Hire local usually arrives as a moral argument. Support small business, keep it in the community, all of which I believe. It is also not the reason I would give you, because it asks you to pay for somebody's proximity as a favor, and nobody should be running their business on favors.
The practical case is narrower and, I think, more convincing. There are specific things that get harder the further away the person is, and there are specific things that do not get any easier by being close. It is worth knowing which is which before you decide. If you are weighing the money rather than the mileage, what you are actually paying for in a website covers that, and custom website design in Chattanooga is where the rest of my work lives.
Photographs are the clearest example
Somebody has to take pictures of your business, and there are only three ways it happens. A photographer comes and shoots it. You send phone photos and hope they hold up at full width. Or the site uses stock, and now your page shows a room that does not exist.
A team three states away cannot do the first one without a flight in the budget, which means for most local businesses it quietly becomes the second or the third. That decision usually never gets made out loud. It just shows up on the finished site as a handshake photo, or a kitchen that is not your kitchen.
This is the part I care most about, and I should say plainly that it is also what I do, so read it knowing that. I photograph the businesses I build for. Not because remote work is illegitimate, but because the pictures are the part of a website that cannot be written well later.
Being in the room changes what gets asked
Most of what makes a business worth choosing does not come up in a questionnaire. It comes up sideways, while somebody is showing you around and mentions the thing they always do for nervous customers, or points at a wall and tells you why it is that color.
Owners almost never volunteer those details, because to them they are ordinary. You find them by being there long enough to notice what the person does automatically. That is a proximity advantage, and it is a real one... but it is about time and attention, not about mileage. Somebody far away who spends three hours on a call will find more than somebody local who fills in a form.
What proximity does not buy you
Local is not a quality signal. Being twenty minutes away does not make someone good at this, and I would rather you knew that from me than found it out afterward. Ask to see finished work. Ask who is actually doing the building. Ask what happens in month seven when something breaks.
Plenty of work also does not need anyone nearby. If your business is entirely online, if your customers never see a physical place, if you already have photography you are happy with, the case above mostly evaporates. Distance stops costing you anything, and you should hire on the work.
And local does not mean cheaper. It usually is not. What it changes is what is possible, not what it costs.
Where I sit in this
I am based in Chattanooga and I work with businesses here in person. That is a genuine constraint on how much work I can take, and it is the trade I chose: fewer projects, but I have stood in the building, met the person who answers the phone, and taken the photographs myself.
I am not going to tell you that makes the website perform better. I have no evidence for that and I am not going to invent any. What I can tell you is that it changes what ends up on the page, because the material is different when it is yours.
One question to ask anyone you are considering
Local or not, ask this before you sign anything: who is taking the photographs, and when?
It is a small question and it exposes almost everything. If the answer is confident and specific, you are dealing with someone who has thought about how your business will actually be represented. If the answer is vague, or it turns out to be you and your phone, that is not a dealbreaker... it just means you now know what your site is going to look like, before you have paid for it rather than after.