Comparison · Build options · UK 2026
Free vs paid website builder for tradesmen
What "free" actually costs a trade, measured against a paid builder and a done-for-you site on the things that win callouts: ownership, speed, trust and your own time.
A free website builder costs you nothing and your customer everything. The bill says £0, but the site arrives wearing another company's advertising, parked on an address like yourname.wixsite.com, and it lands on a phone that gives up after about three seconds of loading. For a tradesman that is not a saving, it is a quiet leak: the jobs walk off to the plumber whose page looked like a real business and answered on the first tap. "Free" is a genuine offer, and for a weekend test of whether you even want a site it does the job. The trouble starts the moment you try to run an actual trade off it, because the three things it takes away, your own domain, a fast page and a site that looks like yours alone, are the exact three things that turn a search into a booked callout. This is the honest comparison: free against paid against done-for-you, on the money that shows up on the bill and the money that hides in your week.
A free website builder for tradesmen (Wix, Google Sites) publishes a page at £0, but it shows ads, parks you on a shared subdomain, blocks a custom domain and leaves the building to you. A paid builder is £10 to £25/month for your own domain and no ads, still your time. A done-for-you site is from £50/month with the build, hosting and edits handled. For a working trade, free is usually a false economy.
What a free website builder actually gives a tradesman
A free website builder like Wix or Google Sites gets you a live page at £0, but it puts the builder's own adverts on your site, parks you on a shared subdomain such as yourname.wixsite.com, blocks you from using a custom domain, and leaves every bit of the building and upkeep to you.
The word free is doing a lot of work in the adverts. What you get is real, a page that exists on the internet without a payment, but it is a stripped tier designed to make you want the paid one. Knowing exactly what is switched off tells you whether it can carry a trade business.
What "free" actually includes
You get the editor, a template, a handful of pages and hosting on the builder's servers. That is enough to put your services, a few photos and a phone number online in an afternoon. Wix's own pricing page confirms the free plan publishes to a wix.com subdomain and carries Wix branding, with a custom domain and the removal of ads reserved for the paid tiers. Google Sites is cleaner and genuinely ad-free, but it is barebones and still leaves you on a Google subdomain.
What it quietly switches off
Three things, and they are the three that matter to a trade. No custom domain, so your address stays on the builder. Adverts for the builder on your pages (on Wix at least). And no upgrade to the small print that a paying customer looks for: your own professional email, a clean address on a quote, a site that is unmistakably yours. The full list of what a site needs before it can win work is in the tradesman website buyer's checklist.
The subdomain problem
yourname.wixsite.com is not a small cosmetic issue. It tells every customer that you took the free option, it is harder to say down the phone or print on a van, and Google treats a shared subdomain as less established than your own domain. A .co.uk address costs about £10 a year. Skipping it to save that is the clearest false economy on the whole page.
Free vs paid vs done-for-you, side by side
A free builder costs £0 but shows ads and a subdomain, a paid builder is £10 to £25/month for your own domain and no ads while still being yours to build and maintain, and a done-for-you site is from £50/month with the building, hosting, security and edits all handled for you.
Line the three routes up on what a trade actually cares about and the "cheapest" column stops being the free one the moment your own hours enter the sum.
| What matters | Free builder | Paid builder | Done-for-you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | £0 | £10 to £25 | From £50, all in |
| Your own domain | No | Yes | Yes, sorted for you |
| Adverts on your site | Yes (Wix) | No | No |
| Who builds it | You do | You do | Built for you |
| Who maintains it | You do | You do | Included, unlimited edits |
| Mobile speed | Template weight | Template weight | Plain files, loads fast |
The cost on the bill
On the invoice, free wins and it is not close: £0 against £10 to £25 a month against £50-plus. If the only number that mattered was the subscription, this article would end here. It does not, because the subscription is the smallest cost in the whole exercise for anyone who works for a living.
The cost in your week
A first build for someone who does not make websites is a weekend to launch and a run of evenings after, fighting a template that does not quite do what you want. Priced at a modest £250 day rate, that is several hundred pounds of your own labour on the free option before it earns a penny, on work you are not trained for and would rather not do. The wider route-by-route breakdown of what a trade site really costs is on the tradesman website cost page.
Speed, and the phone in the customer's hand
Free and paid builders load the same heavy template code onto the customer's phone. Google's page experience guidance is blunt that slow, unstable pages cost both visitors and rankings. A hand-built page sends only what it needs and loads in about a second on a bad signal, which on a trade site is the difference between a call and a bounce you never see. How the cheapest routes stack up on this is covered in the cheapest way to get a trade website.
The hidden costs of a free site
The real price of a free website builder is paid by your customer and your reputation: adverts for another company on your pages, a subdomain that reads as amateur, no professional email, and a slow page that loses enquiries you never get told about.
Every free tier is a shop window for the paid one, so the costs are deliberately arranged to appear after you have already built the thing. These are the ones that change the decision.
Ads and branding that are not yours
On the free Wix tier your visitor sees Wix's branding on your site. It is not a disaster, but it undercuts the one thing a trade site exists to build: the sense that you are an established, real business worth ringing. A customer weighing two plumbers does not consciously think "that one has a builder advert", they just get a faint feeling that one looks more legit, and act on it.
The "does this bloke look real" test
Customers decide fast, and they use scruffy signals: a subdomain address, a generic email, no clear towns covered, no registration numbers. A free site tends to fail several of these at once. Being seen as a proper business is most of the battle, and it is the subject of making your trade business visible to AI and search, because the same signals that convince a customer also convince the engines that now answer their questions.
When free quietly traps you
Here is the sting. You build the free site, it starts to pick up a bit of Google presence on its subdomain, and then you want to move to your own domain. You cannot take the ranking with you cleanly, and you often end up rebuilding. Free is easy to start and awkward to leave, which is the opposite of what you want from a business asset.
Who each option genuinely suits
A free builder suits a brand-new trade testing whether they even want a site, a paid builder suits someone who enjoys DIY and wants their own domain, and a done-for-you site suits a working trade who wants the phone to ring without spending evenings on maintenance.
None of the three is wrong. They answer different questions, and being honest about which question you are asking saves you months of the wrong effort.
Pick a free builder if
You want to test the water this weekend, you are not yet sure a website is for you, and you are happy for it to look and read as a placeholder. Use it for a fortnight, see whether anyone bothers to contact you through it, and treat it as a trial, not a home. Just do not print the subdomain on a van or expect it to win work against a real site.
Pick a paid builder if
You genuinely enjoy the tinkering, you have the evenings, and you want your own domain with no ads while keeping full self-service control. Buy the domain, pay for at least the entry plan so you can connect it, and, above all, finish it. A half-built paid site is the worst of both worlds. If DIY is your lane, the honest ranking of the tools is in the best website builder for tradesmen.
Pick done-for-you if
The website is a tool to win work, not a hobby. You want it live in about a week, fast on a phone, on your own domain, shaped around your trade, and looked after so you never open an editor. You would rather send a message saying "add the new boiler service" than learn a builder. That is most working trades, and it is the case done-for-you is built for.
The recommendation for a working trade
For a tradesman who wants the site to win work rather than be a project, free is a false economy: buy your own domain from day one, and if you do not want to build and maintain it yourself, a done-for-you site from £50/month is usually the cheapest route once your own time is counted.
Free is a fine way to answer the question "do I want a website at all". It is a poor way to answer "how do I win more callouts", because the very features it strips out are the ones that do the winning.
Use free only as a short test
If you are unsure, spend a weekend on a free builder, publish something rough, and see if it changes anything. Give it a fortnight. If enquiries start, you have your answer and it is time to do it properly on your own domain. If nothing happens, you have lost only a weekend, which is the correct price for a test.
The domain is the one thing never to skimp
Whatever route you choose, own yourname.co.uk. It is about £10 a year, it makes you look like a business, and it means the work you put into a site is never trapped on someone else's subdomain. It is the cheapest professional upgrade a trade can make, and free builders are the one option that denies it to you.
See yours before you pay anything
You do not have to guess. I build a free mockup of your actual business, your trade, your towns, your photos, before you pay a thing. Put it next to whatever a free builder gives you and pick the better site. If mine wins, it goes live from £50/month, on your own domain, with hosting, SSL and unlimited small edits included and no setup fee, typically inside a week.