Do carpenters need a website in 2026? The honest answer, including when it is no
Of the 36 UK carpenters and joiners on my call list this year, twelve had no website at all. Not a bad one. None. Twelve businesses that had been trading for years, one of them for over a decade, reachable only through a mobile number and a Facebook page last posted to in March.
That is a third of them, and it is worth saying plainly before anything else: a fair few of those twelve are doing perfectly well. Carpentry is the trade where word of mouth genuinely still works, because the work is visible, it lasts twenty years, and the person who commissioned it points at it when guests come round. A joiner who fits kitchens for two builders and has done for eight years does not have a marketing problem.
So the honest answer is not a straight yes. It is that it depends entirely on where your next twenty jobs are coming from, and most carpenters have never actually sat down and worked that out.
Most UK carpenters need a website, but not all of them. If your work comes from two or three regular builders, you probably do not. If you want bespoke, direct commissions from homeowners, you almost certainly do, because that customer researches before they ring, and a Facebook page cannot show a full project gallery, take an enquiry at nine at night, or appear on Google when somebody searches.
What 36 real carpentry businesses actually look like online
Across 583 UK trade businesses I have audited for cold calling, 36 were carpenters or joiners. Twelve had no website at all, twenty had one that was visibly dated, and four had something worth keeping.
I mine these lists to ring people, so the sample is not random. It skews towards smaller outfits and away from the big shopfitting firms. But it is 36 real British businesses looked at properly rather than a survey, and the shape of it is consistent from Norfolk to Cornwall.
The twenty dated ones are the interesting group. A carpenter with no website is invisible, which is a problem you can at least understand. A carpenter with a 2014 template site, no project photographs and text that overflows the screen on a phone is worse off, because that site does get found, and it is the first evidence of your standards a customer sees. One of the entries in my own notes reads, word for word: dated, poor hierarchy, no project photos despite a visual craft.
That last phrase is the whole problem in five words. Joinery is the most photogenic trade there is and it is the one least likely to show you anything.
When you genuinely do not need a website
If more than about three quarters of your work arrives from builders, developers or kitchen companies who already know you, a website will not change your year and the money is better spent elsewhere.
I would rather say this than sell somebody something that sits there. Subcontract carpentry runs on relationships and reliability. The site manager who rings you at seven on a Monday is not going to visit a website first, and no amount of search ranking makes him ring you more often.
You probably do not need one if your diary is filled by two or three regular trade clients, you are not trying to change the type of work you take on, you are within a few years of winding down, or you already turn away more direct enquiries than you can take. In those cases the honest advice is to put the money into better tools, a second pair of hands, or a proper accountant.
The one thing to do instead
Claim your Google Business Profile anyway. It is free, it takes twenty minutes, it puts you on Google Maps, and it means that when somebody who was given your name by a neighbour searches for you, they find something. That is a different job from a website and it is the minimum for any trade operating in the UK.
When you do need one, and it is not close
The moment you want to sell bespoke work directly to homeowners rather than fit other people's kitchens, the photographs become the product, and you need somewhere to put them that you control.
Direct commission work is where the margin is. A fitted alcove unit, a staircase, a run of wardrobes, a garden room: these are jobs where the customer is choosing a maker, not getting three prices for the same thing. They will spend a fortnight looking before they ring anybody, and almost all of that looking happens on a phone.
What they are doing during that fortnight is trying to answer one question, which is whether your finish is good enough for their house. There is no way to answer that with a phone number. It is answered with fifteen photographs of work you have already done, grouped by the sort of thing they are asking for.
Why the customer never rings the second best joiner
Unlike emergency trades, nobody commissions bespoke joinery in a hurry. That removes the advantage the fastest responder normally has and replaces it with a straight comparison of work. In practice a homeowner shortlists two or three and rings the one whose gallery looked most like what is in their head. If you are not in the shortlist you never hear about the job at all, which is why carpenters routinely believe demand is soft when they are simply not being seen. It is the same pattern I have written about for plumbers deciding whether a site is worth it, except the plumber at least gets rung in an emergency.
What a carpentry website has to do that other trades' do not
For a plumber or a sparky, the trust signal is a registration number. For a carpenter there is no equivalent, so the gallery has to do the entire job on its own.
A plumber puts Gas Safe on the page and a large part of the customer's worry goes away. An electrician has NICEIC or NAPIT. Carpentry has no register that a homeowner recognises, which means every ounce of credibility has to come out of the work itself. It changes what the site is for. It is a portfolio with a phone number attached, not a brochure with some pictures in it.
What it costs in 2026
A small trade website in the UK runs from about £10 a month if you build it yourself to £5,000 up front through an agency, and the gap is mostly about who does the work and who owns the result.
| Option | Up front | Ongoing | Who maintains it |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace) | £0 to £150 | £10 to £25/month | You, on a Sunday |
| Freelancer | £600 to £1,500 | Hosting, edits billed | Whoever answers |
| Agency | £1,500 to £5,000 | Hosting extra | Them, at a day rate |
| Sitework | Nothing | £50 every four weeks | Me, included |
Agency and freelance figures are typical British ranges rather than fixed quotes. On my own: there is no build fee, £50 every four weeks covers the site, hosting, the domain, SSL and unlimited small text and photo changes, and after twelve months the website is yours to keep with the domain and files transferred. Four weekly billing means thirteen payments a year, so it is £650 across a year and not £600, and I would rather write that down than have you work it out later. Three months minimum, then rolling.
Whatever you choose, the number that matters is not the price. It is what one bespoke commission is worth. A single fitted wardrobe job covers a year of any option in that table, which is why the argument is almost never really about cost.
How to tell which one you are
Count where your last twenty jobs came from. If fifteen or more came through a builder or a repeat client, stay as you are. If five or more came from somebody who found you, you are already leaking work you cannot see.
It is a ten minute job with a diary and it settles the question better than any argument I could make. The carpenters who do this are usually surprised by the same thing: the direct enquiries they did get were the better paid ones, and they arrived despite the business being close to invisible.
The other half of the picture is how people search near you, which varies more than most trades expect. I pulled apart how people in Sussex actually search for a tradesman and the pattern held across the county: job-type-plus-town beats trade-plus-town by a distance, which is exactly the search a gallery grouped by job type is built to win.
If you land on the side that needs one, the practical question becomes how quickly it starts working, and the honest answer is one to three months rather than one to three weeks. I have written up what the first ten jobs from a new website actually looked like, timings included. And if you want to see what the finished thing looks like for this trade specifically, that is what my carpenter and joiner website builds are.
Bottom line: a website is not a requirement of being a carpenter in 2026, and anybody telling you it is has something to sell. It is a requirement of selling bespoke work directly to homeowners, because that is a decision made from photographs, and you cannot show photographs down a phone line.