What's a trade website actually worth?
The break-even maths for a sole trader: what it costs, what one extra job returns, and how fast the whole thing pays for itself.
A trade website is one of the few things you'll pay for where the return is dead easy to work out and almost nobody bothers. The sums aren't hard. A done-for-you site across the UK is £50 every four weeks with nothing due on day one, which is £650 across a year, everything included. Your average job is worth a few hundred quid. So the real question isn't "can I afford it", it's "how many extra jobs does it need to win before it's paid for itself", and the honest answer for most trades is under three. Not three a month. Three across the whole year. After that, every enquiry the site catches is money you'd otherwise have watched walk to the competitor whose site turned up looking more sorted than your Facebook page. Most tradespeople never run this calculation, so they treat a website as a cost. Run it once and it flips into what it actually is: cheap insurance against lost work.
A trade website is worth the money for almost any working tradesman in the UK. A done-for-you site costs £50 every four weeks with no build fee, which is £650 across a year, all in. On a £250 average job, the whole year is paid off by under three extra jobs the site wins. Since a live, findable site tends to catch a few enquiries a month, most trades clear the annual cost inside the first month or two.
What a trade website really costs per year
A done-for-you trade website costs £50 every four weeks on the Website plan (£650 a year) or £100 on Groundwork (£1,300 a year), with no build fee and hosting, domain, SSL, security and unlimited small edits included, so the yearly figure is the whole figure.
You can't work out the payback until you're honest about the cost, and the trap here is the sticker price versus the real price. A cheap DIY builder looks like the winner at £10 to £25 a month, but that number ignores the weekend you spend building it and the evenings you spend keeping it alive. A done-for-you plan costs more per month on paper and less in total once your own time is priced in, because none of it is yours to do.
The done-for-you numbers, laid out flat
The maths is clean, with one detail worth getting right. Billing runs every four weeks, which is thirteen payments in a year rather than twelve. So the Website plan at £50 is £650 across a year, not £600, and Groundwork at £100 is £1,300. Say the real number, because a payback sum built on the wrong figure is worthless. Both include hosting, the domain, SSL, security and unlimited small text and photo edits, and there is no build fee, so nothing is due on day one. That's the entire cost. There isn't a separate hosting bill, a renewal spike or a per-change fee waiting round the corner, which is exactly what makes the payback sum reliable.
And at twelve months, you stop renting it
The other half of the cost picture is what you're left holding. After twelve months the website is yours to keep, domain and files transferred, no exit fee. That changes the shape of the sum: a year of payments buys the enquiries and the asset, which is not true of a lead platform, a Facebook page or a directory listing. It is three months minimum, rolling after that, and the first payment is refunded if you don't like the finished site.
Why "cheaper" DIY isn't cheaper
A £15-a-month builder is only cheaper if your time is worth nothing. Reckon on a full weekend to get something live, then several evenings over the following month. At a £200 to £350 day rate, and the going rates across the UK put most trades in that band, that's £400 to £700 of your own labour before the first fee, spent on work you're not trained for. Then the site sits there slower and more templated than a built-for-you one, quietly winning less. The sticker saving is real on paper and gone the moment you'd otherwise have been earning.
What one extra job is worth to you
The whole payback turns on your average job value: at £250 a job, a £650-a-year site needs 2.6 extra jobs across the year to pay for itself, and for higher-ticket trades a single won job can cover the site for a year or more.
This is the number most trades never plug in, and it's the one that decides everything. A website doesn't earn in the abstract. It earns in jobs, so the payback is entirely a function of what a job is worth to you and how many extra ones the site catches.
Run it with your own job value
A general handyman job might be £120. A plumber's average call-out and fix, £250. A boiler swap or a consumer-unit change, £500 to £900. A bathroom or a rewire, a few thousand. Take whichever is closest to your work and hold it in your head, because the site's cost is fixed and small, so the return scales with your ticket. £650 a year is 2.6 jobs for the plumber, and barely one job for the trade doing rewires. The higher your average job, the more absurd it gets to worry about £50 every four weeks.
Most trade work still starts with a search
The reason the site catches those jobs at all is that customers look online first. The ONS reports that the overwhelming majority of UK adults are recent internet users, and for local services the phone comes out before the address book. When someone types "emergency electrician near me" or checks whether you're real after a referral, the site is what turns that look into a call. No site, and that enquiry quietly goes to whoever does have one.
The payback sum, worked all the way through
Take the Groundwork plan at £100 every four weeks, £1,300 a year: on a £250 average job it breaks even at just over five extra jobs across the entire year, and a site that catches even one extra enquiry a month returns roughly £3,000 a year against that £1,300 cost.
Here's the calculation in full, with real figures you can swap for your own. It's deliberately conservative, and it still lands in the site's favour by a wide margin.
Break-even: the small number
Start with the cost and find the jobs that clear it. The Website plan is £650 a year; at a £250 job that's 2.6 jobs, call it three, to cover the whole twelve months. Groundwork is £1,300 a year, which is just over five jobs at £250, or a shade over two at £600. That's the break-even line: everything the site wins beyond three-to-six jobs a year is pure return. Say that out loud and the fear drains out of it. You are not betting a fortune on a maybe. You're risking the price of two or three jobs against a tool that works every hour of every day whether you're on the tools or asleep.
Return: the big number
Now flip to what a working site realistically brings in. It doesn't need to flood you. Say it catches one extra job a month you'd otherwise have lost, someone who found you on a search, liked the look, and rang. At £250 that's £3,000 a year against a £1,300 cost: a return of roughly two and a half times. Nudge it to two extra jobs a month, or run a higher-ticket trade, and the return runs into five figures. The site's cost is fixed and tiny. The upside isn't capped. That's the whole shape of the bet, and it's why the maths so rarely goes the other way.
The bottom line on the sum
Break-even is a handful of jobs a year; a realistic return is several times the cost. You don't need the website to be a lead machine. You need it to catch the few enquiries a month you're currently losing without knowing it, and even that clears the cost many times over.
The returns nobody puts in the spreadsheet
The biggest returns from a trade website are the ones you can't see on an invoice: the enquiries you never knew you lost, the bigger jobs a professional site qualifies you for, and the compounding effect as the site ranks over time.
The break-even sum above only counts jobs you can point at. The real value hides in three places that never make it onto a spreadsheet, and together they usually dwarf the jobs you can measure.
The jobs you never hear about
The most expensive customer is the one who searched, didn't find a proper site for you, and rang the next name on the list. You never get an invoice for that, never even know it happened, which is exactly why it's ignored. A site's job is to stop the silent leak. Every month it runs, it's catching a slice of demand that was previously flowing straight to competitors, and none of it showed up as a loss because losses you never see don't sting.
A better site wins bigger jobs
A professional site doesn't just win more work, it qualifies you for better work. The customer spending £8,000 on a bathroom does more homework than the one wanting a tap fixed, and a tidy site with real project photos, your accreditation and genuine reviews is what makes them trust a one-man band with the job. It is why a flooring fitter's site has to show the finished room rather than the product: the bigger the ticket, the more the customer needs to see before they ring. The same enquiry a Facebook page loses, a proper site converts.
It compounds while you sleep
A website isn't a dead, fixed cost, it's an appreciating asset. A paper flyer is worthless the day after it goes out; a site that's kept current climbs Google over months and pulls in more the longer it runs. The return in year two beats year one, because ranking builds. How long that ramp takes, and what to expect month by month, is set out in how long before a website gets you jobs. The payback maths above is the floor, not the ceiling.
When a website doesn't pay, and how to make sure yours does
A trade website only fails to pay for itself in two cases: you're permanently booked from referrals and want no new work, or you buy the cheapest site, never update it and never link it to Google, so it's never actually found.
Be fair to the other side of the ledger. There are trades for whom the maths genuinely doesn't land, and there are ways to sabotage a site so it never earns its keep. Knowing both keeps you honest and keeps the payback real.
The trades who don't need it
If you're booked solid on repeat customers and word of mouth, actively don't want more enquiries, or you're winding down toward retirement, a website is a cost without a return, and you should skip it. Same if you're a subcontractor who only ever works for two or three firms and never deals with the public. Whether a small firm needs one at all, before any of this maths applies, is worked through in is a website worth it for a small trade business.
How to guarantee the payback
The payback assumes the site is found. A site nobody sees earns nothing, so the two things that protect your return are getting it in front of people and keeping it current. Link it to a Google Business Profile so it shows on Maps, keep the reviews and photos fresh, and don't let it rot. On a done-for-you plan the upkeep is handled, which is the point: the site stays fast, current and ranking without you having to remember it exists, so the maths keeps working long after the novelty's worn off.
See your numbers before you commit
You don't have to take the sum on trust. I'll build you a free mockup of your actual business, your trade, your area, your branding, before you pay anything, with no deposit. You can look at the real thing, run your own job value through the maths above, and decide. Like it? There is no build fee: the Website plan is £50 every four weeks and Groundwork is £100, done-for-you, with hosting, the domain, SSL and unlimited small edits included. Three months minimum, rolling after that, first month refunded if you don't like the finished site, and after twelve months it's yours to keep. Apply at sitework.uk/#apply and see yours before you spend a penny.