The four ways to get a trade website, and what each really costs
Do it yourself on Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy: $16–$60 a month, forever, plus a weekend of your time and another weekend every time something needs changing. It is the cheapest way to start and the most expensive way to run for five years — at $30 a month you have spent $1,800 by year five and you still do not own it.
A freelancer: $500–$2,000 one-off. Quality swings enormously. The two things worth asking are whether you get the logins and whether they will still answer the phone in six months.
A small studio: $700–$3,000 one-off. You are paying for someone who has built this kind of site before and knows a trade site lives or dies on the phone number and the load time, not on the animation.
A full agency: $3,000–$8,000 and up. Worth it if you have multiple branches, an in-house marketing person, or you are selling products online. For a one-van business it is money that would do more in a van wrap and a Google Business Profile.
What actually moves the needle on a trade site
A phone number that is tappable in the top half of the screen. Most trade enquiries are a tap, not a form — the form is for the ones calling out of hours.
Loading in under two seconds on mobile data. Someone standing in a driveway with one bar will go back and ring the next name on the list. This is the single most common failure in trade websites and it is almost always caused by giant unoptimised photos.
The towns you cover, written out in full. "South Yorkshire" does not rank; "Rotherham, Barnsley, Chesterfield" does.
Photographs of your own work. Not stock. Stock photography of a smiling man in a hard hat is invisible to customers because they have seen it on forty other sites.
A Google Business Profile, which is free, and which will send you more work in the first month than the website does. The website's job is partly to make that profile look legitimate when somebody clicks through.
What you should not pay for
Monthly "SEO retainers" of $300–$800 sold to one-van trades. For a local business, the work is a Google Business Profile, consistent contact details, and pages naming the towns you cover. That is a one-off job, not a subscription.
Page counts you will never use. Four to six pages covers almost every trade business: what you do, where you do it, proof you have done it, and how to reach you.
Hosting marked up to $40 a month. Hosting a site like this genuinely costs a few dollars a month at most.
Common questions
Is a website worth it if I already get work from Facebook?
Usually yes, because they do different jobs. Facebook reaches people who already follow you; a website catches the person searching "emergency plumber near me" at 9pm who has never heard of you. The two also feed each other — a Facebook page with a real website linked from it converts better than one without.
How long should a trade website take to build?
Three to five days for a straightforward four-to-six page site if the builder already has your photos and your service list. Agencies quoting six to eight weeks are usually quoting their queue, not the work.
Do I need to pay monthly?
Not to keep a site online — hosting for a small trade site costs very little and plenty of builders include it. You may choose to pay monthly for someone to make changes, add photos and keep it updated, but that should be optional and cancellable, not a condition of having the site.
Who owns the website?
You should. Make sure the domain is registered in your name, and that you get the logins. If a builder will not hand those over, walk away — it is the single most common way trades get held to ransom later.
Last updated 24 September 2026