How Much Does a Website Cost for a Trade Business?

Nobody in this industry likes answering this one, which is exactly why it is worth answering.

The short version: a small trade website usually costs somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand. That is a uselessly wide range until you know what moves the number, so here is what actually does.

What are you actually paying for?

A website is three separate things, and quotes get confusing because people bundle them differently. Toolbox Tribe has a good plain-English breakdown of what a website is actually made of, but the short version is:

1. The domain. Your address. Renewed yearly, costs about as much as a decent lunch.
2. The hosting. Where the site lives. Usually a yearly bill, and a small one.
3. The site itself. The part that takes the work, and the part the quote is really about.

When somebody quotes you a number, they are quoting for the third one. The first two are rounding errors by comparison.

What moves the price?

Two things, mostly.

How many pages you need. This is the big one. A site with a home page and a list of services is a different job to one with a proper page for emergency call-outs, one for bathrooms, one for the commercial work you want more of. Each of those is real writing and real structure, and each of them is a page that can go and win its own searches.

Who writes the words. If you send over notes and photos from your phone, it is quicker. If somebody has to work out what you do, what you want more of, and how to say it in your voice, that is time.

Everything else, the colours, the fonts, the bits that get talked about most, barely moves the number.

Why is the first page more expensive than the rest?

Because you are not buying a page, you are buying the thing the rest of the site sits on. Somebody has to build the foundations, wire up the analytics, point the domain at it, and check the whole lot survives a phone on two bars of signal.

None of that gets repeated on page six. So the first one carries the setup and every page after it is genuinely quick. This is why my own pricing is a higher figure for the first page and a much smaller one for each after it, and why you should be suspicious of anyone charging the same flat rate per page.

What about the cheap options?

There are three ways to end up with a website, and they are not really competing with each other.

• A drag-and-drop builder you do yourself. Cheapest in money, most expensive in your evenings. Fine for a holding page. Gets painful the moment you want it to actually bring work in.
• A template with your details dropped in. Quick and cheap. The problem is not that it looks like other sites, it is that it is usually built as one page listing everything you do, which is close to useless for getting found.
• Built properly for your business. Costs more up front. Does not need redoing in eighteen months.

I spent fifteen years in plumbing, ten of them running my own business in the UK, and I have watched people take the cheap option twice before taking the third one. Paying twice is the expensive way to save money.

Is it worth it?

The honest test is not what it cost, it is what it brought in. One extra job a year covers most trade websites. Two covers almost all of them.

If you want to check that properly rather than guess, Toolbox Tribe's marketing ROI calculator will tell you what you are actually paying per lead and per customer. It is worth doing before you spend anything, not after.

One thing worth knowing: a slow site costs you money in a way that never shows up on any invoice. Google's own research on why speed matters found people abandon slow pages, and a customer standing in a wet kitchen has no patience at all. That is a cost of the cheap option that nobody quotes for.

What should you actually ask for?

When you get a quote, ask these:

1. How many pages, and which ones?
2. Who is writing the words?
3. Is the domain registered in my name?
4. What happens if I want to leave?
5. Is the price fixed, or does it move?

If the answer to the last one is vague, that is your answer.

A website for a trade business should be a fixed figure agreed in writing before anything starts. Mine is. If you are a plumber specifically, here is what that looks like for your trade.