How Much Does a Website Cost for a Tradesperson in the UK?

It is one of the first questions every tradesperson asks when they start thinking about getting a website. How much is this actually going to cost me? And the answer you will usually get is "it depends," which is not particularly helpful when you are trying to budget.

So let us cut through the vagueness. Here is what a website actually costs for a UK tradesperson in 2026, broken down by the most common routes.

Option 1: DIY website builders (£0 to £300 per year)

Platforms like Wix, Squarespace and GoDaddy let you build a website yourself using drag-and-drop templates. The entry price is low. Some are even free to start, though the free plans come with the platform's branding plastered across your site and a domain like yourbusiness.wixsite.com, which does not exactly scream professional.

To get a custom domain and remove the ads, you are looking at roughly £10 to £25 per month. That adds up to £120 to £300 a year. On top of that, you need to factor in your own time. Most tradespeople we speak to say it took them a full weekend or more to get something they were happy with. Some never quite got there.

The sites look decent at first glance, but they tend to be slow, bloated with unnecessary code, and limited in how well they perform on Google. You also do not own the code. If the platform raises its prices or shuts down, you lose everything.

Option 2: A cheap freelancer (£200 to £800)

There is no shortage of freelancers on platforms like Fiverr and PeoplePerHour offering websites for a few hundred pounds. Some of them do solid work. Many of them do not.

At the lower end, you are typically getting a WordPress theme that has been lightly customised with your logo and colours. The site might look fine, but under the surface it is running on a template used by thousands of other businesses. Speed, security, and SEO are often afterthoughts.

The bigger risk is reliability. Cheap freelancers come and go. If something breaks in six months, the person who built it might not be around to fix it. You are left with a site you cannot easily maintain and no one to call.

Option 3: A web design agency (£2,000 to £10,000+)

At the other end of the scale, agencies offer fully managed projects with discovery sessions, wireframes, multiple rounds of revisions, and polished results. For a large business with complex needs, this makes sense.

For a sole trader or small trades business, it is usually overkill. You do not need a six-week discovery process to build a four-page website for a plumbing business. And at £3,000 to £5,000 for a basic brochure site, the return on investment takes a long time to materialise when you are running a one or two-person operation.

Many agencies also lock you into ongoing contracts for hosting and maintenance. Monthly fees of £50 to £150 are common, and the site often runs on their servers, meaning you cannot easily move it if you decide to leave.

Option 4: Hand-coded, fixed-price websites (£399 to £1,299)

This is the approach we take at Deepwater Design, so we are biased. But we built the business specifically because we saw a gap between the options above.

A hand-coded website means no WordPress, no templates, no page builders. Every line of code is written specifically for your business. The result is a site that loads fast, ranks well on Google, looks professional on every device, and does not depend on any platform to keep running.

Our Starter package is £399 for a single-page site. Our Business package is £749 for up to four pages. Our Professional package is £1,299 for up to eight pages with advanced SEO and a blog or portfolio section. All packages include a 5-day delivery guarantee, and you own the code outright.

There are no monthly platform fees, no lock-in contracts, and no surprise costs. You know exactly what you are paying before any work starts.

What about ongoing costs?

Whichever route you go, there are a couple of recurring costs to budget for.

Domain name: Your .co.uk or .com address. This costs roughly £10 to £15 per year. You register it through a provider like GoDaddy, Namecheap, or 123 Reg, and it is yours as long as you keep renewing it.

Hosting: This is where your website files live so people can access them online. Basic hosting for a small business site runs from free (GitHub Pages, Netlify) to around £5 to £10 per month for shared hosting. If your web designer sets this up for you, they might charge a monthly fee that includes hosting and occasional updates.

All in, a tradesperson can realistically have a professional, fast, well-built website live and generating enquiries for under £500 in the first year, with ongoing costs of less than £200 a year after that. Compare that to the cost of a single job that came through the site, and the maths speaks for itself.

So what should you actually spend?

It depends on where your business is at. If you are just starting out and need a simple online presence with your contact details and a description of what you do, a single-page site for a few hundred pounds is more than enough. If you are more established and want to rank on Google, show off your work, and generate a steady stream of enquiries, investing in a proper multi-page site with SEO will pay for itself many times over.

The one thing we would strongly advise against is spending nothing. In 2026, not having a website is not a money-saving decision. It is a decision that costs you every job you never hear about because the customer found someone else online.