For most tradesmen, the right website is three to five pages, built so a stranger on a phone can see what you do, where you do it, and how to ring you within about five seconds. In the UK you would expect to pay somewhere between £500 and £2,000 as a one off build from a small designer, or roughly £50 to £150 a month on a rental or pay monthly arrangement. Anything much above that is usually buying you design time you do not need.
The size of the site matters far less than three things: whether the phone number is impossible to miss, whether the site proves you are a real local person who turns up, and whether it is set up so Google shows it to people in your towns. Get those right on five pages and you will beat a twenty page site that gets them wrong.
What should website design for tradesmen cost in the UK?
There is no standard price, so here is roughly how the market breaks down. A full service agency will quote £3,000 upwards, and for a plumber or an electrician that is almost always more than the job needs. A freelance designer or small studio typically lands between £600 and £2,000 for a build, sometimes with hosting billed separately afterwards at £10 to £30 a month.
Do it yourself platforms like Wix or Squarespace run at roughly £10 to £25 a month plus your own time, and the time is the real cost. A weekend is optimistic. Most people I speak to who tried it got the homepage looking decent and then stalled for six months on the rest.
Then there are rental and pay monthly options, where someone builds it and looks after it for a fixed monthly fee. Ours are Starter one page at £49, Essential three pages at £79, Professional five pages at £99 and Business ten pages at £149, all per month and all excluding VAT. You pay the first three months up front to start and there is no setup fee. If you want to compare the whole market properly, we wrote a longer breakdown of how much a small business website should cost in the UK.
The number to watch is not the headline price. It is the five year total, including hosting, renewals, plugin updates and the small change fees some designers charge when you want a price updated. That is where a cheap build sometimes turns expensive.
What your site has to do on a phone at 7am
Picture the actual moment someone finds you. It is quarter past seven, there is water coming through a ceiling, and someone is standing in a hallway in a dressing gown with a phone in one hand. They search, they tap the second or third result, and they give it a few seconds.
In those seconds they need to see your trade, your town, and a button that dials you. Not a menu to open. Not a slider to scroll past. Not a photo of a stock image kitchen that loads slowly on 4G. If they have to think, they press back and ring the next one.
That is why a floating call bar matters more than almost any design decision. It sits at the bottom of the screen the whole time they are on the site, so wherever they have scrolled to, the phone number is one tap away. It comes with every site we build. If your current site makes people hunt for the number in a footer, that alone is costing you calls.
Speed is part of the same thing. A site that takes six seconds on a phone signal has lost most of that hallway audience before it appears. We covered the detail in why a slow website costs you work, but the short version is that big uncompressed photos are usually the culprit, and it is fixable.
The three things that decide whether it brings work in
1. Getting the call made easy
Phone number in the header, phone number in the floating bar, phone number at the end of every page. Make it a proper tap to call link, not typed text that does nothing when pressed. Add your hours and whether you do emergency call outs, because someone at 7am wants to know if ringing now is pointless.
A contact form is fine as a second option. It is not a substitute. Most trade enquiries want a voice.
2. Proving you are real and local
People are not comparing your design to other designs. They are deciding whether you will turn up, do a tidy job and not disappear with the deposit. What settles that is evidence: photographs of your own finished work, your van, your face, your reviews with names and towns, your trade registration numbers, and a clear list of the places you cover.
Ten real photos from your phone beat any stock library. They do not need to be beautiful. They need to be yours. The same goes for the words. Write like you talk on the phone and it reads as genuine, which is exactly the point covered in what a trade business website actually needs.
3. Being findable for your towns
A site nobody sees cannot bring you work. For trades, the heavy lifting is done by a properly filled in Google Business Profile plus pages on your site that name the towns and the jobs. "Boiler repairs in Sleaford" will do more for you than any amount of clever design, because that is what people type.
This is the part most tradesmen skip and then wonder why the website went quiet. Start with getting found on Google when you only work locally, because for a local trade it matters more than everything else on this page put together.
How many pages do you actually need?
Fewer than you think, and more than one if you want Google to have something to work with. Here is the usual shape:
- One page works if you are a sole trader who mainly gets word of mouth and just needs something to send people to. It is a business card that loads. Do not expect it to rank for much.
- Three pages is the sweet spot for most one van trades. Home, services, contact. Enough to explain yourself, small enough that you will actually keep it up to date.
- Five pages suits you if you have two or three distinct services worth their own page, say bathrooms, heating and emergency call outs. Each page can then target its own searches.
- Ten pages makes sense when you cover several towns properly, or you have a team and want a page per service area. Only worth it if the content is genuinely different on each page, not the same paragraph with the town name swapped.
If you are not sure which bracket you are in, you can price up your website and see the difference between sizes before you talk to anyone.
Should a tradesman own the website or rent it?
Owning suits you if you have the cash up front, you want the asset on the books, and you have someone you trust to keep it updated afterwards. The build is the easy part. The awkward part is year three, when the contact form stops emailing and the person who built it has moved on.
Renting suits you if you would rather treat the site like the van insurance: a fixed monthly cost with someone responsible for it. With us that covers hosting, SSL, business email and a free redesign every year, and you can cancel any month with a month's notice. You can also buy the site outright whenever you like for twelve times the monthly price. That is a separate one off payment and it is not reduced by the rent you have already paid, so it costs the same in month three as it does in year three.
Neither is automatically better. We laid out both sides honestly in should you own your website or rent it, including the cases where renting is the wrong answer.
What to check before you hand over money
Whoever you use, agency, freelancer or us, run through this list first. It takes ten minutes and saves a lot of grief.
- Who owns the domain. It should be registered in your business name with you as the contact, not buried in a designer's account.
- What happens to hosting if you part ways. Ask directly. Get the answer in writing.
- What a text change costs. Prices change, staff change, service areas change. If small edits are chargeable, budget for it. With us, content changes (words, prices, photos) are unlimited and free for as long as you rent.
- How many rounds of design you get. One is normal on a fixed price, and one design revision is what we include: you see the design, you tell us what to change, we change it. Some studios offer more rounds and price accordingly, so ask what the second and third redraw costs before you sign.
- Whether the price includes SSL and email. Some quotes leave both out and add them later.
- How long it takes. A three page trade site should be days, not months, once you have supplied photos and details.
- Whether you can see it on a phone before you approve it. Most of your visitors will be on one. Approve it the way they will see it.
There is a longer version of this in ten things to check before you pay a web designer, and it applies whether you spend £49 a month or £4,000 once.
Do you need a website if you already get work from word of mouth?
Honestly, sometimes not. If your diary is full six weeks out from recommendations and repeat customers, a website will not change your life. Spend the money on a better van signwrite or a second pair of hands instead.
But two things usually push a trade over the line. The first is that people who get your name from a friend still search you before ringing, and finding nothing feels like a small red flag. The second is that word of mouth is not a tap you can turn up when a big contract ends. A site plus a Google Business Profile gives you something to lean on in a quiet month.
If you do go ahead, do not over invest at the start. A three page site that exists and loads fast is worth far more than a ten page site you keep meaning to finish.
Where RentAWeb fits
We build small business websites and rent them monthly, which suits tradesmen who would rather not find a few thousand pounds up front or manage hosting and renewals. Sites run from £49 a month for one page to £149 a month for ten, all excluding VAT, with the first three months paid up front and no setup fee. Hosting, SSL, business email, reviews, gallery, FAQ section, the floating call bar and a yearly redesign are all included, one design revision comes with the build, content changes stay unlimited and free, and a .co.uk domain comes free with a package.
If you want to see numbers for your own situation, have a look at what a rented website costs or work it out yourself in the builder. And if renting is not right for you, one of the freelancers in your town will build you something perfectly good. Just take the checklist above with you when you go.
