Do flooring fitters need a website, or just Instagram? The floor sells itself, the quote does not
Fitting labour on a laminate floor runs about £15 to £30 per square metre across the UK, so a 25 square metre lounge is £375 to £750 of labour before anybody has priced the floor itself.
Every one of those quotes starts from the same three facts: how many square metres, what is going down, and what is underneath it now. Not one of the three can be read off a photograph. That is the whole tension in this question, and it is why the answer for flooring is less one-sided than it is for most trades. Flooring is the trade where Instagram genuinely works. A finished herringbone floor photographs better than a rewired consumer unit or a re-pointed gable, a before and after fits in a single frame, and a fitter who posts steadily builds a following faster than a plasterer ever will. Then the following sends a direct message asking how much, and there is nothing to answer with, because the answer is arithmetic and the app is a gallery.
Both, and they do different jobs. Instagram wins the attention, because a finished floor is the strongest photograph in the trades. A flooring fitter's website wins the quote. A UK price needs square metres per room, the material, the subfloor and a date, and British Standard BS 8203 sets a moisture limit before anything is laid. Post to the app, quote from the site.
Instagram is genuinely good for flooring, and that is exactly the problem
A finished floor is the strongest photograph in the trades, which is why flooring fitters get further on Instagram than most trades do, and then stall in the direct messages.
I want to start by conceding the point, because most advice on this subject refuses to. Pattern work photographs beautifully. Herringbone, chevron, a border in a hallway, a stair nosing done properly: these are visual results in a way that most trade work is not, and the whole job lands in one frame with no explanation needed. A fitter with a decent phone and a year of steady posting can build a genuine local audience. I have argued the general case for owning a site rather than renting an audience in website versus Instagram and TikTok for trades, and flooring is the trade where that general case is weakest.
The problem is not the feed. It is what the feed hands you. An audience that likes floors is not the same thing as a person with a room, a budget and a date, and the app gives you no way to tell them apart until you are already twenty messages deep. For most trade accounts the profile bio is still the only clickable route off the platform: links inside feed captions were reported through 2026 as a paid Meta Verified feature in limited testing, capped at a small number a month and absent from Reels and Stories. So the one thing you are allowed is a single link. The question is what sits behind it.
The six things a flooring quote needs, and where each one can come from
A flooring quote needs six facts before it is a price rather than a guess, and a direct message reliably delivers one of them: roughly what room it is.
This is the scorecard I use when a fitter tells me the enquiries are not converting. Score your own setup against it. The point is not that Instagram is useless, it is that each of these six has to arrive from somewhere, and if the page does not ask, you ask, one message at a time, at half past nine at night.
| What the price hangs on | A direct message | A page that asks |
|---|---|---|
| Square metres, room by room The number everything multiplies |
Rarely, and rarely right | A field, with a how-to-measure line |
| Material and finish chosen LVT, laminate, engineered, carpet |
Sometimes, as a photograph of somebody else's floor | A list of what you fit, picked from |
| Subfloor and whether it is dry Concrete, screed, boards, old tile |
Almost never volunteered | Asked, with the check stated as a condition |
| Old floor: lifting and disposal Who takes it to the tip |
Assumed, by both of you, differently | A yes or no on the form |
| Doors, thresholds and skirting What comes off or gets trimmed |
Discovered on the day | Flagged before you price it |
| Access, date and the furniture Whether the room is empty |
Two more messages | Answered while they are still keen |
| Score | 1 of 6, on a good day | 6 of 6, before you ring |
None of this is a trick against the app. A determined fitter does get all six out of a chat thread eventually. The cost is that it takes a dozen messages per enquiry, it happens in the evening, and the keenest customers are the ones who go quiet partway through because somebody else gave them a number first. A form that asks once collects the lot while the room is still on their mind.
The subfloor question decides whether the job is profitable
British Standard BS 8203 treats a subfloor as dry enough for a resilient covering such as vinyl at 75 percent relative humidity or lower, measured with a hygrometer sealed to the floor and left in place for three to seven days.
This is the figure that separates people who fit floors from people who write about fitting floors, and it is the reason a quote given off a photograph can lose money. Levelling an uneven subfloor with screed or ply, or putting a surface damp-proof membrane over a slab that reads too wet, adds roughly £5 to £15 per square metre before the new floor goes down. On that 25 square metre lounge, preparation nobody mentioned is £125 to £375 out of your labour. You either absorb it, or you have the conversation about it standing in their hallway, having already given a price.
What to put on the page about it
One sentence, and it does two jobs at once: every quote is subject to a subfloor check, because a resilient floor laid over a screed reading above 75 percent relative humidity will not last. That protects your price, and to a customer who has been quoted by three people it reads as the only one who knows what they are doing. Almost nobody in this trade puts it in writing. The equivalent sentence works in every trade with a hidden variable, which is why I keep finding it missing: a damp-proofing survey has the same shape, and so does the certification question in the trade next door.
The trade bodies worth naming, if you hold them
Flooring has real British trade bodies and hardly any fitter's website names one. The Contract Flooring Association and the National Institute of Carpet and Floorlayers co-founded FITA, the Flooring Industry Training Association, which runs practical training centres at Loughborough and Kirkcaldy. If you have done a FITA course, or you are a CFA or NICF member, that is a checkable fact about you that your competitor down the road cannot copy. Put it next to the standard, not in a footer.
What people type when they are ready to pay
Nobody searches Instagram for what engineered oak costs per square metre fitted. They search Google, in words, and the page that answers with a real range gets the call.
The two platforms catch people at different moments, and that is the cleanest way to think about the whole question. Somebody scrolling in the evening is being reminded that their hall floor is tired. Somebody typing the cost of LVT fitting per square metre into Google on a Tuesday morning has decided to spend money this month. The second person is the one you want, and nothing you post will reach them, because they are not looking at pictures. They are looking for a number.
A claimed Google Business Profile plus a page that names the trade, the towns and a fitting band is what puts you in front of that search. Paid social reaches the first person rather than the second, which is the distinction I set out in Facebook ads against a website for tradesmen. And the pattern holds across the fit-out trades: when I counted what comes back for bathroom fitter across three English market towns, one result in fifteen actually named the trade, which is the same gap in how bathroom fitters get jobs without Checkatrade.
Retail subcontract or direct to the homeowner: the site does a different job
If most of your work arrives through a retailer or a showroom, the website's job is to make you the fitter they keep. If it arrives direct, its job is to produce a measured enquiry. Build for the one you are actually in.
Flooring splits in a way that kitchens and bathrooms do not, and getting this wrong is the commonest reason a flooring site does nothing. A large share of fitters in Britain work behind retailers and contract suppliers, where the customer has already chosen the material and the price conversation is labour only. The rest, or the same person on different weeks, sell direct. These want different pages.
So, a website or just Instagram?
Keep the Instagram, it is doing real work in this trade. Add the thing that turns a follower into a measured enquiry, because the app is never going to ask anybody how many square metres they have.
If you fit floors and you have built a following, you have done the hard half. What you have not got is a way to be found by the person who types a number into Google, or a way to collect six facts without spending your evening on it. That is a page, and it is not a big one: a fitting band, the materials, the subfloor line, the disposal answer, a form that asks for room sizes, and the work you have already photographed.
Built and looked after for you that is £50 every four weeks with no build fee and nothing to pay on day one, which is £650 a year, an allowable business expense against your profit, and less than the labour on one 25 square metre lounge. You see a free mockup of your own floors on the screen before any of it is payable, and after twelve months the site and the domain are yours to keep. If you would rather build it yourself on a site builder for £10 to £25 a month, do that instead: the six questions matter more than who types them in. Either way, stop quoting off photographs.