Does Checkatrade give you a website you own? Six tests, five fails
On 29 October 2025 Checkatrade quietly started giving UK members a website. It is called a TradeSite, it costs nothing while the beta runs, and handing a sole trader who has never had a site a real one at no charge is a genuinely useful thing to do.
Then you read the product terms that govern it. I put six ownership questions to that document, the six a tradesman would actually care about, and on five of them the answer is that the thing belongs to Checkatrade. The design, the software and the AI-written copy are theirs under clause 16. Any domain they register stays under their ownership under clause 17. Under clause 26, the day the service ends the site is permanently de-commissioned and nobody sees it again, not you and not the public.
The one test it passes is your own photographs and logo, which were yours before you uploaded them.
No. A Checkatrade TradeSite is licensed to you, not owned by you. Their product terms, last updated 29 October 2025, keep ownership of the TradeSite and of any domain Checkatrade registers, and state that on termination the site is permanently de-commissioned. You keep the content you supplied. A UK trade who wants the website to be an asset needs one in their own name.
What a TradeSite actually is
A TradeSite is defined in Checkatrade's own terms as "the co-branded website made available to You through the TradeSite Service", a service where they "design, host, maintain, and license to You" that site.
Every word in that definition is doing work. Co-branded, so it carries their name as well as yours. Licensed, not sold or transferred. And the same document says the service is "only available to trades with a Fixed Plan or PAYG Campaign", which are the paid lead products. The free website is attached to a paid subscription.
It is also formally a beta, "made available free of charge on a discretionary basis" under clause 4, with clause 6 reserving the right to "update, modify, suspend, or withdraw" it at any time. Clause 13 sets out how fees would arrive later: advance notice, and if you do not cancel before they start you are deemed to have accepted them.
You will not find it in the marketing
Checkatrade's own member benefits page runs through insurance discounts, fuel savings, the badge for your van and the national TV advertising. It does not mention the website at all. The clearest description of the product anywhere on the site is the legal document that governs it, which is an unusual way round.
Six ownership questions, scored against their own clauses
Of the six things a tradesperson would reasonably expect to own in a website they were given, the TradeSite Product Terms leave five of them with Checkatrade.
Every verdict below is quoted or paraphrased from the TradeSite Product Terms as published on 28 August 2026. I have put the clause number against each so you can check me rather than take my word for it.
| What you would expect to own | Who actually has it | Clause |
|---|---|---|
| The photos, logo and copy you supplied | Yours | 15 |
| The site design, code and layout | Checkatrade's | 16 |
| The AI-generated content on your pages | Checkatrade's | 16 |
| The domain name they register for you | Checkatrade's, revocable licence to you | 17 |
| The site itself once you leave | Permanently de-commissioned | 26 |
| Enquiries the site brings in | Counted against your paid lead plan | 14 |
The last row is the one I did not expect and the one worth reading twice. Clause 14 says any lead generated through the TradeSite, via a Secure Contact or the request a quote button, "will be allocated against Your existing Fixed Plan or PAYG Campaign". Somebody finds your website, likes your work, clicks the button, and that enquiry is drawn down from the leads you have already bought. It is a defensible piece of accounting, because the phone number and the form are theirs. It is also not what most people picture when they are told they are getting a free website.
There is one softener. Clause 25 says that at the point you give notice to terminate, "You may request to acquire the domain used for the TradeSite". A request, not a right, with no published price and no published process. Better than nothing, but you would want that conversation in writing long before you need it.
The clause that settles the question
Clause 26 is unambiguous: on termination or expiry "for any reason", the TradeSite "will be permanently de-commissioned and will no longer be available to You or the public".
There is no export, no archive and no handover of the built site. Three lines are worth having in front of you before you agree to any of this.
Clause 12 covers the softer landing. Cancel the paid plan but stay on a Free Profile and you keep something, except that Checkatrade may remove "all Checkatrade branding, Secure Contacts, widgets, and technology" from it. What is left is a website with the parts that made it work taken out.
The website you do own costs extra to link to
Linking your Checkatrade profile to your own website is a separate paid product, charged either as a fixed monthly fee or as a fee for every click.
This is set out in the Weblinks Product Terms, updated 26 September 2024. The service is "the provision by Us to You of a dedicated area in Your Profile to link a Webpage URL", and clause 8 says the fees "may be chargeable either as a Fixed Fee or a Fee Per Click". Clause 10 spells out the per-click version: a fee for every click, a rate they can vary at any time, and a monthly budget that switches the link off when you hit it.
Clause 6 closes the side doors. You "must not include the Webpage URL or any other website or webpage link or reference anywhere within Your Profile" outside that paid area, and they reserve the right to remove any that turn up. Clause 7 adds that the page you link to has to be dedicated to your business and cannot be a social media profile.
So the position for a British trade paying for both is this: your own website generates enquiries you paid for, and sending a Checkatrade visitor to that website can cost you again on the way out. If you want the arithmetic on the membership itself rather than the website, I have written separately on whether Checkatrade is too expensive in 2026.
Their own drafting makes the distinction
One detail I enjoyed. The Master Service Terms define the Review Widget as something you use "on a website that You own and control". That phrase appears in their contract exactly once, and it is not describing the TradeSite.
What Checkatrade gets right here, and it is not nothing
The TradeSite terms are clearer and more honest than most of this market, and on price Checkatrade beats every paid provider in Britain including me, because the site is free.
Four things deserve saying. Clause 15 leaves your content yours and takes only the licence it needs to display it, which is the correct and fair way to draft that. Clause 21 refuses to guarantee "that search engine rankings or visibility will improve as a result of the TradeSite Service", and a company willing to write that down is more trustworthy than one promising page one. Clause 13 commits to notice before any fee is introduced, with a window to leave. And clause 25 at least creates a route to the domain.
There is a fifth. Checkatrade publishes eighteen separate product terms documents covering everything from the AI receptionist to the opportunities board. Of the nine UK website providers I audited earlier this week, three published no terms at all. Being able to read the contract before you sign it is not a small thing, and it is what made this article possible.
What the plan behind it costs
Checkatrade publishes no membership price on any public page. To see a figure you have to choose a trade category and enter the signup funnel, which asks for your business details first. The only price in their own documents is in the Master Service Terms, which define an Application Fee as "a fee of £250 excluding VAT" that they may charge to process an application. The same terms set an agreement that runs for the period in your confirmation email and renews automatically, cancellable only by the business owner telephoning, and only in the window from 35 days before renewal. Yell, by contrast, does now publish figures, which I went through in what Yell charges for a trade website.
Free against £50 every four weeks
On cash Checkatrade wins this outright, because the TradeSite is free and mine is not, so the only honest comparison is what each one leaves you holding in year two.
| Checkatrade TradeSite | Sitework Website | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free during beta | £50 / 4 weeks |
| Requires | A paid Fixed Plan or PAYG campaign | Nothing else |
| Who owns the site | Checkatrade | You, after twelve months |
| Who owns the domain | Checkatrade, revocable licence | You, registered in your name |
| Can you edit it | Request changes, accepted at their discretion | Unlimited small text and photo edits |
| Enquiries it generates | Drawn against your lead plan | Straight to you |
| If you leave | Permanently de-commissioned | Files withheld inside twelve months |
| Minimum term | None stated | 3 months, then rolling |
Two rows in that table are uncomfortable for me and I have left them in. The first row says free, and free beats £650 a year in anybody's arithmetic. The seventh row says I withhold the files inside twelve months, which is a restriction of the same family as theirs, just on a twelve month clock with an automatic handover at the end of it rather than a permanent switch-off. If you are choosing on price alone this is not a close call and you should take the free one.
Where it stops being about price is the second year. A TradeSite is a marketing asset owned by a company whose interests are not yours, running on a domain they hold, feeding enquiries into a plan you pay for, and it evaporates the day the relationship ends. A site in your own name accumulates: the domain ages, the pages rank, the reviews and photographs build up against an address you control. For a carpenter working a few towns that difference compounds quietly for years, which is what the carpenter website page is really selling.
Seven questions before you accept a free website from any platform
None of this is unique to Checkatrade, and the same seven questions will sort a good free website from an expensive one on every lead platform in the UK.
Question four is the one that separates a website from a listing. Question seven is the one almost nobody asks until the week they need it, which is the worst possible week to ask it. If you are weighing the membership as a whole rather than the site, there is more in my Checkatrade advice for tradespeople.
The verdict
A note on method, because it caught me out. The Checkatrade membership terms still circulating as a single PDF dated 25 October 2021 are long superseded. The live contract is a Master Service Terms document plus eighteen product-specific ones, and every answer above is in the product terms rather than the master. Find a provider's terms hub and read the document named after the thing you are actually buying.