Websites for trade businesses — what they cost, what they need, and what actually wins work

Pillar22 August 20269 min read

Most trade owners we speak to have had the same experience. One quote says £300. The next says £6,000. A bloke in the pub says his nephew will do it for nothing. Nobody explains what the difference is, so the decision comes down to who seemed least likely to be having you on.

This is an attempt to explain the difference properly. It covers what a trade website is actually for, what it needs to contain, what the price ranges mean, and what nobody can honestly promise you.

What a trade website is actually for

It is worth being precise about this, because the wrong answer leads to spending money in the wrong place.

A trade website is rarely the thing that finds you. Word of mouth finds you. A local Facebook group finds you. A Google Business Profile with fifty reviews finds you. Someone who already used you finds you, again.

What a website does is settle the question once someone has your name. It is the thing people check after they have heard of you, and before they ring you. Somebody has three numbers written down. They look all three up. One has nothing at all, one has a Facebook page last posted to in 2023, and one has a site that looks like a real company. That is the moment the site earns its keep.

This matters more the bigger the job. Someone booking a small domestic job may not check at all. Someone putting you on a tender list for commercial work absolutely will, and so will their insurer.

What it needs to contain

Far less than most people selling websites will tell you. In rough order of how much they matter:

• What you do, in the words your customers use. Not “bespoke access solutions”. Scaffolding.
• Where you work. Towns and areas, written out. This is the single most common omission, and it is the first thing anyone checks.
• Photographs of your own work. Not stock images of somebody else’s job. This is covered further down, because it is the biggest single difference between a site that convinces and one that does not.
• A phone number that is tappable on a phone. Most people who look you up are standing outside holding the phone. If they have to copy the number out by hand, some of them will not.
• Proof you are real. Insurance, accreditations, trade memberships, company number, a business email address on your own domain rather than a Hotmail one.
• Something that shows the site is current. A dead site can be worse than no site, because it suggests the business might be dead too.

Notice what is not on that list: a blog nobody reads, a clever animation, a mission statement, or a chatbot that cannot answer anything. Those are what get sold when the actual job is already done and someone needs to justify a bigger number.

Photographs are the whole thing

If you take one point from this piece, take this one. The difference between a trade site that reassures somebody and one that does not is almost always the photographs.

Stock photography is instantly recognisable and it works against you, because the visitor is specifically trying to establish that you are real and that your work is decent. A stock image of a smiling model in clean PPE answers neither question.

Twenty photographs taken on your own phone, of your own jobs, in the actual weather, beat any amount of design. Take them as you go. Wide shot of the finished job, a couple of details, and the site left tidy.

What the price ranges actually mean

Prices vary so wildly because the phrase “a website” covers about five different products. Roughly:

• Around £10–15 a month, no build fee. A website builder such as Squarespace or Wix, which you set up and maintain yourself. The tools are genuinely good. The cost is your time, and that is a real cost — there is a whole piece on that trade-off here.
• A few hundred pounds. Usually a template filled in for you. Fine for a sole trader who needs to exist online and nothing more. Check who owns the domain before you pay anybody anything.
• One to three thousand. A site built for your business specifically, with proper structure for services and areas, written content, and someone maintaining it afterwards. This is where most established trade firms land.
• Five figures. Justified for multi-branch operations, genuine e-commerce, or systems that talk to other systems. Rarely justified for a trade firm that wants a good website, and frequently sold to them anyway.

For what it is worth, we publish our own prices in full rather than quoting per job, and there is a fuller breakdown of the ranges here.

The monthly fee — what it should and should not be

Almost every website now comes with something monthly attached, and this is where trades get stung most often, because two completely different things get sold under one number.

Maintenance is hosting, software updates, backups, security patching and somebody to ring when it breaks. That is a real, ongoing cost and it is reasonable to pay it.

Marketing is ongoing SEO work, ads management, content. Also legitimate — but it is a separate thing, it should be priced separately, and you should be able to stop it without your website going dark.

When those two are blended into one monthly figure, you cannot tell what you are paying for and you cannot drop one without losing the other. Ask for them itemised. If the answer is vague, that is the answer.

What nobody can honestly promise you

This is the part that gets left out of most guides, including ones written by people who sell websites.

Nobody can promise you rankings, traffic or a number of enquiries. Not us, not anyone. Search results depend on your competitors, your area, your reviews, how long your domain has existed and a large amount of machinery nobody outside Google can see. Anyone who gives you a guaranteed position or a guaranteed number of leads is either guessing or selling.

What can honestly be promised is the build: that the site is fast, that it works properly on a phone, that it is structured so search engines and AI assistants can read it correctly, that it says true things about your business, and that you own it. That is a real deliverable and you can check every part of it.

Be especially wary of anyone quoting you a specific number of leads per month. The trades we have spoken to who have been burned were almost all burned by exactly that promise.

Questions worth asking before you pay anyone

• Whose name is the domain registered in? It should be yours. This is the single most important question on the list, and the one most likely to produce an uncomfortable pause.
• What happens if I leave? Can you take the site, or does it stop existing?
• What exactly is in the monthly? Itemised, not described.
• Is there a minimum term, and does it auto-renew?
• Can I see it before I commit? There is no good reason you should be asked to pay a deposit to find out what somebody would do.

Where we come into this

Plainly: we build websites for trade businesses, and we do it in an unusual order. We build the site first, from what is already public about the business, and then show the owner the finished thing. If they do not want it, they pay nothing.

We are new. There is no client list on this site, no testimonials and no projects-delivered figure, because none of that would be true yet. What we can do is show you a finished site with your own name on it before you have spent anything, which is a more useful proof than a page of logos.

Either way, the questions above are worth asking whoever you end up using.