If you are a plumber, a roofer, a cleaner or any other trade wondering what a website should cost, here is the straight answer, without the runaround. A good trade website does not need to cost thousands. A focused one, built properly, is cheaper than most people expect, and the reason why tells you a lot about what you actually need.
Why a trade site is cheaper to build than you think
People assume a website is expensive because they picture a big, complicated one. A trade site is not that. Its job is small and clear: show your work with real photos, name your services and the towns you cover, load instantly on a phone, and put your number one tap away. That is a focused thing to build well, not a sprawling one, and focus is what keeps it affordable.
The expensive sites are expensive because they carry things a trade does not need. An online shop, a booking and payment system, dozens of pages, a design signed off by a committee. Strip all that away and what a tradesman actually needs is lean, fast and quick to build. You are not getting less by paying less here, you are getting exactly what wins the work and nothing you would never use.
What genuinely pushes the price up
Not every trade site costs the same, and it is worth knowing what moves the number, so you can decide what you actually want.
A site with a separate page for every service and every town takes more work than a tight handful of pages. Integrated booking or online payment is real extra work, and most trades win their jobs on a phone call anyway. A very large photo gallery has to be handled so it still loads fast. And a rushed timescale, where you need it live yesterday, costs more than a sensible one.
None of those are needed to win everyday trade work. If you want them, fine, but price them on their own rather than assuming every website comes loaded with them. Most trades are best served by the lean version.
The only sum that actually matters
Here is the way to judge the cost, and it is not against other websites. Judge it against one job.
Work out what a single decent job is worth to you. A boiler swap, a re-roof, a full driveway, a regular cleaning contract. Now set the cost of the site against that. If a website brings in even one job a month that you would not otherwise have won, it has already more than paid for itself, and everything after that is profit. For most trades, a single job covers the entire build several times over.
That is the lens I would use: not “what does a website cost”, but “how quickly does this one pay me back”. Built properly, for a trade, the answer is usually fast. A slow, generic, hard-to-find site that never brings in a job is expensive at any price. A lean, findable one that wins you steady work is cheap even before you count the profit.
What it costs with me
No “from” games beyond the honest starting price. I build a spec-built trade site from £297, live in seven days on your own domain, with the first three months of care included, then £49 a month for hosting, small edits and your Google listing kept current. You see the finished site before you pay the rest, and you own it either way. If you want the fuller picture on pricing across all business types, what a website costs goes deeper, and you can see the site I would build for your trade directly.