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The four tiers, honestly described
There is no single market for websites. There are four, they barely overlap, and confusion between them is where most of the frustration in this purchase comes from. These are observed UK ranges for trade and local service businesses, not anybody's rate card.
| Tier | Typical UK range | What you are really buying |
|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | A monthly subscription, commonly £10–£30 | A builder, a template and your own evenings. Genuinely viable for a sole trader who writes clearly and has photographs. The cost is time, and the risk is a platform whose output is hard to move later. |
| Template build | Roughly £300–£900 one-off | Somebody applies your logo and colours to an existing template, adapts generic copy to your trade and wires a contact form. Fast, and at that price it has to be. A brochure rather than a sales process. |
| Freelancer or small studio | Roughly £1,000–£3,500 | Usually the sweet spot for a trade firm. Structure decided around your services, copy written for your jobs, photographs handled, speed taken seriously, tracking installed. Quality varies more within this tier than between the others. |
| Agency build | Roughly £4,000–£12,000 | A team rather than a person: research, copywriting, design, build, testing, and someone accountable afterwards. Justified by scale — multiple divisions, many locations, real integrations — rather than by better-looking pages. |
| Custom application | £15,000 upwards | Software with a website attached: live pricing engines, customer portals, stock or fleet systems, bespoke booking against complex availability. Very few trade businesses need this and the ones that do know. |
Two things are worth saying about this table. First, price does not reliably predict quality within a tier, and it predicts it least in the freelancer band, which contains both the best value in the market and most of the disappointments. Second, moving up a tier does not buy a nicer-looking site. It buys more of the work that happens before anyone opens a design tool.
What genuinely moves the number
When a quote is higher than another quote, it is almost never because the design is fancier. Six things move the figure, in roughly this order of impact.
- How many pages carry real, original writing. A page written by somebody who has interviewed you about how the job is actually done takes hours. A page adapted from a template takes minutes. Ten of the first is a different product from twenty of the second, and it is the single largest cost line in any honest quote.
- Research. Finding out what your customers search, what they are frightened of, what your competitors already answer and what nobody is answering. Invisible on the finished site and the thing that decides whether it works.
- Photography and image handling. Sorting six hundred phone photographs into labelled jobs, stripping location data, resizing each into several widths and converting formats is real work. A half-day shoot is real money. Both outlast the design.
- Integrations. Anything that talks to another system: booking against a live diary, a registration lookup, a payment provider, a practice management platform, a CRM. Each is a build, a test cycle and a failure mode to handle.
- Custom tooling. A quote calculator, a measuring tool, a filterable project gallery. Logic, edge cases and testing on real handsets.
- Accountability afterwards. Whether anybody is contracted to look at the site once real visitors have used it and change what the data says to change. This is the difference between a delivery and a service, and it is frequently the entire gap between two quotes.
Notice what is absent from that list: number of images, whether it has animations, how modern it looks. Those are outputs of the work, not drivers of its cost.
There is a seventh driver that only appears in some quotes, and it is worth asking about explicitly: who is responsible for the words being true in two years. Trade sites go stale in specific, damaging ways. Prices move, an accreditation lapses, a service is dropped, a town is added, an engineer leaves and their profile stays up. A quote that includes a scheduled review is buying you something a cheaper quote is not, and a quote that includes a content management system you have been shown how to use is buying you the ability to do it yourself. Either is fine. Neither being present is the thing to notice.
What you are not paying for
Three things are commonly presented as premium and are not.
Design polish beyond a point. A clean, fast, legible site with the right things in the right order outperforms a beautiful one with the phone number in the footer. Beyond basic competence, visual sophistication has almost no measurable relationship with enquiries in the trades. It has some relationship with credibility, which matters, and that ceiling is reached early.
Page count. A quote for a forty-page site is usually a quote for thirty-two thin pages generated from a template with a town name swapped. They do not rank, they do not convert, and they create a maintenance burden forever. Eight good pages is a better purchase than forty weak ones and should cost less.
The platform. Whether a site is built on one content system or another is an implementation detail that some quotes dress up as a feature. What matters is whether the content is in the HTML before JavaScript runs, whether it is fast on a phone, and whether you can move it. Those are properties, not brands, and the argument for server-rendered output is set out on the web design page.
The running costs nobody mentions
The build price is not the cost of ownership, and a quote that does not set out the ongoing position is incomplete rather than cheap.
- Domain registration. Small, annual, and it must be in your name. This is the most common piece of accidental lock-in in the trades.
- Hosting. Ranges from a few pounds a month to considerably more depending on what the site does. Cheap shared hosting is a genuine cause of slow sites.
- Platform or licence fees. Content system subscriptions, plugin licences, form handlers, booking software. These accumulate quietly.
- Third-party services. Registration lookups charged per query, mapping, payment processing, SMS sending. All usage-based.
- Maintenance. Updates, backups, broken things. Either you buy this or you absorb the risk.
- Content. The site needs new job photographs and occasional new pages. This is the cost that is never quoted and always needed.
A monthly website package that bundles all of this can be genuinely good value, particularly for a firm that will otherwise never touch the site. It becomes a poor deal at the point where you have paid several times the build value and do not own the result. Ask what happens at the end, and ask before you sign.
Ownership, and the question that reveals it
Ask this: if I stop paying you tomorrow, what do I keep?
The answer should be everything — files, domain, hosting account, content, analytics, tracking configuration — handed over without argument or fee. Anything less is a rental, and a rental can be the right choice as long as you know that is what it is.
The specific traps to check for: a domain registered in the builder's name rather than yours; a proprietary platform the site cannot leave; hosting bundled so tightly that moving means rebuilding; analytics and Search Console under their account rather than yours; and copy or photographs you paid for but do not have the rights to. None of these are exotic and all of them are ordinary in this market.
The practical protection is boring and it takes an afternoon. Register the domain yourself, in your own name, with your own card, before anybody starts work; every builder can be given access without being given ownership. Create the analytics and Search Console properties under an email address you control and add the agency as a user. Ask for the finished site as files at handover even if you never touch them, and keep a copy. None of that implies distrust and any competent builder will do it without comment. It simply means that if the relationship ends badly, or the person you hired stops answering the telephone, you have lost a supplier rather than your online presence. Firms discover this distinction at the worst possible moment, usually while trying to change a phone number on a site nobody can log into.
Nine questions to ask any quote
- How many pages carry original writing, and who writes it?
- What research happens before anybody designs anything?
- Is the content present in the HTML before JavaScript runs? Ask them to show you view-source on something they have built.
- What do the Core Web Vitals look like on mobile for your last three builds?
- What is installed on day one to tell me which page produced which enquiry?
- Who owns the domain, the hosting account and the files?
- What are the total recurring costs, listing every third-party service?
- What happens in month three when the data says something should change?
- What is the process if I want to move to somebody else?
You are not testing knowledge with these. You are testing whether the person quoting thinks about the site as a sales process or as a deliverable. Both answers are legitimate at the right price; you just need to know which you are buying. Our own answers are on the methodology page.
Working out which tier you are in
The honest way to decide is to work out what a percentage point of conversion is worth to you, and the calculation takes ten minutes. Monthly visitors, enquiries from the site, the resulting conversion rate, and gross profit per enquiry, which is your margin multiplied by your close rate. Then model the change. If moving from two per cent to four adds a few hundred pounds of gross profit a year, a template site is correct and anybody telling you otherwise is selling. If it adds five figures, the money you saved is the most expensive saving in the business. The cost per lead calculator will run the sum with your own numbers.
One factor tilts this decisively: whether you buy traffic. UK digital ad spend reached £40.5bn in 2025, with paid search alone accounting for £17.9bn, according to the IAB UK Digital Adspend 2025 study. That is an enormous amount of money being poured onto landing pages, and every pound of it is multiplied by whatever the page does with the visitor. A firm spending a thousand pounds a month on search advertising against a page that converts at two per cent is buying half the enquiries of the identical firm at four, permanently. If you advertise, the site is not a brochure cost, it is a multiplier on every channel you run.
And if you do not advertise, do not intend to, and get most of your work by referral, then a clean, fast, credible site at the lower end is the right answer. It is a business card. Business cards should be cheap, and we will tell you so rather than quote for something you do not need.
Rather have someone else do this?We run exactly this for trade and construction firms across the UK. Call and we will tell you what is realistic in your area, including when the answer is that it is not worth it.
Call 07443 392243WhatsAppCommon questions
Why do quotes for the same brief vary by ten times?
Because they are quoting different products under the same word. One is applying a template in two days; another is doing research, original writing, photography, integration and post-launch iteration over six weeks. Neither is dishonest. The way to compare them is to ask each what is included in writing, page by page, and see how far apart the answers actually are.
Is a monthly website package a rip-off?
Not inherently. For a firm that will never otherwise touch the site, bundling hosting, maintenance and small changes into a monthly fee is convenient and often good value. It becomes poor when the total paid passes several times the build value and you still do not own the files or the domain. Ask what you keep if you stop paying, and decide with that in front of you.
Should I pay extra for copywriting?
It is usually the highest-return line in the quote, and the one most often cut. Copy is what answers the visitor's questions, pre-qualifies enquiries and gives a page something to rank for. A beautifully built page with generic trade copy on it is an expensive way to say nothing.
How long should a trade website take to build?
Three to six weeks is normal for a properly written trade site, and the delay is almost never the build. It is waiting for photographs, for answers about how you actually work, and for sign-off. A quote promising a week is quoting a template, which may be exactly what you want as long as you know.
Can I start cheap and upgrade later?
Yes, and for a new business it is frequently the right sequence: get something honest online, win work, gather reviews, then invest once you know which services you actually want to sell. The one thing to protect is portability. Register the domain yourself, keep your own analytics account, and avoid platforms whose content cannot be exported.