How much should a tradesman pay for a website?
A tradesman should pay somewhere between £300 and £1,000 to have a website built properly, and between £99 and £500 a month to keep it working. Those are our figures, not an estimate of somebody else's. A five page site with your Google Business Profile looked after is £295 to set up and £99 a month. Everything above that is £995 to set up, and the monthly is £149, £299 or £499 depending on how much of the job you want us doing rather than you.
We publish that because almost nobody else will, and the silence is the reason this question gets asked so often.
Why is it so hard to find out what a website costs?
Because most firms in this trade treat the price as something you have to ring up for.
On 30 July 2026 we sat down and fetched the live pages of the agencies within reach of Sudbury, and saved the HTML so the figures could be checked later rather than remembered. One agency in the same town publishes everything: £550 for a basic site, from £2,000 for a professional one, £25 a month for managed hosting, and search work at £450, £650 and £850 a month, with a headline bundle of £2,500 plus £500 a month. That is a gift to anybody trying to budget.
The next one along publishes no price at all, on any page. When we measured three more local firms on 13 August, none of them published a price either.
So the honest answer to "why is this so confusing" is that four out of five of us have decided you should have to ask. You end up on a sales call before you know whether the thing is £600 or £6,000, and that is the point of it.
What do the different prices actually buy?
| What you pay | To set up | Each month | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | £295 | £99 | Five pages, your Google Business Profile looked after, and local search work every month |
| Essential | £995 | £149 | A design built for your business rather than a recoloured template, up to five town pages, and a monthly report |
| Growth | £995 | £299 | Everything above, plus the back office built for your trade, up to fifteen town pages, and review requests handled |
| Full | £995 | £499 | Everything above, plus the staff phone app, a photo shoot, your print refreshed every year, and Bing kept current beside Google |
The build fee is paid in two parts on the three larger tiers: £500 when you sign and £495 when the site goes live. Starter is paid in full. You are not tied into a twelve month contract to make the build fee add up, because we would rather charge you properly once than lock you in.
Two things sit outside all of that, so nobody finds them on an invoice later. A logo with business cards and an A5 flyer is £250 for all three. A full day of photography is £250. Google Ads is £495 to set up and £199 a month to manage, and that £199 is our fee, not your advertising budget. While your budget is under £1,500 a month the fee stays at £199, and above that it becomes ten per cent, and we tell you before it changes.
What are the ongoing costs, and which ones are unavoidable?
Every live website costs something to keep alive, whoever built it. There are four, and only the first two are genuinely unavoidable.
- Your web address. A .co.uk renews yearly. It is small money and it must be in your name.
- Hosting. The machine your site sits on. The agency across town charges from £5 a month without the extras and from £25 a month managed. Ours is inside the monthly fee.
- Maintenance. This is where the money goes on a WordPress build, because the software and its plugins need patching or the contact form quietly stops sending. Ask whether it is included or extra.
- Email on your own domain. A few pounds per person per month. Worth every penny, because a business advertising a free email address on fifteen pages of its own website is telling everybody something it did not mean to.
Will a website actually win you work, or is it a waste?
If your phone already rings all day on referrals, a website will not double your turnover this month, and anybody who tells you it will is selling.
What it does is decide what happens when somebody who has been given your name goes and looks you up, and what happens in a quiet February. Google's own guidance on how local results are ranked names three things: relevance, distance and prominence. You cannot move your van closer to everybody, and prominence takes years. Relevance is the one you can actually change this month, and it is mostly a matter of the words on your pages saying plainly what you do and where you do it.
When should you not buy a website at all?
This is the part most agencies leave out, so here it is.
If your Google Business Profile is not claimed and filled in, do that first, and do it before you spend a penny with anybody. It is free, it takes an afternoon, and for a lot of trades it brings in more work than the website will. If you are three months into trading and every job is coming from a family friend, spend the money on a van sign and come back in six months.
And if somebody quotes you a monthly fee with no build fee at all, read what happens to the site when you stop paying. Sometimes the answer is that it disappears.
What should you ask before you pay anybody?
Four questions, and the answers tell you more than the quote does.
- Do I own the domain, the site and the content outright? If the answer needs a paragraph, it is no.
- What is the total in year one, and in year two? A cheap build with an expensive contract is not a cheap build.
- Is the Google Business Profile in my name, with you as manager? It should be. If it is in the agency's name, leaving them costs you your reviews.
- Where do enquiries actually go? An email that lands in a folder nobody opens is not a lead.
Where to start
If you already have a site and want to know whether it is any good before spending anything, use the free website check. We run it, a person reads it, and the findings come back to you by email.
If you know roughly which tier fits, the prices and what is in each one are on the home page, and the trade pages spell out what a build looks like for plumbers and heating engineers, electricians, roofers, builders, decorators and landscapers and gardeners.
Or tell us what you need and we will tell you what it costs before you have to ask twice.