How much does a scaffolding company website cost? And what the 55 I checked this week are spending it on
This morning I opened the websites of 55 scaffolding companies across eight parts of Britain, from Shropshire and Sussex to West Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and central Scotland. Eight of them could not complete a secure connection at all.
Two of the domains had lapsed completely and no longer have nameservers, although both firms were still being returned in search results. The other six are live but broken at the certificate: three redirect you to an address their own certificate cannot serve, two are running on self-signed certificates, and one fails the handshake outright. One of those certificates expired in January 2024. Another has been invalid since January 2022. In every case a customer who clicks through meets a full-screen warning telling them the connection is not private, before they ever see the name of the company. That is what a scaffolding website actually costs when nobody is being paid to look after it, and it is the number this guide is really about.
Four routes, and they land a long way apart. A site builder you run yourself is about £10 to £25 a month plus your evenings. A UK designer's one-off build is commonly £500 to £2,000 or more, with renewals left to you. A lead platform is not a website and the listing is not yours. Done-for-you with Sitework is £50 every four weeks, no build fee, everything included.
Nobody in this trade quotes a price, so here is mine first
£50 every four weeks, no build fee, nothing to pay on the day you start.
That is £650 across a year, because billing every four weeks means thirteen payments rather than twelve, and I would rather write that down than let it look like a monthly figure. It covers the build itself, hosting, the domain, the SSL certificate, backups, routine security and unlimited small text and photo edits. Three months minimum, then it rolls. You see a free mockup of your own firm before any of it is payable, and after twelve months the files and the domain transfer to you with no exit fee.
I am putting the number at the top because almost nobody selling to this trade will. The rest of this is what that money is buying compared with the alternatives, measured against what the trade is actually doing right now rather than what a web designer thinks it should be doing.
I audited 55 UK scaffolding websites. The trade is building the wrong page
Forty-eight of the fifty readable sites had a photo gallery. Eight named NASC. Five stated an insurance figure. One mentioned SG4.
That single line is the whole problem. Scaffolding firms are building portfolio sites for a buyer who is running a compliance check. The person deciding whether to let you put steel up the side of their building is not browsing photographs of scaffolds, because every scaffold looks like a scaffold. They are trying to work out whether you are insured, whether your lads are carded, and whether this is going to come back on them.
55 UK scaffolding company websites, checked 20 September 2026
| Could not complete a secure HTTPS connection | 8 of 55 |
| Domain no longer resolves at all | 2 of 55 |
| Homepage shows a photo gallery or "our work" | 48 of 50 |
| Mentions CISRS cards | 24 of 50 |
| Mentions CHAS assessment | 21 of 50 |
| Mentions NASC membership | 8 of 50 |
| Mentions TG20 design | 8 of 50 |
| Mentions liability insurance at all | 10 of 50 |
| States an actual cover figure | 5 of 50 |
| Mentions SG4 | 1 of 50 |
| Has a tap-to-call phone link | 34 of 50 |
| Has no mobile viewport tag at all | 5 of 50 |
| Median homepage | 717 words, 120 KB |
Homepages of 55 scaffolding firms surfaced by search across Shropshire and Herefordshire, Sussex, West Yorkshire, Bristol and Bath, Greater Manchester, Essex and Suffolk, Devon and Cornwall, and Scotland and the North East. Five could not be read because the domain had lapsed or the certificate could not be served, so percentages below that row are of the 50 readable. No business is named.
How the sweep was run
These are homepages as they were served to an ordinary browser request on the morning of 20 September 2026, not a survey of the businesses. A firm that does not mention its insurance on the homepage may well state it on an inside page, and plenty of excellent scaffolding companies have quiet websites. That is the point rather than a caveat. The homepage is what a stranger holding your name sees, and a buyer who has to dig for your cover levels usually rings the next firm on the list instead. Worth noting too: 32 of the 50 were on WordPress, four on Wix, and one each on Squarespace, GoDaddy, Webflow and a builder platform whose certificate was the self-signed one.
What an expired certificate actually looks like to your customer
Not a small padlock icon. A full-page interstitial in red or grey, filling the screen, saying the connection is not private and that attackers might be trying to steal information. The company name does not appear. To carry on, the visitor has to find "Advanced" and click through a warning telling them not to. Nobody chasing a quote for a two-storey rear extension does that. They go back to the results and pick someone else, and you never learn it happened. Three of the eight failures I found were certificates that had simply lapsed at renewal: one 58 days ago, one 103 days ago, and one that has been dead for over two and a half years.
The four routes, and what each one really costs a scaffolding firm
The cheapest column on paper is almost never the cheapest column after three years.
| Route | Typical UK cost | Who renews the certificate | Where it usually fails |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build it yourself on a site builder | Roughly £10 to £25 a month | The platform, automatically | Not the tech. It is the evenings. The credentials page never gets written because you are on site at seven |
| Independent designer, one-off build | £500 to £2,000 or more | Nobody, unless you agreed it separately | Year two. The designer has moved on, the renewal notice goes to an old email, and the site goes insecure |
| Lead platform listing | An approved listing around £30 a month, next tier from £59, plus per-lead charges | Not applicable, it is their site | You are renting a profile. The reviews and the ranking stay with the platform if you leave |
| Done-for-you, rolling | £50 every four weeks, no build fee | Me, as part of the price | It costs more than doing nothing, which is the honest objection |
Why the middle row is the one that bites
A one-off build is the most common arrangement in this trade and it is where nearly every failure in my sweep came from. It is not that the work was bad. It is that a website is not a product you take delivery of, it is a thing that needs a certificate renewed, a plugin patched and a phone number changed when you switch networks. Pay once and nobody owns any of that afterwards. If you are weighing this up more generally, the same arithmetic is laid out in full on what a tradesman website costs, and I ran the identical comparison for what an EV charger installer should pay, where the accreditation problem looks almost the same.
What a scaffolding site has to carry that a plumber's does not
Scaffolding is the only trade where the customer is signing off on a structure, a licence and somebody else's safety at the same time.
That makes the credentials page the most valuable page on the site, and in my sweep it barely exists. Here is what belongs on it. None of this is difficult to write. It is just nobody's job when the site was a one-off.
The licence clock almost nobody puts on the page
Under section 169 of the Highways Act 1980, scaffolding that obstructs a highway in England and Wales needs a written licence from the highway authority, and erecting one without authorisation is an offence. Councils attach standing conditions: lighting and guarding, the structure whitewashed or painted to a height of 1.6 metres where it needs to be lit, and either the footway kept open or an alternative walkway at least 1.2 metres wide. Most householders have no idea this applies to them. A firm whose website says plainly that it handles the application, and gives the usual turnaround in that borough or county, has answered a question the customer did not know how to ask, and has quietly explained a line on the quote at the same time. It is the single easiest piece of genuine expertise to put on a scaffolding site, and in fifty homepages I saw it handled properly on a handful.
Over three years, against one job
At £50 every four weeks, three years of a maintained website is £1,950, and the certificate never lapses in that time because renewing it is my problem rather than something you find out about from a customer. Set that against a single domestic contract on a two-storey rear extension, or a couple of weeks of hire on a commercial job, and it stops being a meaningful line in the accounts. It is also a business expense, so it comes off your profit before HMRC takes a view of it.
The comparison that matters is not against zero. It is against the one-off build that goes insecure in year two, which costs less on the invoice and rather more when a customer meets a security warning with your name on it. Scaffolding work moves largely through builders, roofers and repeat contacts, so most people arriving at your site were given your name by somebody. They are checking you, not discovering you. That is the same sequence I found in groundworks, where the referral arrives first and the search decides what happens next, and scaffolding is if anything more exposed, because the check includes insurance.
So what should you actually pay?
If you already have a site, spend nothing until you have checked two things. Open it on your phone on mobile data, not on the office wifi, and look for a padlock rather than a warning. Then see whether a stranger could find your cover levels and your CISRS position in under thirty seconds. If both pass, you do not need me. On the evidence of this week, roughly one scaffolding firm in seven fails the first test and the large majority fail the second.
If it fails, the question is only whether you want to own the maintenance or hand it over. Doing it yourself on a builder platform is genuinely fine if you will actually sit down and write the credentials page. If you know you will not, £50 every four weeks with no build fee buys a site that someone is responsible for, and the mockup comes first so you can see your own firm on the screen before anything is payable. Either way, run the two checks above this week. Before you compare any quotes, it is worth reading the buyer's checklist for a trade website, because most of what goes wrong is agreed at the start and discovered in year two.