What should a kitchen fitter pay for a website? Priced against one kitchen, not against nothing
Almost every kitchen fitter who asks me this treats it as a price question. It is not. It is a ratio question, and the ratio in this trade is unusually kind.
Labour-only on a kitchen fit across the UK is commonly quoted at £1,500 to £2,500 for a small one and £3,500 to £4,500 for a large one. A maintained website costs £650 across a year. So a fitter is weighing up about a quarter of one medium job, spread over twelve months, against a plumber who would have to win a great many £120 call-outs to reach the same point. If you have been putting this off because you are unsure the spend is justified, the arithmetic settled that a while ago. What it has not settled is the harder part: whether the site you end up with is built so that somebody choosing a fitter on the strength of a finished room can tell your work from the next firm's. That is where the money either works or quietly does nothing.
£50 every four weeks, so £650 a year, judged against one job. That is under a third of the labour on a single medium kitchen at UK rates, no build fee, nothing payable on day one. Running it yourself on a site builder is roughly £10 to £25 a month plus your evenings. A one-off designer build is £500 to £2,000 and nobody owns year two.
Start with the only number that matters: what one kitchen is worth to you
A year of a maintained site is £650. One medium kitchen fit is £2,500 to £3,500 in labour. Everything else in this decision is detail.
Most trades cannot make this argument. It works for kitchen fitting because the job value is high and the jobs are discrete, so you can put the annual cost of the website against a single invoice and see it immediately. The figures below are labour-only, taken from published UK cost guides rather than from my own quotes, because I am not the right person to tell you what kitchen fitting is worth.
| The job | Typical labour-only value, UK 2026 | A £650 year as a share of it | What that means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small kitchen, roughly 3 days | £1,500 to £2,500 | 26% to 43% | One small kitchen covers the site for two to three years |
| Medium kitchen, roughly 4 days | £2,500 to £3,500 | 19% to 26% | About a quarter of one job pays for the whole year |
| Large kitchen, 5 days or more | £3,500 to £4,500 | 14% to 19% | A seventh of one job, and these are the ones a good gallery wins |
| Solo fitter, per day | £180 to £280 | Two and a half to three and a half days | The site costs you three days of labour a year |
The caveat that keeps this honest
Labour value is not margin. On supply-and-fit work a large share of what the customer pays is the kitchen itself, so do not read the left column as money in your pocket. On fit-only work it is much closer. The point of the table is not that the website is free, it is that the website has stopped being the thing worth agonising over: at £50 every four weeks it is roughly three days of your labour a year, and it is an allowable business expense, so it comes off your profit before HMRC takes a view of it. If you want the same arithmetic run for a trade where it is genuinely tighter, I did it for what a scaffolding company website costs, where the job values are similar but the page has to do a completely different job.
I checked 58 interior fit-out firms. Fifteen have no website at all
Of 58 fit-out businesses in three market towns in England, 39 had their own domain, 15 had no website of any kind, 3 had only a Facebook page and 1 had only a directory listing.
These come from a listings sweep I keep for cold-calling, covering eighteen trades across Ludlow, Craven Arms and Church Stretton in Shropshire. I pulled out the six trades that make up interior fit-out, which are kitchen fitters, bathroom fitters, tilers, plasterers, joiners and carpenters, and deduplicated by business name and phone number. That leaves 58 distinct businesses. It is three towns in one county rather than a national sample, and I would not pretend otherwise, but it is real and it is consistent with what I see everywhere else.
58 interior fit-out businesses, three Shropshire towns, September 2026
| Own domain | 39 of 58 |
| No website of any kind | 15 of 58 |
| Facebook page only | 3 of 58 |
| Directory listing only | 1 of 58 |
| Showing any review count at all | 44 of 58 |
| Fewer than five reviews | 19 of the 44 |
| Twenty reviews or more | 14 of the 44 |
| Median reviews, firms with their own domain | 7 |
| Median reviews, firms without one | 3 |
Deduplicated by business name and phone from a listings sweep of eighteen trades in Ludlow, Craven Arms and Church Stretton. Trades counted as interior fit-out: kitchen fitter, bathroom fitter, tiler, plasterer, joiner, carpenter. Medians are taken across the 44 businesses showing any review count. No business is named.
What the review gap probably is, and what it is not
A median of 7 against 3 is not proof that a website generates reviews. The likeliest reading is that both are symptoms of the same thing: a firm that has got round to putting up a site is usually the firm that has got round to asking for reviews, registering the business properly and answering the phone in office hours. That is worth saying plainly rather than dressing the number up as a causal claim. What it does tell you is what the competitive field looks like. In a field where a quarter of your competitors have no website at all and nineteen of the forty-four visible ones are sitting under five reviews, the bar is not high.
Which of the 58 I would actually be worried about
Not the fifteen with nothing. They are invisible and they know it. The ones in a worse position are the three running on a Facebook page as their only presence, because they feel covered. A Facebook page does not rank for "kitchen fitter" plus a town, cannot carry a gallery split by style, and disappears with the account if it is ever locked. The same goes for the firm relying on one directory listing, which is somebody else's asset with your work on it.
A fit-out buyer is comparing finished rooms, and most of the photographs lose
Every interior fit-out trade in Britain sells on one thing, a photograph of a completed room, and almost nobody in the trade takes that photograph properly.
This is the single most common fixable problem I find on fit-out sites, and it has nothing to do with web design. The gallery photographs are taken on a phone at the end of the last day, under the new downlights, with the client's kettle box still on the worktop and the protective film half off the appliances. The camera is in the corner of the room, so the run of units bends away and the worktop you are proudest of is a thin wedge at the edge of the frame.
The buyer is looking at four fitters' galleries with a Pinterest board open in another tab. They are not judging your joinery, because they cannot see it. They are judging which of the four looks like the picture in their head. A well-lit, tidy, straight-on photograph of a modest kitchen beats a badly shot photograph of a beautiful one, every time, and it is free.
Why splitting the gallery by style matters more than it sounds
A single dumped grid of kitchens is a missed sale. Somebody who has decided on a shaker kitchen should be able to click straight to your shaker installs rather than scrolling past handleless gloss hoping one turns up. It also gives search engines clean separate signals for each kind of kitchen you fit, which is how you end up visible for the specific thing somebody is searching rather than only for the trade. The distinction between the trades doing this work is worth being clear about too, since customers use the words interchangeably and you can lose an enquiry to the wrong label: I set it out in joiner versus carpenter versus kitchen fitter.
Supply-and-fit or fit-only: the page that decides which customer rings you
Kitchen customers arrive in two camps, and a site that does not clearly serve both is turning away roughly half of them without ever seeing it happen.
One camp wants a single firm to supply and fit the lot. The other has already bought the kitchen from Howdens, Wickes, Wren or Ikea and needs a fitter, sometimes urgently, because the delivery date is fixed and the showroom's own fitter is booked out. Those are different searches, different price expectations and different anxieties, and most fitter websites address only the first while quietly doing plenty of the second.
Give fit-only its own page with its own starting band and its own short list of what is and is not included: whether you strip out the old kitchen, whether you handle the worktop template, what happens if the flat-pack delivery is short. That page is also where the better margin often is, because the whole fitting fee stays with you rather than being split with a showroom. It is the cheapest structural change you can make to a kitchen fitting site and I have never once seen it do nothing. Everything I would put on the page, in order, sits on the kitchen fitter website design page.
Where the money actually goes wrong, and it is not the build price
The failure is almost never that a fitter paid too much. It is that they paid once, for something that needed looking after every month afterwards.
A one-off build from an independent designer, commonly £500 to £2,000 or more in the UK, is the most common arrangement in this trade and it is the one that quietly breaks. Not on the day it is delivered. In year two, when the certificate needs renewing, the designer has moved on, the renewal email goes to an address nobody reads, and the site starts showing visitors a security warning before it shows them your name. For a trade that sells on a gallery, there is a second version of the same problem: nobody is adding the new kitchens. A fit-out portfolio that stopped in 2024 is worse than a small one that is current, because it reads as a business that has gone quiet.
The lead platform alternative, priced properly
A lead platform is the other route fitters take, and it is worth understanding what you are buying. Checkatrade's membership tiers are reported at around £30 a month for an approved listing and from £59 a month for the next tier up, with per-lead charges on top of that, commonly put at £15 to £25 for mid-sized jobs. Kitchen work is a high-value lead, so it sits at the upper end. The structural difference is not the price. It is that the listing, the reviews and the ranking are the platform's asset rather than yours, and the enquiries are shared with whoever else paid for them. I compared what each channel costs per job actually won in cost per job across trade lead channels, which is a more useful comparison than monthly fees.
What done-for-you is actually removing
Three things, and they are the three that do not get done otherwise. Somebody renews the certificate and patches the thing before it breaks. Somebody adds the new kitchens to the gallery when you send the photographs over, without an invoice arriving for the edit. And somebody has already written the fit-only page and the supply-and-fit page, because on your own you will build the gallery and never get to either. At £50 every four weeks with no build fee, that is what the money buys. Three months minimum, then it rolls, and after twelve months the files and the domain transfer to you with no exit fee.
So what should you pay?
Do not spend anything until you have done the ten-minute test. Open your own site on your phone, on mobile data rather than the office wifi. Look for a padlock instead of a warning. Then find the last photograph you added and check the date. Then try to find, as a stranger would, whether you fit customer-supplied kitchens. If all three pass, you do not need me. On the evidence of the 58 firms above, most fitters fail at least one, and a quarter of them have nothing to test.
If it fails, the only real question is whether you want to own the upkeep or hand it over. A site builder at £10 to £25 a month is genuinely fine if you will sit down on a Sunday and write the fit-only page yourself. If you know you will not, £50 every four weeks with no build fee buys a site that somebody else is responsible for, and you see a free mockup of your own kitchens on the screen before anything is payable. Either way, do the photography fix this month. It is the one change on this page that costs nothing and moves the most.