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The wrong question
“How much should a website cost?” produces answers between nothing and tens of thousands, all of them defensible, none of them useful.
The question that produces a decision is different: how many of the people who reach my site contact me, and what would one more percentage point be worth? A site that turns 2% of visitors into enquiries and one that turns 6% are not two versions of the same purchase. Over a year of the same traffic, the second produces three times the work. If your average job clears £2,000, the gap between those two sites is not a design preference. It is the difference between a slow year and a good one.
This matters more the moment you start paying for traffic. Every pound of advertising is multiplied by the conversion rate of the page it lands on. A poor site does not just lose the enquiries it was given, it silently doubles the cost of every channel you run, which is why we look at the site before we look at the ad account.
What five hundred pounds buys
Let us be fair about it, because plenty of cheap sites are perfectly adequate and the people building them are not villains. At that price you are buying a template, a handful of pages, your logo and colours applied, some generic copy adapted to your trade, and a contact form. Built quickly, because at that price it has to be.
What you are not buying, and could not reasonably expect to, is any of the work that determines whether the thing converts: research into what your customers actually search and worry about, copy written for your specific jobs and pricing, a page per service rather than a list, proof placed where it gets read, speed work, tracking that tells you which page produced an enquiry, and somebody revisiting the layout once real behaviour has been observed.
That is the honest distinction. A cheap site is a brochure. A proper site is a sales process. Both are websites in the sense that both have a domain name.
Where a cheap site leaks enquiries
The leaks are consistent and boring, which is good news, because it means they are diagnosable without a redesign.
| The leak | What it does | What fixing it involves |
|---|---|---|
| No phone number visible on a phone | Most trade traffic is mobile and most of it wants to call. A number in the footer is a number nobody found. | A tap-to-call button fixed in view. Genuinely an afternoon. |
| One page for every service | Somebody searching a specific job lands on a general list and has to find themselves. Most go back to the results instead. | A page per service that earns money, written to answer that search. |
| No coverage area stated | The commonest reason a visitor leaves without contacting: they could not tell whether you come to them. | Towns named in text, not only on a map image. |
| No proof above the fold | Reviews and real job photographs buried three screens down, past the point most people stop. | Move existing proof up. No new content needed. |
| Stock photography | Somebody else’s finished kitchen tells a visitor you have nothing of your own to show. | Phone photographs of your actual work. Better, not worse. |
| Slow loading | Uncompressed images and template bloat on a poor mobile signal in a van outside a job. | Image compression and cutting unused scripts. |
| No pricing signal at all | Visitors who cannot tell whether you are in their bracket leave rather than ask. So do the ones you did not want, but they were free to lose. | A range, a minimum job size, or an honest explanation of what drives the price. |
| No tracking | You cannot tell which page produced an enquiry, so every improvement decision afterwards is a guess dressed as judgement. | Call tracking and form tracking. Cheap, and it should have been there first. |
Notice how many of those are content and configuration rather than design. A lot of cheap sites can be made substantially better without being rebuilt, which is a genuinely cheaper answer than the one we sell.
The arithmetic in enquiries, not pounds
Convert the decision into your own currency. Four numbers, ten minutes.
- Monthly visitors. From your analytics. If you do not have analytics, that is finding number one.
- Enquiries per month that came from the site. Calls and forms, counted properly rather than estimated.
- Conversion rate. The second divided by the first.
- Gross profit per enquiry. Your margin multiplied by your close rate.
Now model the change. Take a firm with 400 visitors a month converting at 2%, so eight enquiries. Say it wins one job in three at £2,000 with a 35% margin, which is £233 of gross profit per enquiry. Moving conversion to 4% adds eight enquiries a month, or about £1,860 of gross profit a month. Over a year that is a five-figure difference from the same traffic and the same advertising budget.
Run it with your own figures. If the modelled gain is a few hundred pounds a year, a cheap site is the correct decision and anyone telling you otherwise is selling. If it is five figures, the £500 you saved is the most expensive saving in the business, and it goes on costing every month it stays. The sector-level version of this calculation sits on the industries pages, and the definitions of everything in it are in the glossary.
What a proper site is actually paying for
Not design. Design is the visible part and the least of it. You are paying for six things, and it is fair to ask any prospective builder which of them are included.
- Research. What your customers actually type, what they are frightened of, what makes them choose one firm over another. This is where a site is won.
- Structure. A page for each service and, where the volume justifies it, each area, so that search traffic lands on something that answers it rather than on a homepage.
- Copy that does work. Written to pre-qualify: what you do, what you do not, where you go, what things roughly cost. Copy that costs you the wrong enquiries is doing its job.
- Proof, positioned. Reviews, real photographs, accreditation and insurance placed where they are read. BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, a US panel of 1,002 consumers, found 97% read reviews and 68% would only use a business rated four stars or above. A US sample with a UK lesson that nobody in the trades finds surprising.
- Speed and technical health. Fast on a bad signal, correct markup, indexable, working on the phones people actually own.
- Measurement and iteration. Tracking from day one, then changes made against what visitors did rather than what anybody thought they would do.
That is what a proper build involves, and it is also the reason a proper site keeps improving after launch while a cheap one is finished the day it goes live.
When a cheap site is the right answer
Frequently, and we would say so.
- You are brand new and testing whether the business works. Get something honest and fast online, win jobs, collect reviews, then invest once you know which services you actually want to sell.
- Nearly all your work is referral. If people arrive already recommended and only want to check you exist, a clean, quick, credible site does the job. It is a business card, and business cards should be cheap.
- You send no paid traffic and do not intend to. The case for conversion investment scales with traffic. Without traffic there is nothing to convert.
- Cash is genuinely tight. A cheap site now beats a proper site in eight months, and beats an unaffordable monthly payment for something you cannot service. Do the free things properly instead: complete the Google Business Profile, name your towns in the text, put your number at the top, get reviews.
When not to rebuild at all
Rebuilding is often the wrong response even when the site is bad, and the honest sequence is to rule these out first.
If your site converts badly but the traffic is also very low, you have a traffic problem, not a conversion problem, and a beautiful new site will convert the same handful of people slightly better. Fix acquisition first.
If you have never had tracking, install it and wait a month before deciding anything. Rebuilding without knowing which pages produced enquiries means throwing away the parts that worked along with the parts that did not.
If the leaks are the ones in the table above, most of them can be fixed on the site you already own for a fraction of a rebuild. A tap-to-call button, your towns written in the text, real photographs, proof moved up the page, three service pages written properly. We have told firms to do exactly that and come back in six months, and it is usually the higher return.
The moment a rebuild does become obvious is when the structure itself blocks you: no way to add service pages, no way to make it fast, nothing to track, and a paid budget being poured into it every month. At that point the site is not saving you money, it is quietly taxing every channel you run. If you want a straight answer about which of those two situations you are in, send the address over on the contact page and you will get one, including if the answer is to keep what you have.
Want this decided on your numbers rather than in the abstract?Average job value, close rate and the area you cover. That is enough to say which of these is right for you, including when the answer is neither.
Call 07443 392243WhatsAppCommon questions
Is a £500 website a waste of money?
Not necessarily. For a new firm testing whether the business works, or one whose enquiries are nearly all referrals, it can be exactly the right decision. It becomes a waste at the point you start buying traffic, because from then on every pound of advertising is multiplied by the site’s conversion rate.
How do I know if my website is losing me enquiries?
Compare visitors with enquiries over a month. Below about 2% for a local trade site, there is usually something structural wrong. Then check the obvious leaks on a phone: is the number tappable at the top, are your towns written in the text, is there proof above the fold, does it load on a weak signal.
Can my existing cheap site be improved instead of replaced?
Very often, yes, and it is usually the better first move. Tap-to-call, coverage areas in the text, real photographs, reviews moved up, and proper service pages fix most of the common leaks without a rebuild. Rebuild when the structure itself prevents those changes.
Does a better website help my Google rankings?
Indirectly and substantially. Speed, structure, indexable service pages and content that answers real searches are all inputs to organic performance, and a page per service is what lets you rank for specific jobs rather than only your company name. Design alone changes nothing.
What conversion rate should a trade website get?
There is no reliable published benchmark for UK trade sites, so treat any single figure with suspicion. What is useful is your own baseline and the direction it moves. Measure for a month, change one thing, measure again. Your own trend line beats somebody else’s average every time.