The short answer
Based on the UK pricing guides we checked on 28 August 2026, a professionally built 5–10 page website for a trade usually costs £1,000–£5,000 as a one-off. DIY builders run roughly £100–£400 a year; bigger agency builds run to £10,000 and bespoke work goes beyond that. Domain, hosting, care and any monthly SEO come on top.
The top Google result for this question, on both the UK search and the general one, is a Reddit thread. That tells you what people want: real numbers from people who have paid, not a brochure. So here are the numbers, where each one comes from, and what changes them when the site is for a trade.
What a website costs in the UK by who builds it
The table below is what the UK pricing guides ranking for this question were quoting on 28 August 2026. They disagree at the edges, so the source is next to each figure.
| Who builds it | One-off build | Running cost per year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| You, on a DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy) | £0–£300 (Red Eagle) | £100–£400 (Red Eagle); £240–£360 (Duport); from around £100 (GoDaddy) | Red Eagle, Duport, GoDaddy |
| A freelance designer, usually on a template | £500–£3,000 (Red Eagle); £800–£3,000, typically £1,200–£2,000 (Duport); £1,000–£2,500 for a small site (Authentic Style) | £150–£600 (Red Eagle); £100–£300 (Duport) | Red Eagle, Duport, Authentic Style |
| A small UK agency or studio | £1,000–£1,500 for a 3–5 page brochure site, £1,500–£3,500 for a professional small business site (GetYouOnline); £2,000–£6,000 for a regional agency (Red Eagle); £2,500–£10,000 (Duport) | £600–£1,500 (Red Eagle) | GetYouOnline, Red Eagle, Duport |
| A bespoke or premium agency build | £5,000–£15,000+ for a London or premium agency (Red Eagle); £10,000–£12,000 for an agency's small site (Authentic Style); "up to £10,000 and beyond" (GoDaddy) | £1,000–£3,000+ (Red Eagle) | Red Eagle, Authentic Style, GoDaddy |
Two of those guides go a step further and price by industry. Red Eagle puts a trades website (it names plumbers, electricians and builders) at £1,000–£3,000 and a construction firm's at £2,000–£5,000. GetYouOnline tells small businesses to budget £1,000–£3,000 for "a professional, lead-generating website" and puts a growing local business at £1,500–£3,000. All checked 28 August 2026.
Google's own AI summary at the top of the UK results that day told the same story in three tiers: DIY builders in the low hundreds a year, a freelancer from about a thousand pounds, an agency from a few thousand into five figures.
So the honest headline for a trade is this: a proper site built by someone else lands somewhere between £1,000 and £5,000, and where you sit in that band depends on the items below.
What changes the price when the site is for a trade
A plumber, electrician or roofer does not need what a shop or a law firm needs. The price is driven by a short list of things, and most of them are about pages and content rather than design.
| What the site needs | Why a trade needs it | What it does to the price |
|---|---|---|
| A page for each service you want to win | Google ranks pages, not businesses. "Boiler installation" and "emergency plumber" are different searches and need different pages. | Priced per page. This is the biggest lever on any quote. |
| Service-area pages | A firm covering six towns needs to be found in six towns. | Each one is a page. Done properly they cost as much as a service page; done as clones with the town name swapped they are cheap and Google ignores them. |
| Tap-to-call and a short quote form | Most trade enquiries are a phone call from a mobile. The form catches the rest. | Cheap to build, expensive to leave out. Should be standard in any quote. |
| Your Google reviews on the site | Reviews are what a homeowner checks before calling. | Small cost if pulled in from Google; more if built by hand and kept up to date manually. |
| Accreditation badges | Gas Safe, NICEIC or NAPIT, TrustMark, CHAS, FMB, CompetentRoofer, Which? Trusted Trader: the marks customers look for. | Nothing extra, but only if you ask for a proper place for them rather than a logo dumped in the footer. |
| Photos of your own jobs | Nobody is convinced by a stock photo of a stranger in a hard hat; before-and-after shots of real jobs are what a homeowner checks. | Free if you supply them from your phone. Red Eagle prices a professional shoot at £300–£1,500 (checked 28 August 2026). |
| The words on each page | Somebody has to write them. If it is you, it takes evenings. | Red Eagle quotes professional copywriting at £200–£500 per page (checked 28 August 2026). Cheaper quotes often assume you write everything. |
| SEO foundations versus ongoing SEO | Titles, structured data, speed and a clean local set-up belong in the build. Ranking work is monthly. | Foundations should be in the build price. Monthly SEO for trades is a separate, ongoing cost. |
| Hosting and care | The site has to live somewhere and be kept updated. | Often included for year one, then billed yearly or monthly. See hosting and care. |
If you want the full checklist of what belongs on the site before you ask for quotes, read what a tradesman website should include. Walking into a quote with a page list is the single best way to get comparable prices. The pages for plumbers, electricians and roofers show what that page list looks like for each trade.
How much for a 5-page or a 10-page website
Page-count pricing is the question the big guides answer weakly, so here it is straight, with figures checked 28 August 2026:
- 3–5 pages (home, one or two services, about, contact): £1,000–£1,500 from a UK agency (GetYouOnline); £1,200–£2,000 for a typical freelancer build (Duport).
- 5–10 pages: £2,000–£5,000 for a brochure site (Red Eagle).
- 10–20 pages: £5,000–£10,000 for a small business site (Red Eagle).
- One page: £300–£900 for a single landing page (Red Eagle), which is rarely enough for a trade that wants to rank for more than its own name.
For a trade, ten pages is a home page, four to six service pages, one or two area pages, a reviews page and contact. Five pages is the sole-trader version: home, one services page, about, reviews, contact.
Pages are not all equal, though. A page that needs new writing, its own photos and its own search title costs more than one that reuses a layout, which is why Red Eagle can price a whole trades site at £1,000–£3,000 while pricing a 5–10 page brochure site at £2,000–£5,000. Ask what a page costs to add later, and whether adding one means a new invoice or a small change under a care plan. The answer tells you a lot about the provider.
The running costs that never make the headline
The build price is the number everybody quotes. The number that matters over three years is build plus running costs. These are the categories, with the ranges the UK guides were quoting on 28 August 2026.
| Cost | Typical UK figure | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | £10–£20 a year (GetYouOnline, Duport); a .co.uk renews at around £10–£20 a year (Authentic Style) | Renews every year. Make sure it is registered in your name, not the agency's. |
| Hosting | £10–£20 a month for a basic site, £20–£50 for a business site (Red Eagle); £20–£40 a month (GetYouOnline); shared hosting £2–£10 a month (Authentic Style) | The cheap end is fine for a brochure site if it is fast. Slow hosting costs you rankings on mobile. |
| Business email | £5–£10 a month for a basic set-up (Red Eagle); £3–£10 a month (Duport) | Optional, but an address at your own domain looks more established than a Gmail. |
| Care or maintenance | £30–£100 a month (GetYouOnline); £0–£50 a month for a basic site, £50–£150 for a business site (Red Eagle); £100–£300 a year for a freelancer's ongoing costs (Duport) | Updates, backups, security, small content changes. Check what is included. |
| Ongoing SEO | £300–£1,000+ a month (GetYouOnline); £60–£300 a month for a freelancer, £300–£1,500 for a studio, £1,500+ for an agency (Authentic Style) | Only if you choose it. The build should already include the foundations. |
Red Eagle also totals the monthly running cost by site type: £16–£82 a month for a basic site and £91–£261 a month for a business site, before any SEO. That works out at roughly £200–£1,000 a year for a basic site and £1,100–£3,100 a year for a business site (our arithmetic on Red Eagle's monthly figures, checked 28 August 2026).
Put together, a three-year cost looks like this:
- Year one: build price, plus a year of domain, hosting and care. Many quotes include the first year of hosting; check whether yours does and what it costs after.
- Years two and three: running costs only, unless you add SEO. A business site sits in that £1,100–£3,100 a year band on Red Eagle's figures.
- Over three years: a £2,500 build with business-level running costs comes to roughly £5,800–£11,900 in total on those numbers. A DIY builder at £240–£360 a year (Duport) comes to £720–£1,080 over the same period, plus your evenings.
That last line is the fair way to compare DIY with paying someone: the same three years, all costs in, and a value on your own time.
Building it yourself versus paying someone
The DIY builders are not a con. A sole trader who gets most work by word of mouth, wants somewhere to be found by name and has a quiet January can build a decent site on Wix or Squarespace for the price of a few hours' labour a month. Duport lists Wix's Core plan at £13 a month, and GetYouOnline puts the DIY platforms at £15–£40 a month (both checked 28 August 2026).
The subscription is the small cost. The big cost is time, and it is easy to underestimate: picking a template, writing every page, sourcing photos, setting up the domain and email, and then keeping it all working. Charge yourself your own day rate for those hours and the comparison changes.
Where DIY sites usually fall down for a trade is not the look. It is:
- Speed on a phone. Builder templates carry a lot of code, and a slow page on a 4G connection loses the call.
- Local search. Getting a builder site to rank in six towns for five services takes the same page structure an agency would build, and it is fiddly to do on a builder.
- Reviews and badges. Pulling in live Google reviews and giving accreditations a proper home is where templates run out.
- Moving out. Most builders will not let you take the design with you. You can usually move the domain, not the site.
If you already have a site that is dated or slow rather than missing, the honest option may be a redesign of what you have rather than starting again.
The fair-price test before you sign
Quotes for the same brief vary widely, and the Reddit threads are full of people asking whether they were overcharged. Most of the spread comes from four things: the hourly rate of whoever is building it (Red Eagle puts Manchester, Leeds and Bristol agencies at £50–£80 an hour against £100–£150+ in London, checked 28 August 2026), whether the design is a template or bespoke, who writes the words, and whether the first year of hosting and care is inside the price.
So compare quotes on the same items, not on the total. A quote you can trust itemises:
- How many pages, and which ones by name.
- Who writes the copy and who supplies the photos.
- Whether hosting and care are included, for how long, and the price after that.
- Whose name the domain is registered in.
- What "SEO" means in the quote: foundations in the build, or a monthly service.
- How many rounds of changes are included before it goes live.
- A fixed timescale, agreed before you pay a deposit.
- What happens to the site if you stop paying.
Red flags are the mirror image: no page count, "SEO included" with no detail, a monthly figure with no total, a domain the agency owns, and a price far below the market with no explanation of what has been left out.
The same test works whether the quote is a fixed package or a day rate: itemise it, then compare item by item.
Who owns what when you stop paying
None of the top-ranking guides answers this properly, and it is the question that costs tradespeople the most money.
There are three models. With a one-off build, you pay for the site and it is yours: the files, the design, the words, the domain. You can move it to another host or another developer. With a DIY builder, you own your content and your domain, but the site itself only exists on that platform. With a rental or subscription site, where an agency builds for nothing or very little and charges a monthly fee, the site is usually theirs; stop paying and it goes, often with the domain if you let them register it.
None of these is wrong, but the price only makes sense once you know which one you are buying. A low build price on a rental deal is not a low price if you are still paying for it in year five and cannot leave.
Three questions settle it before any money changes hands:
- Is the domain registered in my business's name, with my login?
- If I stop paying, do I keep the site, and can I move it?
- Do I get the files and full admin access when it goes live?
Ask them in writing. A provider who is happy to answer is usually a provider who is happy to be compared.
Questions people ask
How much for a 10 page website?
Red Eagle's UK guide prices a 5–10 page brochure site at £2,000–£5,000 and a 10–20 page small business site at £5,000–£10,000, while its industry table puts a trades site at £1,000–£3,000 (all checked 28 August 2026). The gap between those figures is mostly whether every page gets its own writing, photos and design or reuses a layout. For a trade, ten pages usually means a home page, four to six service pages, one or two area pages, reviews and contact, so ask for the price per page and what a page costs to add later.
What is a fair price to pay for a website?
A fair price is itemised and sits inside the market range for what you are actually getting: on 28 August 2026 the UK guides we checked put a 3–5 page brochure site at £1,000–£1,500 (GetYouOnline) and a typical freelancer build at £1,200–£2,000 (Duport). A quote well below that usually means a template with your name typed in; a quote well above it should come with a reason, such as bespoke design or professional writing and photography. Judge it on the page count, who writes the words and what you own at the end, not on the total alone.
Does it cost money to keep a website running?
Yes. Every site needs a domain renewal, which GetYouOnline and Duport both put at £10–£20 a year, and hosting, which Red Eagle prices at £10–£20 a month for a basic site and £20–£50 for a business site (checked 28 August 2026). Care or maintenance is optional but sensible for a business site: GetYouOnline quotes £30–£100 a month and Red Eagle £50–£150 for a business site. SEO is a separate monthly cost only if you choose to pay for it.
What is a reasonable budget for a small business website?
GetYouOnline tells small businesses to budget £1,000–£3,000 for a professional, lead-generating website, and Red Eagle's industry table puts trades at £1,000–£3,000 and construction firms at £2,000–£5,000 (both checked 28 August 2026). Set the budget on what the site has to do rather than on the cheapest number: a sole trader who wins work by phone needs fewer pages than a firm covering six towns with five services. Add a year of domain, hosting and care to the build price before you compare it with a directory subscription.
How much should I pay someone to build a website for me?
For a trade site, the UK guides checked on 28 August 2026 put a freelancer at £500–£3,000 (Red Eagle) or typically £1,200–£2,000 (Duport), and an agency at £1,500–£3,500 for a professional small business site (GetYouOnline) or £2,000–£6,000 for a regional agency (Red Eagle). Pay at the lower end for a template with your content dropped in, and towards the upper end when the price includes the writing, photography, service-area pages and the first year of hosting and care. Whatever you pay, get the page list, the ownership terms and the after-launch costs in writing first.
How much should a website cost per month?
If you build it yourself, GetYouOnline puts the DIY platforms at £15–£40 a month and Duport lists Wix's Core plan at £13 a month (checked 28 August 2026). If someone builds it for you, the build is a one-off and the monthly figure is your running cost: Red Eagle totals that at £16–£82 a month for a basic site and £91–£261 for a business site, covering domain, hosting, email and maintenance. Be careful with all-in monthly deals that include the build: check whether you keep the site if you stop paying.
Written by Janusz Wozniak, Founder & Lead Developer. Guides are updated when prices or platforms change; the dates above say when.