing this process, just wanna see if it works. So, my hope is that you give me a testimonial and that you're gonna be flexible with me if it does take longer, but my real hope is that we do this in a really professional sense so that I can just like test if this works. And so for me, doing the very first one for free felt really good because it helped me know that I could do it and it just made my stress level like so much lower. But all the ones after that I did, I did them all paid after that. If you wanna do two or three for free, great, but like I wouldn't go beyond that. Like we don't need to do 15 projects for free in order to, get started.
On the other hand, if you feel comfortable charging from the start, that’s great too. When it comes to charging a few hundred dollars, I wouldn't even do it because it's such a small amount of money that people don't even really respect the project necessarily.
Rebecca: Yeah, I didn't have a good experience with offering for free. I tried to offer my first one for free too. I wanted to test the process. I was really nervous. I was like, okay, this will be low risk. I mean, maybe I didn't communicate the expectations very clearly. I find that can make a huge difference in a project as well. But it just did not go well because they just didn't take it seriously. When you have free or lower costs, you're attracting a certain type of client and it tends to be somebody who wants the world for a very small price. And in my experience, it's been the worst clients that I have worked with. And so it didn't really help me test my process or my project because it was just such a headache.
Yeah, it's totally true. I think actually one of the reasons that I maybe didn't have that problem was because when we started discussing it, we weren't discussing doing it for free. We were just discussing their need for a website and everything, and then I really thought it through and it was like, okay, I'll see, like maybe I'll work with you on this project. Let me like give me some time to think about if I really have time to fit this in with like all the other stuff I'm doing right now. And so we had kind of spoken about working together before we even talked about the price. Then I was like, okay, cool, I wanna do this for free just to whatever, but I wanna do it in this really professional way and everything.
For example, I've seen people post in Facebook groups like, hey, wanna do a free website project? Do you want a free website? And I think maybe starting off with that is maybe getting those people who are literally going to make your life harder, and therefore gonna maybe knock your confidence that you could do it correctly because they're really difficult to work with, so it's really difficult to wrap the project up on time.
I agree that the way you go into it is good, but yeah, I totally think it's also fully valid for you to charge for the first project if you wanna charge for the first project. If you have the confidence to do that, I think that's also a great way to go. So it's not like you have to do one way or the other.
The other option is you can make concept projects for your first projects to go in your portfolio, which doesn't even involve another human anyways, so yeah.
Rebecca: Yeah, I never linked live websites in my portfolio, even if they were for a client because I handed over all my projects and they could change them. So I never had live links, so they wouldn't know whether it was a real person or not. There's a good tip for you too, if you're not wanting to do it for free or test out the client process, you could build it with just concepts.
Does the length of a project contribute to the cost?
It definitely is a factor. Let's say that your projects start at $7,500. Maybe that's including six pages or seven pages on the website. If it's more pages we're like adding on a couple hundred bucks for like these extra pages and everything. You do have this sort of starting out rate because if you think about, okay, I have so many weeks in a year that I can build websites in. And if each project takes me a week or two weeks or three weeks, whatever you decide you want your timeline to be, I have like this many spaces. Let's say you have 20 spaces to build websites in a year and you want to make six figures. Well, you've got to then work backwards. So if someone's like, I just want a one page project or something, you need to decide do I even want to take on that project? Because maybe I can't be charging $7,500 for a one page website. So therefore I would rather do a full website build, if that makes sense.
It's also the time to onboard a client, off-board a client, manage the project, do the consultation call, get their homework together, communicate with them, all of those things take time. So you do also need to set your sort of minimum, if that makes sense. So the size of the website does impact, but I would also say we wanna start with how much you want to make in a year, how many project spaces do you have, therefore how much does each project need to cost? Is that at all in line with what's happening in the industry?
Rebecca: Yeah, I like how you talked about going backwards, because I think a lot of times people are still thinking in the hourly. Like, oh, I want to charge this much per hour. And then they're trying to figure out how many hours this web design takes. And I think that's it's a hard way of trying to scope out a project. So I like how you said, the average website five page website, it's going to take me two weeks from start to finish. So I have this many two week periods in a year, how much do I want to charge and kind of work backwards. I think that's important for people to kind of make that shift from an hourly to a value of a project.
Totally, totally. I think that can be difficult for people if you come from the VA world, if you come from, I don't know, some other world, like hourly is the way that things work and everything, but really when it comes to website design, it's not so much about your hours. A friend asked me, she's starting a catering company, and she was like, hey, can you help me build a website? And I was like, yeah, sure. So just on a Sunday, like I literally knocked out an entire website for her. I didn't charge her anything, she's one of my best friends. I could build her an entire incredible website in like six hours on a Sunday. Would it make sense if I was like, oh well, hourly, right? No, it doesn't really make sense because it took me so long to get to the point where I could knock out an incredible website in six hours.
Rebecca: Yeah, your hour is different than a beginner's hour or somebody else's hour.
Exactly, exactly. And that's the thing as well, if when you're a beginner, you're like, oh, I feel bad because I'm charging hourly, but this is taking me seven hours because I didn't know how to do this thing. So I had to spend seven hours researching something on Google or YouTube or whatever. And then you feel bad to charge your client for all that time because you just didn't know how to do the thing. But that's the same once you get really good, it also doesn't really make sense in the other way. So again, it's more based off of like, okay, what is the value to the end client? What is this website worth to them? How much you need to be making in a year? So you kind of set your minimums of like, I'm not gonna give away two week period for less than this amount of money.
Can you have a work-life balance and make six figures?
Totally, totally, such a valid question. Let me actually tell you a story quickly because it's kind of funny. So in my mastermind, the lady who runs the mastermind sent an email to all of us to update us on some trip that we're going on together. She got 18 auto responses back and they were all like basically along the lines of like.
“I'm enjoying my summer vacation, living my life, doing my thing. Like my team is there to support you or like there's like the resources in the FAQ section or like I'll be back in September and whatever.”
So she was just kind of joking. She's like, I can see you all are off living your best life and no one's actually working right now. These are women with incredible businesses. So no, you do not need to work constantly in order to run a larger business.
The key difference, I think, between people who run these larger businesses who make more money and the people who are running the smaller businesses and are in the beginner stages. It's choosing what you spend your time on.
When I started my business and when I see a lot of other people starting a business, they're coming back to the shoulds. I should do Instagram, I should do Pinterest, I should do this, I should do that, whatever. I should offer these 77 different types of services to my clients and I should do anything that they ever ask me.
The longer you're in business, the more you realize like, I'm gonna offer one thing or like two packages and I'm going to have one marketing strategy or two marketing strategies and I'm going to get so exceptionally good at this or so exceptionally well known for this that people just like come to me for this thing. So I think it's really about the decisions that you make. If you start off doing all the things, like it's really worth evaluating after let's say year one of your business, look back at where were you spending your time and what brought in money into your business and are things correlating or not correlating and what can you just stop doing.
So for me, I started off doing like a bajillion marketing strategies and then I looked back at every client which inquired this year, where did they come from? The blog. I had like one from Pinterest or something and I was like, okay, screw Pinterest, screw Instagram, screw all of these other things. I'm just gonna do this thing which is like clearly already working.
When it came to different services, I used to offer a few different things and then I realized, you know what? The thing that gets me the biggest bang for my buck in terms of if, I did website audits, for example. They brought in a couple hundred bucks; between the onboarding, the communication, doing the call and organizing my life around the fact that I had this call to do when I normally don't have calls and everything. I realized, you know what? Actually, the amount of time that this is taking versus how much it's making versus if I just do one more website design project…. I should just get rid of that service basically. So it's really about evaluating what are you doing and again, how is your time being spent and where you're making money. Where is that aligning and not aligning?
Also just outsourcing things. So when it comes to outsourcing, it's about outsourcing the lowest dollar per hour thing. So say, for example, website designers would be like, oh, I'm like maxed out on work so therefore I need to hire another website designer to bring in more money in the business. But a website designer costs them a fair amount because that's a more highly skilled thing to do versus if you're still doing your own bookkeeping or you're doing your customer service or you're doing some sort of like admin nonsense or clearing the recordings out of your Zoom or something. It's like, maybe I don't need to hire another website designer, but I need to spend my time on higher dollar per hour tasks versus these lower dollar per hour tasks. Maybe it's getting stuff out of your plate that doesn't need to be there. So you can, again, focus your efforts on more money generating things. And yes, then you're spending money on paying a person to do this thing, but it could cost you $20 an hour as opposed to $100 an hour, if that makes sense.
So it's really about making decisions differently as opposed to working more hours. You do not need to work more hours. You just need to get a little bit more strategic about how you're spending your time.
Rebecca: When to hire and how to hire is a difficult decision to make in your business. But I like how you talked about efficiency. And the other thing that you kind of hinted at, but it's something that I really learned was making data-driven decisions in your business. And I think when you're first starting out, you're like, oh wait, I'm the business owner. I have to make all the hard decisions and a lot of times we don't necessarily have somebody we can like bounce ideas off of, or we don't really know who to turn to, to be like, okay, do I spend money on this thing or this thing? To hire a business coach is so expensive. It's often out of reach at the beginning. And I was like, well, how do I know what decision to make? How do I know what to do? I think that the data driven decision is so important. Recording how long this is taking me and how much money am I spending on this and where's the money coming in to the business and recording all of that so later on you can make decisions based on facts and not just based on how you're feeling about something or your emotions, right, to remove that emotional piece out of it and go back to analytics.
Yep. Absolutely. I should also mention that sometimes when I think about efficiency, it's actually not hiring a person. It's sometimes like, for example, I didn't use a CRM system in my business at the beginning, and so signing contracts and following up on payments and all these different things, managing a project with so much work, and then I got a CRM system, I got HoneyBook personally.
The amount of time that saved me. I didn't even need to hire a person, I just needed to set up a system and a software, which yes, it did cost me money and everything, but the amount of time that it saved me was definitely worth it. So it's like, is there things that you're doing in your business that could be done faster if you had some sort of a software to help you with it, and in which case, that would be a really great first investment, for example.
Then to your point about, sometimes you feel alone and you don't even know what decision you should be making, trying to. Sometimes business coaches can be very expensive. Sometimes you can get inside of communities where there's people who are really experienced. I look at our student community, and because the course has been going for so long, there's people who have been running a web design business for five years, and someone asks a question who started this year, or when I do monthly Q&A calls with the students, it's like they can still get that sort of an answer and sort of get that advice from someone who's been in it a bit longer who knows how to make these decisions, maybe in a different way than everyone who's just like the blind leading the blind, all first year people.
Rebecca: Yeah, I know it can be very difficult, I think, in communities. You know, you get sometimes so many different opinions thrown at you that it can be hard, but if you're in a community like you're saying where they're a specific community, so I think it's important to also be careful with who you're surrounding yourself with and be cautious of what communities you're joining and pay attention to who's in that community and who's giving that advice.
Exactly, yeah, coming back to the blind leading the blind, you need to figure out, like is the person who's answering this question, do they actually know what they're talking about? Be conscious of where the advice is coming from for sure.
Is making 6 figures really possible? How many designers can achieve this?
When I look at people who do these different online jobs, virtual assistants, brand designers, copywriters, these sorts of things, these are typically not as well paid as something in the web design industry. So making six figures in the web design industry, if you think about if your average project is, I don't know, $7,500 per project, and you can knock those out in a week or two weeks, it becomes pretty easy to achieve that six figure mark. I feel like this is lucky and maybe unusual in the web design industry because it is on average a lot more well paid than the average like online job that's out there. I did do a video which compared like all the different online jobs and what they were typically paid and website designer definitely came out at the top in with Facebook ads manager as well. So those are really like the two highest paid online jobs you can get these days. And so again, when you just think about, okay, how many projects could I do in the year? What is the average price of those projects? Knowing the fact that people start out at like $3000 maybe per project, but then it's going up to like $15,000. Doesn't take that many $15,000 projects to get to six figures in a year. So it's definitely very possible within this industry.
A lot of virtual assistants are charging like $20, $30, $40 an hour or something like, how am I ever going to get to six figures? And it's true that math, coming back to your question about like, do I just have to work an insane number of hours? If you're staying in something like that, then yes, it would take an insane number of hours. So you've really got to start figuring out what's like a higher value skill that I could offer that has a more valuable end result to a business owner. And that's kind of the key to getting there.
Rebecca: I think too, that's just counting web design. Most people, most designers that are making six figures, that's not their only source of income in their business. So I think it's also important to think about the other sources of income. I think I read an article, that talked about the average seven figure business owner or something had like seven streams of income. I can't remember, but it was like, it talked about the number of streams. So there's becoming affiliates for, HoneyBook, like I'm an affiliate for HoneyBook and Creative Law Shop and different places. I think that helps bring in money. You get revenue maybe from YouTube or from different platforms. And so I think it's important to also diversify your business in a way that you are bringing in income without adding to your hourly. Fo me, YouTube just made sense because I was posting my tutorials on YouTube. And then as a way to put them on my blog. Squarespace at the time didn't have the video upload feature. So it was YouTube or Vimeo. So I'll put them on YouTube and then I'll post them on my blog. And then I was like, well, I'm already doing this. So why don't I spend a little bit of time learning how to, you know, build up subscribers and maybe become monetized on YouTube. So it doesn't take any extra work from me. And yet now I have another stream of revenue in my business. And so I think that's important too, when you're thinking about getting to six figures is adding in other streams that don't add to your time.
Yes, that's so true. Honestly, that's one of the reasons I love YouTube and love having a channel. I was the same as you. It was just a video which goes in the blog and like whatever, I never even thought about it. At some point I got an email being like, you can turn on monetization and so I was just at some point like, okay, I'll just take it on and see what happens. It's like $1,000 a month from Squarespace Tutorials I had made five years ago.
Do I need training or some sort of certification to charge enough to make 6 figures?
It is not mandatory, but it helps get there a lot faster. I should clarify, there is no certain certification that is needed to be a website designer these days. That is not a thing. Of course you need to genuinely know how to build great websites to serve clients well and for anyone to actually take you seriously and want to book with you and everything. So you do need the skill of doing the job. Certain certification, certain degree, not a thing. My brothers both studied computer science in university. They are like building website design platforms like Squarespace. They are not actually building websites for small businesses. So don't think that you need to go to get a computer science degree in order to be a website designer because it's actually not even gonna lead you to sort of the job that we're talking about right now, building websites for small businesses.
But we have actually done a study and if you take some courses, we have definitely found that you are able, between a mix of confidence and better skills, charge significantly more for your web design projects, and so it definitely helps you to, you know be earning a little bit better.
I can say, however, you don't even need to start with taking a paid course if you don't want to. I do actually have something, and it's called the Profitable and Productive Web Designer Bootcamp. It's actually coming out live October 16th, 17th, and 18th 2023 and it is a little community if you wanna make some good web designer friends, people who are interested in the same thing.
We're talking all about finding clients, managing your projects, sort of like the introduction to what it means to be a website designer, again, what is normal pricing, what are the different like revenue generation options you have as a website designer, and we also have some really fun giveaways happening there as well to really get you started as a website designer. So that's something FREE which you can get started with.
Rebecca: Yeah, I love that you're still running this. That's how I got started. That's how I kind of came across Squarespace. I hadn't heard of Squarespace really before, but I knew I wanted to get into web design and I saw that you were hosting a free bootcamp and so I joined and got me hooked. And that's how I actually got started with that as well. So I love that you are running it again, because it's definitely was an amazing experience for sure.
It's always so nice to get to hang out with past students as well. I don't know if we mentioned it at any point, but Rebecca actually took the courses.
Rebecca: Yeah, yeah, that's how I got started. I did the profitable bootcamp and then I decided to purchased Square Secrets and Square Secrets Business from you and that's when I jumped into SquareSpace and the rest is history.
