Ask five people what a trade website costs and you will get five answers between a couple of hundred pounds and a couple of hundred a month forever. They are all true, because they are describing completely different things. Here is how the market actually prices this, and what you get for each.
Ours is on the pricing page, one figure for the build with nothing a month at the sale, so you can hold it against anything below. What this page does is explain the shapes a quote comes in, so you can read the ones you are given.
The four ways it gets priced
The agency retainer
A design agency builds the site and then charges monthly for hosting, support and usually some marketing on top. The build fee is sometimes low or even free, which feels good until you read the contract length.
The thing to check is what happens at the end. If you stop paying, do you keep the site? Often you do not, because it sits on their platform and their licence. You have been renting. That can be fine if the monthly spend is bringing in work, and a bad deal if it is not and you cannot leave.
The page builder subscription
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy and the rest. You pay monthly, you get a template, and you build it yourself in an evening. Genuinely cheap and genuinely quick.
Two things to know. First, you are also paying with your time, and your time is billable on site. Second, a template ships its own code to the browser on top of yours. We are not going to put a number on that from here, because it depends entirely on the template. Test any builder template with Google's own tool before you commit, not after.
The freelancer
One person, a one-off fee, usually the cheapest route to something decent. The quality range is enormous, from excellent to abandoned halfway. The risk is not the skill, it is continuity. If the person who built it stops answering the phone in eighteen months, who changes your prices?
Ask before you hire: who owns the domain, who owns the code, and what happens if you disappear. A good freelancer has a straight answer ready.
The specialist studio
A firm that only builds for one kind of business. The price sits above a freelancer and usually below a full agency retainer, and the argument for it is that they have already solved your problems on somebody else's site. They know what a drainage enquiry form needs to ask. They know which area pages earn their keep.
What actually moves the price
- Number of pages. A five page site and a forty page site are different jobs. Area pages and service pages are where the volume comes from.
- Copywriting. If somebody has to write the words, that is real hours. If you write them, it is cheaper and often better, because it sounds like you.
- Photography. Using your own job photos costs nothing. Arranging a photographer costs a day.
- Forms and tools. A name and message box is an hour. A proper enquiry flow that filters jobs by service, urgency, property type and postcode is a build in its own right.
- Who hosts it and who maintains it. This is the part that turns into a monthly figure, so get it in writing separately from the build.
Before you sign
Nine questions worth asking any quote
- Is the domain registered in my name, and can I see the account?
- When the site is paid for, is it mine to take elsewhere?
- What exactly is the monthly fee paying for, line by line?
- What is the minimum term, and what happens on the day it ends?
- Can I see three sites you built that are live now, in my trade?
- What does the mobile speed score look like on those sites today?
- Who writes the words, and who supplies the photos?
- How do I change a price or add a service in six months, and what does that cost?
- Can I see it working before I pay anything?
The cheapest quote is rarely the cheapest site
A three hundred pound site that brings in nothing has cost you three hundred pounds and a year. A site that brings in two jobs a month has paid for itself before the summer, whatever it cost. That is the only maths that matters, and it is why we push people to judge the thing on enquiries rather than on the invoice.
It also cuts the other way. Paying a large monthly figure for a site nobody visits is not an investment, it is a standing order. Ask to see the numbers. Any firm that is confident in its work will show you visits and enquiries without being chased.
What to do with a quote when it lands
Read it for the three things people forget: ownership, term and exit. Everything else is negotiable and most of it is obvious. Those three decide whether you are buying an asset or renting a shopfront.
Then look at their own work. Not the portfolio screenshots, the live sites. Load two of them on your phone on mobile data. If the firm building sites for trades cannot make their own client sites load quickly on a phone, that tells you what yours will be like.
See it before you spend anything
We build a live demo of your site first, with your trade, your town and your photos in it. You look at it on your phone, show it to whoever you want, and decide then. Nothing is paid and nothing is owed until you say you want it. If you look at it and it is not for you, that is a perfectly good outcome and it has cost you a WhatsApp message.