What should a trade website actually cost in 2026?

Nobody publishes prices, which is why you can ring three people about the same five-page site for a plumbing business and be quoted £300, £1,200 and £6,000. All three are “a website”. They are not the same purchase.

Here is what is actually behind each bracket.

Free to £150: do it yourself

Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, or a Facebook page with a shop tab. You do the work; you pay monthly for hosting.

Fine if: you need something online this week, you have more time than money, and you are comfortable fiddling with a drag-and-drop editor.

The catch: it will be slower than a built site, the SEO defaults are mediocre, and the real cost is that you will spend twenty evenings on it. If your day rate is £250, that is not a cheap website.

£200 to £450: someone’s spare-time template

Usually a template with your logo dropped in, often by someone doing it around another job or from overseas.

Fine if: you genuinely only need a business card online because all your work comes by word of mouth.

The catch: at this price nobody is writing your content, doing keyword research, or setting up your Google Business Profile. And support afterwards tends to evaporate, because the maths does not allow for it. I get a steady stream of people who bought at this level and cannot get hold of anyone to change a phone number.

£500 to £2,000: a proper small-business site

This is where a build with actual thought behind it starts.

At the bottom of the bracket, £500 gets you a genuine brochure site: a handful of pages, custom built rather than templated, fast on a phone, with the technical SEO groundwork done and your Google Business Profile connected. Not a placeholder, just a small site done properly.

Further up, the money buys scope rather than quality. Content written or drafted for you, location pages for the towns you work in, a gallery of your own jobs, more pages, more research. The build standard does not change; there is simply more of it.

Fine if: you want the website to bring in work rather than just exist.

The catch: you have to be involved. The projects that go badly at this level are the ones where the client cannot find an hour to talk about their business or take twenty photos of their work. I can write your copy but I cannot invent your jobs.

For reference, this is where I work: from £500, fixed, agreed in writing before anything starts.

£3,000 to £8,000: agency

A team of designer, developer, copywriter and account manager. Genuinely better if you need what it buys: several stakeholders, complex functionality, booking systems, integrations with your job management software.

The catch: for a two-van operation you are paying for coordination overhead you get no benefit from. And the retainer usually attached to it, typically £400 to £1,500 a month, is rarely worth it under a certain turnover.

£10,000+

Real, and occasionally justified: e-commerce with thousands of products, custom applications, multi-site franchises. Not a trade website.

Where the money should actually go

If you have £1,000 to spend on getting found, I would not spend it all on the site:

1. Google Business Profile, done properly. Free, and the biggest single return. More on that here.
2. Photos of your own work. £150 for a couple of hours with a local photographer, or free if you learn to hold your phone steady in decent light. Nothing converts like proof.
3. A fast, well-structured site. The remainder.
4. Reviews. Free, ongoing, and more valuable than anything above.

The mistake is spending the entire budget on a site with no photos, no reviews and an unfinished Business Profile. It looks lovely and rings nobody.

Questions worth asking whoever quotes you

• Is that a fixed price or an estimate?
• Who writes the content, me or you?
• Do I own the domain and the code?
• What happens if I want to change something in six months, and what does that cost?
• Are you setting up my Google Business Profile as part of this?

If someone gets vague on any of those, that is your answer.

Want a straight number for your situation? Tell me what you do and I will send a fixed quote, or tell you honestly that you do not need me yet.