Painter & decorator website design · UK 2026
Painter & decorator website design: what wins local jobs
What a decorator's site should actually cost, why the photo gallery does most of the selling, and how the three routes to getting one compare once you price your own time honestly.
Decorating is the easiest trade to sell online, because the proof is a photograph. A customer cannot see a rewire or a boiler service, but they can see a crisp cutting-in line and a hallway that went from tired to showroom. A full interior repaint is worth £1,500 to £3,000, and the person paying for it decides between two decorators on one thing above all: whose finished work looks better in the photos. That makes a decorator's website less a brochure and more a portfolio with a phone number attached. Most decorator sites get this backwards. They lead with a paragraph about being reliable and professional, bury three blurry photos at the bottom, and wonder why the phone is quiet. This post covers what painter and decorator website design should cost in 2026, what the site must show to win local jobs, and how the three ways of getting one compare on real money.
Painter and decorator website design costs about £10 to £25 a month DIY on a builder, £800 to £2,000 for a one-off freelance build, or from £50/month done-for-you with hosting and edits included. Whatever the route, the site must lead with a gallery of real finished jobs, name the towns you cover, show genuine reviews and a tap-to-call number, and load fast on a phone. For a trade bought on visible finish quality, the photos do the selling.
What a painter and decorator website should cost in 2026
A decorator's website costs £10 to £25 a month plus your own build time on a DIY builder, £800 to £2,000 up front for a freelance one-off, or from £50/month done-for-you with hosting, security and edits included, and one landed interior repaint covers a year of the done-for-you fee.
The sticker prices hide where the real cost sits: your evenings and who keeps the thing running. Here is the honest first-year picture for a decorator, with your own time priced at a modest £200 a day.
DIY looks cheapest until you count the weekend and the evenings you spend fighting the editor.
DIY on a builder
Wix or Squarespace runs £10 to £25 a month. You build it yourself, which for most decorators means a weekend to launch and a string of evenings after, roughly £500 of your own labour at a £200 day rate. The result is usually a template that looks like every other template, with your photos squeezed into boxes they were never shot for.
The freelance one-off
A freelancer will build you something better for £800 to £2,000, then hand over the keys. From that day the upkeep is yours: hosting, security, and £50 an hour every time a price or a phone number changes. The site is only as good as its last update, and most one-off sites never get one.
Done-for-you monthly
A done-for-you plan rolls the build, hosting, security and every future edit into one flat fee, from £50/month for a one-pager or £100/month for a full site, no setup fee, live in about a week. It costs more than a builder subscription and takes none of your hours. The wider price comparison across every trade is in how much a tradesman should pay for a website, but the short version for decorators is simple: one landed repaint pays for the year.
Typical UK job values. If the site lands one job a year it has paid for itself several times over.
The gallery does the selling: what a decorator's site must show
A decorator's website lives or dies on real job photos: before and after shots of rooms and exteriors, taken in daylight on a tidy job, outsell any paragraph of copy, because decorating is the one trade a customer can fully judge with their eyes.
The customer weighing you against another decorator has no way to compare your brushwork except your photos. So the site's job is to put your best finished work in front of them fast, then make it easy to act. Here is what a page that wins that comparison carries, against the generic template most decorators end up with.
| Feature | Winning decorator site | Generic template |
|---|---|---|
| Photos | Real before & after, room by room | Stock rollers and paint tins |
| Service area | Named towns and postcodes | "Serving the local area" |
| Trust signals | Reviews, PDA membership, insurance | "Fully qualified" with no proof |
| Getting a quote | Tap-to-call + short photo-upload form | Long form, no number visible |
| Mobile speed | Compressed images, loads fast | Full-size photos, slow on 4G |
Shoot the work like it matters
Ten minutes with a phone at the end of a job is the highest-value marketing a decorator can do. Daylight, straight lines, one wide shot and one detail shot of the cutting-in. Pair each with the matching "before" and you have the only sales copy the site needs. Six good jobs beat sixty mediocre snaps.
Prove you are legitimate
Decorating has no legally required register the way gas work has Gas Safe, which makes the trust signals you can show worth more. Genuine Google reviews, public liability insurance stated plainly, and membership of a body like the Painting and Decorating Association all separate you from the van-and-a-mobile crowd the customer is nervous about.
Make the next step tiny
A visible tap-to-call number plus a short form that lets the customer attach a photo of the room is all the conversion machinery a decorator needs. Every extra field on the form costs you enquiries.
Is Instagram enough for a painter and decorator?
An Instagram grid shows your work to people who already follow you, but it cannot rank on Google when someone in your town searches for a decorator, so it feeds on your reputation without ever growing it beyond your followers.
Plenty of decorators run a tidy Instagram and treat it as their website. It is half the job. The feed is a brilliant shop window for people who already know your name, and useless for the customer three streets away typing "decorator near me" into Google, because individual posts do not rank for local search and the platform buries your contact details behind taps.
Where the grid falls short
Instagram owns the audience, orders your work by recency rather than quality, and pushes your best transformation down the feed within days. A website holds your ten best jobs at the top permanently, and Google can send it strangers every week. The full comparison is in website vs Instagram and TikTok for trades.
Use both, but own the middle
The pattern that works: Instagram for the running feed, a one-page site as the permanent portfolio, and your Google Business Profile pointing at the site. Google's own guidance on improving local ranking is blunt that complete, consistent information across your profile and website is what moves you up the local results. A grid alone gives Google almost nothing to rank.
Do painters and decorators need their own website at all?
A decorator with a full diary from word of mouth still leaks work without a website, because referred customers search your name before they call, and an empty result sends a share of them to the decorator who does show up.
The honest question underneath all of this is whether a decorator needs a site in the first place, and the answer depends on how much of your work you want to control. Word of mouth is real and it is free, but it has a ceiling: it only reaches people one conversation away from a past customer.
Referrals still get checked
When your name gets passed across a fence, the new customer searches it. A site with your gallery and reviews converts that warm lead on the spot. Nothing coming up plants doubt you never hear about. The case for and against, played straight, is in do painters and decorators need a website.
The jobs you never see
Beyond referrals there is a steady stream of local searches from people nobody referred you to: landlords between tenants, new owners redecorating before they move in, offices wanting a repaint over a quiet week. Those jobs go to whoever shows up on Google with believable photos. Without a site you are not losing them, you simply never see them.
Getting your decorating site built without losing a weekend
A done-for-you decorator one-pager is usually live in about a week for £50/month with hosting, security and unlimited small edits included, so the photos win jobs while you stay on the brushes.
What done-for-you covers
You send the job photos, your towns and your services. The build, the words, the image compression, the hosting, the security and every future tweak are handled for one flat monthly fee. New showcase job? Send the photos over and they are live on the site without you touching an editor.
See yours before you pay
I build a free mockup of your actual decorating business, your name, your towns, your photos, before you pay anything. Like it? A one-pager is £50/month and a full site is £100/month, done-for-you, no setup fee. The commercial detail is on the painter and decorator website design page, and you can apply at sitework.uk/#apply to see yours finished.