How much does Yell charge for a trade website? They will not sell you one

What a first year costs, against the rest of the market

The cheapest published door to a Yell website is £299 a month on a twelve month initial period, which is £3,588, against £588 to £828 a year for the British companies that sell a trade website as a product in its own right.

Two of these bars are not measuring the same thing as the other three, and I have labelled them so you can see which. The point of putting them together is not to call Yell expensive. It is to show that "how much is a Yell website" and "how much is a trade website" are different questions with an order of magnitude between them.

Look at bars three and four before you assume where this is going. On the like-for-like comparison, a website with ongoing search work attached, Yell's entry price is cheaper than mine, £3,588 against £4,550. I am not going to pretend otherwise on my own website. Where the gap opens is the top two bars: if what you actually want is a website, Yell has nothing to sell you at that end of the market at all.

Why there is no separate price for a Yell website

Yell's websites page is headed "INCLUDED IN AMPLIFY & ACCELERATE · NO EXTRA COST", so the website is a feature of a marketing subscription rather than a product with a price of its own.

What they describe is a 30-page site "structured around the services and locations you want to be known for", built, written and managed by Yell, "typically live within 10 working days", with blog content included and the ability to edit it once live. For a trade covering eight towns and six services, thirty pages is not padding, it is one page per combination. That is a real approach and it is the same logic behind a lot of local SEO work.

The catch is structural rather than sneaky. You cannot buy the website and leave the rest. A sole trader in Wales who wants a decent five page site and nothing else has no Yell product to buy, and the smallest thing they can buy costs roughly six times what that site is worth on the open market. If you want to see who does sell one, I audited nine companies that build websites for UK tradesmen on their published prices.

What the published price does not include

Yell's Advertising Terms and Conditions define a Design Fee "payable for the design and set up of your Yell Website which shall apply across all Service Tiers as set out in the Confirmation of Order", an amount that appears nowhere on the public pages.

The websites page says the site is at no extra cost. The terms define a fee for building it that applies across every tier and whose amount lives only on your own order form. Both can be true at once if the bundle waives it, and a buyer reading the marketing page has no way to tell which applies to them. Three lines from the Yell Website service rules are worth having in front of you on the call.

The Lead Guarantee is a credit, not a refund

Accelerate is "backed by our Lead Guarantee", and it is a real clause rather than a slogan, which is more than most of this market offers. Read what it does, though. It is calculated from figures you supply about your average profit per job and your expected conversion rate, Yell may withdraw or amend it if it believes those figures are inaccurate, and a shortfall is met by crediting a proportion of the charges. Their own worked example credits 25% back on a 75% delivery. You are not getting the year's money back for a quiet year.

The domain is registered by Yell as your agent

Their terms say Yell acts as your agent to register the domain, it renews automatically each year unless you instruct otherwise at least 30 days before expiry, and each renewal carries a charge. Agent is the right word and it is better than some arrangements in this market, but it still means the renewal calendar is not in your hands.

The figures still circulating, and who wrote them

The Yell prices quoted across British web design blogs, typically £500 to £5,000 for a build plus £40 to £66 a month, come from third parties writing during a period when Yell published nothing, and none of them are Yell's published price.

You will find those numbers in forum threads, agency blog posts and review sites. Some of them are people describing what they were quoted, which is real evidence of something but is not a price list. Others are secondhand. All of them predate the pricing now on business.yell.com, and repeating them as current is how a comparison article ends up telling you something that stopped being true.

There is a second thing worth saying out loud, because nobody in my trade says it. Almost every page you will find attacking Yell's pricing was written by a web design company that wants to sell you a website instead. Including this one. That is not a reason to ignore any of us, but it is a reason to check the figures against the source rather than against the tone, which is why every number above is quoted from a Yell page with the date I read it.

£299 a month against £50 every four weeks

The comparison only makes sense once you decide whether you are buying a website or buying an ongoing marketing service, because Yell's cheapest product is the second thing and most tradespeople searching this question want the first.

Neither column is the right answer for everybody. A trade doing £400,000 across three vans in a competitive city, who has nobody doing the marketing and no intention of learning, can make £299 a month work and Yell will do more of the job than I will at £50. A sole trader who needs to stop losing enquiries to a rival with a decent site is buying a website, and paying £3,588 for one is the wrong shape of purchase entirely. There is more on what that site has to do in how a website wins better jobs, and if you are an electrician specifically, the electrician website page sets out what I build and what it covers.

Nine questions for the 0800 call

Yell's entry point is a free 30-minute audit rather than a checkout, so the price you end up on is set in a conversation, and the answers below are the ones that decide what the year actually costs.

Question five is the one people skip and it is worth £718 on the entry tier. Question three is the one that decides year two. Neither is awkward to ask, and a salesperson who cannot answer both in writing has told you something useful.

Yell is not really competing for the website buyer

Everything Yell now sells is built around being found on Google, Maps and AI search, with the website as the thing those systems read, which is a different product from the one a tradesman means when he says he wants a website.

Their own framing makes this clear. The homepage offers a free AI readiness scan and asks whether AI could recommend your business. The websites page talks about being understood by "both search engines and AI platforms" and about supporting answer engine optimisation as well as traditional SEO. That is a fair read of where local search is going, and it is the same reason I have written about whether your business is invisible to AI.

So the useful comparison is not Yell against a web designer. It is Yell against doing that work another way: yourself, with a smaller agency, or on a plan that bundles it for less. Priced as marketing, £299 a month is defensible. Priced as a website, it is not a purchase a one van business in Britain should be making.

The verdict

One last note on method, since this post exists because I got it wrong first. Two days ago I published that Yell does not publish prices, because I checked yell.com and not business.yell.com. That page has been corrected. If you are comparing providers, check the business or partner subdomain before you conclude that a large company is hiding its price, and note the date you looked.