Who builds websites for UK tradesmen? Nine compared on price and ownership
I spent this morning reading the pricing pages of nine companies that will build a website for a British tradesman. Two of them do not publish a price at all. Not a range, not a starting figure, nothing. You book a call and find out.
The trade specialists that do publish sit between £45 and £69 a month, or £750 to £1,250 as a one-off build. Those numbers are close enough together to look like a market that has settled on a price. It has not. Add the setup fees and the minimum terms and year one runs from £588 to £1,030 for what is broadly the same five-page site. Then there is Yell, whose cheapest published door to a website is £299 a month, an order of magnitude away from everyone else on the list.
And the term that varies most is not printed on any of the nine pages in figures at all. It is what happens to the website if you leave.
Nine UK companies build websites for tradespeople. Seven publish a price, between £45 and £69 a month or £750 one-off among the trade specialists, and from £299 a month at Yell. Two publish nothing. Year one runs from £588 to £1,030 across the specialists once setup fees are counted. The bigger difference is ownership: at least one transfers no website files if you cancel inside twelve months.
The nine, and what a year actually costs
Every figure below was read from the provider's own published page on 25 August 2026, and year one is the advertised monthly fee multiplied out plus any setup fee, which is a number none of the nine publish themselves.
I have put them in order of year-one cost, cheapest first, with the three that publish nothing at the bottom where they belong. My own plan is in the table because leaving it out would be dishonest, not because it wins.
| Provider and plan | Advertised | Setup | Year one | Year three |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Digital Tradies Standard, up to 5 pages | £49 / month | £0 upfront | £588 | £1,764 |
| MyTradeSite Single plan | £49 / month | £0 | £588 | £1,764 |
| TRADESON Managed monthly | £45 / month | £99 build | £639 | £1,719 |
| Sitework Website plan, what I do | £50 / 4 weeks | No build fee | £650 | £1,950 |
| Ubie Websites Pay monthly | from £69 / month | Not published | £828 or more | £2,484 or more |
| Tada Websites Launchpad, one-off | £750 one-off | Included | £860 | £1,100 |
| Trades Digital Draft-first build | £65 / month | £250 | £1,030 | £2,590 |
| Yell Amplify, website bundled in | from £299 / month | Design Fee, not published | £3,588 or more | £10,764 or more |
| Proxima Studio Presence, Authority, Dominance | Not published | Not published | Not knowable | Not knowable |
| Local Website Design Services Managed websites | Not published | Not published | Not knowable | Not knowable |
Tada is the interesting row. It is the most expensive to start and the cheapest by a wide margin over three years, because after the build you are only paying £10 a month for hosting. It is also the only one of the nine that tells you it is not VAT registered, which it describes as a deliberate choice to keep prices down for startups. That means the £750 is the £750.
Two of the nine will not tell you the price
Proxima Studio and Local Website Design Services publish no website price anywhere on their own sites, and Proxima goes as far as naming three packages, Presence, Authority and Dominance, with timeframes attached and no figures at all.
Neither is a large company, and for a genuinely bespoke project a price set per customer is normal. For a five-page trade website it means you cannot compare before you commit to a conversation, which is a cost of its own.
Yell is worth understanding separately rather than as a row in this table, because it is not selling the same thing. Its websites page says the 30-page site is included with the Amplify and Accelerate solutions at no extra cost, so there is no standalone website price to compare: you are buying managed marketing and the site comes with it. Priced as marketing that is defensible. Priced against the £49 a month specialists above, it is a different product entirely.
Ownership is where the cheap plans get expensive
The monthly fee tells you what a website costs to keep. The contract tells you what it costs to leave, and across these nine that second number varies far more than the first.
This is the part I would read first if I were buying, and it is buried on every one of these sites. Three examples from the nine, all quoted from their own pages.
Digital Tradies is upfront about it, which is more than most manage. It asks for a twelve-month commitment to hold the £49, states that the files are not transferred if you cancel before that, and states that after twelve months the files are yours to keep. That is a clear deal and a tradesman can decide about it. What he cannot do is decide about it if he never reads it, and it is not on the pricing card.
MyTradeSite is the one I would ask hardest about. The offer includes a free .co.uk domain that MyTradeSite registers and manages on your behalf. That is convenient, and it is also the single most valuable thing you own online, because the domain is what every Google result, every van sticker and every business card points at. If it is registered to somebody else and there is no stated transfer right, moving is a negotiation rather than a decision. This is worth understanding properly before you sign anything, and I have written separately on who actually owns your domain name in the UK.
TRADESON, a small Edinburgh outfit, does the opposite and does it well. The domain goes in your name on day one, there is a published £400 price to take the files and host it yourself, and cancellation is thirty days' notice. You may or may not want what they build, but you can see exactly what leaving costs, which puts them ahead of firms several times their size.
What the headline monthly figure leaves out
Four things move the real number and none of them appear in the price a trade website company advertises: the setup fee, the minimum term, VAT, and who pays to renew the domain from year two.
Trades Digital advertises £65 a month, which reads as the second cheapest monthly figure on the list. It carries a £250 setup fee, charged after you approve a free draft, so year one is £1,030 and it is the most expensive of the six that publish. Nothing dishonest is happening. The two numbers just live in different places on the page.
Domain renewals are the other quiet one. TRADESON is the only provider of the nine that states the figure, at roughly £12 a year to the registrar from year two. On the others it is either included, unstated, or you find out later.
Nine questions to ask before you sign anything
Every one of these has a one-sentence answer, and any company that cannot give you all nine in writing has told you something useful about how the next three years will go.
If you want a longer version of this to work through before a call, the buyer's checklist for a trade website goes further, and there is a fuller argument about how to weigh one designer against another in choosing a website designer as a tradesman.
When not to buy from any of them yet
If you have no photographs of your own finished work, no Google Business Profile and no reviews, a website will not fix your enquiry count and none of these nine companies will tell you that.
A website is a place to send people and a thing for Google to find. If nothing points at it and there is nothing on it, it sits there. Three weekends spent photographing finished jobs, claiming your Google Business Profile and asking your last ten customers for a review will do more for a quiet British trade business than any of the plans in that table, and all three are free.
The order matters. Get the proof together first, then buy the site to put it on. Anyone selling you the site first is selling, not advising.
The verdict
One thing I would take seriously as a buyer: while I was checking these, search results quoted a setup fee for Ubie and a build fee for TRADESON that both contradicted the providers' own live pages. This market moves and the comparison articles quoting it are stale. Read the actual page, and note the date you read it. If you want the wider picture on what these builds are worth, there is a worked case study of one real trade site and a breakdown of what a trade website costs in the UK.