How much should a tradesman's website cost in 2026?

Cost & buying22 August 20267 min read

There is no single right price for a trade website, and anyone who gives you one without asking what your business does is quoting a template. But the ranges are not random either. They correspond to genuinely different amounts of work.

Below is what each band buys, who it suits, and where the money actually goes. We publish our own prices in full, so you can see exactly where we sit in this and judge it against everyone else.

Why the quotes vary so much

Three reasons, and only one of them is about quality.

The word covers different products. A one-page site with your number on it and a twenty-page site with service pages, area pages and written content are both “a website”. They are not the same job.

Some of the price is pricing, not cost. Agencies with offices and account managers have overheads that a freelancer does not. The overhead is real, but you are paying for it either way.

Some of it is what the seller thinks you will pay. This is the uncomfortable one. Day-rate quoting with no published prices exists partly so the number can move depending on how the conversation goes.

Under £500, or £10–15 a month

This is the website-builder band — Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy — or a very simple template someone fills in for you.

Who it suits: a sole trader who needs to exist online so people can check they are real, and who has the evenings to do it themselves.

What you are really paying: your own time, which is not free. The tools genuinely work. Setting one up properly is a weekend, and keeping it current is an ongoing drip. We have written a full comparison of that trade-off rather than pretending the option is bad.

Watch for: template sellers at the low end who register the domain in their own name. Ask before you pay.

£500–£1,000

A small built site, usually a handful of pages, put together for you.

Who it suits: sole traders and small firms who want to be online properly without doing it themselves. For most one- and two-van operations this is genuinely enough.

What you should get: your services, your areas, your photographs, a tappable phone number, and a site that loads fast on a phone. Our own entry tier sits at £700 for up to five pages, to give you one published number to measure others against.

Watch for: “free website, just pay monthly” offers. The build is not free; it is spread across a contract you may not be able to leave.

£1,000–£3,000

This is where most established trade firms should be looking, and where the work stops being cosmetic.

Who it suits: firms with several services, several areas, staff, and commercial as well as domestic customers.

What the extra money buys: structure, mainly. A separate page for each service and each area rather than one page listing everything. Content written from an actual conversation with you rather than guessed. Proper technical foundations. Revision rounds, so it ends up right rather than nearly right.

Watch for: paying this much for what is still a template with your logo dropped in. Ask to see two other sites the same person built, and check they do not look identical.

£3,000–£8,000

Larger firms, multiple trading locations, or genuinely more complicated requirements.

Who it suits: regional operators, firms bidding for substantial commercial work, businesses where the website has to do a job beyond being looked at.

Watch for: this band being sold to businesses that needed the one below it. If nobody can explain what the extra thousands do in terms you recognise, they are probably not doing anything.

Above £8,000

Real, and occasionally justified — integrations with job-management systems, customer portals, genuine e-commerce, multi-brand structures.

For a trade firm that wants a good website, this is almost never the right number. It is, however, quite often the quote.

The monthly is where the real money is

Trades tend to negotiate hard on the build fee and barely glance at the monthly. Over five years the monthly is usually the larger number.

£65 a month is £3,900 over five years. £200 a month is £12,000. That is worth two minutes of attention.

The question is not whether the monthly is high or low, but what is inside it. Maintenance — hosting, updates, backups, support — is a genuine recurring cost. Marketing is a separate service. When both are baked into one figure you cannot see either, and you cannot stop one without losing the other.

A rough way to decide

• One person, domestic work, word of mouth is fine: the builder band, or the few-hundred band. Do not overspend here.
• Small firm, a few services, a defined patch: £700–£1,500.
• Established, staff, commercial customers who check you out: £1,500–£3,000.
• Multiple locations or multiple trades: above that, and ask for the reasoning in writing.

The one thing that is not about price

Whatever you spend, make sure the domain is registered in your name and that you can take the site with you. A cheap site you own is worth more than an expensive one you rent without realising.

And be sceptical of any quote that comes attached to a promised number of enquiries. Nobody — ourselves included — can promise you rankings, traffic or leads. The build can be promised. The outcome cannot.