I started out my career building these sorts of websites, making $3000 Wordpress custom themes. The secret sauce was my lead source who had super developed business sense and social skills, and went out and wined and dined clients and sold them these sites. He went on to build an agency and I was the first freelancer he hired. I'm pretty sure he was pitching wide reaching marketing and strategy help to these clients, and a website was just one part of that.

If a business just wants to make a simple website themselves, I see absolutely no reason not to just use Squarespace or equivalent. I agree with others in this thread that this kind of website has become completely commoditized when taken in a vacuum.

I've done much better as a solo freelance software developer doing webapp development - Django/Vue is my current stack of choice but any full stack can work. The advantage this has over building design-heavy sites for small businesses is that this kind of dev still has a long way to go before being commoditized, and in general is worth north of $100/hr.