How much should a carpenter pay for a website? Nine real 2026 prices
The same brief, a small carpentry site with a gallery, a few service pages and a contact form, is publicly advertised in the UK from £360 to £10,000. Not quoted privately at those numbers. Published, on the providers' own pages, this month. That is a spread of twenty-eight times for a job with the same page count.
No other trade tolerates that. If a British joiner quoted £360 for a set of fitted wardrobes and the firm down the road quoted £10,000, one of them would be doing something fundamentally different, and everyone would know which.
So I went and read nine of them properly: what each provider actually charges, what the headline figure leaves out, and what the first year genuinely costs once setup fees and minimum terms are counted. Then the more useful question, which is what a fair price for a joinery site has to include before the number means anything at all.
A UK carpenter should expect £550 to £1,200 in year one for a site built and maintained for them. Managed plans advertise £49 to £99 a month; a freelance one-off build runs £800 to £3,000 plus running costs. Below £400 you maintain it yourself. Above £3,000 for seven pages you are buying agency overhead, not a better website.
What nine UK providers actually charge in 2026
Every figure below was read off the provider's own published page on 23 August 2026, not estimated, and the year one column counts the setup fee the monthly headline leaves out.
| Provider and plan | Advertised | Setup | Year one |
|---|---|---|---|
| Duport Done-for-you build | £360 one-off | Included | £360 |
| Digital Tradies Starter, up to 5 pages | £49 / month | £0 upfront | £588 |
| Sitework Website plan, what I do | £50 / 4 weeks | No build fee | £650 |
| Ubie Essential, 5 pages | £69 / month | £99 | £927 |
| Digital Tradies Pro, adds local SEO | £79 / month | £0 upfront | £948 |
| Ubie Growth, 10 pages | £89 / month | £99 | £1,167 |
| Freelancer Typical UK 4 to 5 page build | £800 to £3,000 | n/a | £900 to £3,300 |
| Freelancer plus care plan Web Design and SEO Company | £39 + VAT / month | Deposit | Build + £562 |
| Agency Standard small business site | £2,500 to £10,000 | n/a | £2,500 to £10,000+ |
Read the year one column rather than the advertised one, because they rank differently. Ubie's Essential plan looks like a mid-range option at £69 a month, and the £99 setup fee plus the twelve month term pushes it past Digital Tradies' Pro tier for the first year while including less. That reordering is the single most useful thing in the table.
The gap between the cheapest and the second cheapest
Duport's £360 build is genuinely the cheapest real option here and the £94 a year renewal is honest. What you are buying at that price is a small, tidy, largely standard site. It is a reasonable purchase for a joiner who mainly needs somewhere legitimate for a customer to land after they have already decided to call, and it is not going to out-rank the four established joinery firms in your town, because nothing at that price point is built to.
Why the top of the range is not the top of the quality
The £10,000 end is not a better joinery website. It is the same seven pages carrying an account manager, a project manager, a studio lease in a city centre and a sales team who worked on winning you before anyone opened a code editor. Agencies price against their overhead, which is entirely rational for them and irrelevant to you.
The monthly figure is not the price, the exit is
On a twelve month term a £99 setup fee is not a small extra, it is 11% added to the year, and it is the number most often left off the comparison.
Every managed plan needs that same sum doing to it before it can be compared with anything, because the headline monthly figure and the year one figure rank the market in a different order. Ubie publishes all three of those numbers honestly. It just publishes them in three different places.
Then ask the question that actually decides value, which is what you own at the end. Digital Tradies states plainly that the website files belong to the customer after twelve months and that it keeps them if you leave sooner. That is at least clear. Plenty of providers are not, and a joiner who cancels in month nine can find that the site, the content and occasionally the domain go with them.
Get it in writing before you pay anything. Who owns the files, who holds the domain, what notice you have to give, and whether there is an exit fee. I set out the exact clauses worth insisting on in what should be in a web design contract, and none of them are unreasonable to ask for.
What a fair price has to include
A price is only comparable once you know what is inside it, and six things belong inside the headline figure rather than on a separate invoice.
Any quote that excludes the first three is not the price you will pay. Any quote that excludes the last three is not a website that will bring you work, whatever it costs, and that is the more expensive mistake of the two.
£650 a year against a £198 day
HaMuch puts the average UK carpenter and joiner day rate at £198, so a £650 year is a little over three days of work.
That is the sum worth doing, because a website priced per month never feels like a purchase and a joinery job always does. The national average is £198 a day, ranging from £135 in Lisburn to £256 in Perth and Kinross. I broke the regional spread down properly in the UK carpenter day rate.
So the honest test is not whether £650 is a lot of money. It is whether the site brings in more than three days of joinery across a year. One fitted wardrobe job clears it. An agency site at £5,000 has to find twenty-five days before it breaks even, which is a materially harder bar and nobody selling it ever puts it that way.
What I found on 36 carpenters' websites
Of the 36 UK carpenters and joiners on my call list this year, twelve had no website at all, and twenty of the remaining twenty-four had one that was actively costing them work.
Almost none of those twenty had been ripped off on price. That is the part that surprised me. They had paid roughly the going rate, somewhere between £400 and £1,500, and got something that did not work, because the money went into the wrong things.
What the money had been spent on
A homepage slider. A stock photograph of a kitchen in someone else's house. A contact form nobody had tested. On more than one, an animated hero that took four seconds to appear on a phone on a rural connection, which is where the customer already gave up.
What it had not been spent on
A page for each job type. The gallery grouped by what the job was rather than when it was finished. The towns covered, written out. On several sites the only mention of where the business worked was a postcode in the footer, so the site could not be matched to the search that would have found it.
Which is the real answer to the pricing question. The difference between a joinery site that earns and one that sits there is not the invoice. It is what got built, and the cheapest possible version and the most expensive one fail in exactly the same way. If you want the full spec of what a carpentry site needs to carry, it is on the carpentry and joinery page, and the build calendar is in how long a joiner's website takes to build.
So what should you pay?
£550 to £1,200 in year one, with everything included and the files yours at the end, is a fair price for a carpentry website in 2026.
What I charge is £50 every four weeks with no build fee. Four-weekly means thirteen payments across a year rather than twelve, so the true annual figure is £650, and I would rather print that than the rounder number a monthly plan implies. It covers the site, hosting, the domain, the certificate, backups and unlimited small text and photo edits, so adding last week's staircase to the gallery is a text message. Three months minimum, then rolling. After twelve months the website is yours to keep, files and domain transferred, with no exit fee.
And there is nothing to pay to find out. I build a free mockup of your actual joinery business first, from your photographs and your towns, and you decide after you have seen it. Every price in the table above is asking you to commit before you have looked.