How much should a plumber or electrician pay for a website?

Most UK sole traders and small trade firms land between £500 and £2,000 for a one-off freelance build, or £30 to £100 a month on a subscription that includes hosting and support. Below about £500 you are usually buying a template with your logo on it; above about £3,000 you are paying for agency overheads a two-van business rarely needs.

Is a cheap website better than no website?

Usually yes, but not always. A fast, plain, honest one-page site with a tappable phone number beats nothing comfortably. A slow, broken or abandoned site is worse than nothing, because a customer who finds it concludes the business is the same.

Why do website quotes vary so much for the same job?

Because "a website" is not one product. A quote may or may not include the design, the copywriting, photography, hosting, the domain, SSL, ongoing changes and support. Two quotes ten times apart are usually pricing different things — ask each one what happens when you want a phone number changed.

How much does a website cost for a UK trade business in 2026?

Ask five web companies what a website costs and you'll get five answers, none of them a number. Here are the numbers. This is what UK trade and service businesses actually pay in 2026, route by route, including the costs each option tends to leave out of the headline price.

The quick answer

Route	Typical cost	Who it suits
DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace)	£10–£30/month + your time	Brand-new businesses testing the water
Freelancer	£300–£1,500 one-off	Businesses with time to manage the project
Local agency	£2,000–£5,000+ one-off	Larger firms with bigger requirements
Subscription studio (like us)	£40–£170/month, no setup fee	Trades that want it built, hosted and maintained

DIY builders: cheap until you price your evenings

Wix, Squarespace and GoDaddy plans run £10–£30 a month. The subscription is the small part. The real cost is the 20–40 hours it takes a non-designer to produce a site, then the years of being its unpaid administrator — renewals, updates, the padlock, the form that quietly stops working — and the harder truth that the result usually looks homemade, because design skill was the thing you were trying not to pay for. If your website's job is to make a £5,000 job feel safe, homemade is expensive. We've written up the five ways a self-built site loses jobs.

Freelancers: the widest range, the biggest lottery

£300 buys a template with your logo swapped in; £1,500 buys genuinely custom work from a good freelancer. The catch is rarely the build — it's afterwards. Hosting, updates, security patches and "can you change our opening hours" all depend on one person still answering email a year later. Budget £100–£300 a year on top for hosting and domain, plus hourly rates for every change.

Agencies: proper work at proper prices

A local agency building a custom trade site will quote £2,000–£5,000, sometimes far more, plus £30–£100 a month for hosting and care plans. The work is usually good. The question is whether a five-page site for a plumbing firm needs an account manager and a discovery workshop — you're paying for the agency's overheads as well as its output.

Subscription studios: the newer model

Studios like ours charge a monthly fee with no setup cost — the build, hosting, SSL, backups, security and content updates are one subscription. Ours is one plan at £49 (no VAT) a month, and the first thing we do is rebuild your homepage free so you can judge the work before paying anything. The trade-off versus a one-off build is honest: you pay monthly for as long as you want the site looked after, and in exchange you never think about hosting, updates or a developer who's stopped replying.

The hidden costs nobody's headline price includes

Domain name — £10–£25 a year, every year, whoever builds the site.
Hosting — £5–£30 a month if it isn't bundled.
SSL certificate — should be free and included; walk away from anyone charging for it.
Email at your domain — £5–£12 per user per month for Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.
Changes — the one that stings. £50–£100/hour on a one-off build; with a subscription it should be included. Ask before you sign, not after.
The rebuild — one-off sites age. Most get rebuilt every 4–6 years, so a £3,000 build is really £50+ a month amortised; it just isn't billed that way.

How to compare quotes fairly

Put every option over 48 months: build cost plus hosting plus realistic change costs, divided by 48. A "£free" DIY site that costs you thirty hours and looks it, a £3,000 agency build plus £50/month care, and a £49 (no VAT)-a-month subscription land far closer together than the headline prices suggest. Then judge what each actually delivers against what a trade website needs — that list is the same whoever builds it.

What this looks like for your trade

The arithmetic above is the same for everyone; what changes is how much a lost job costs you and how many service pages the work justifies. We've written the numbers up per trade:

And if you're local to us, the same page by town: Reading, Bracknell, Wokingham, Newbury, Henley-on-Thames, Basingstoke, Maidenhead, Slough.