Why do trade website quotes range £100 to £10,000? One word, five products
A plasterer I spoke to in the East Midlands had three numbers written on the back of a delivery note. Someone on a freelance marketplace had said £150. A local outfit had said £1,800. An agency in the nearest city had come back with £7,500 plus VAT. Same five pages, same trade, same handful of towns, and a fiftyfold spread between the ends of it.
His question was the sensible one: which of them is trying it on? Mostly, none of them. All three had quoted honestly for the thing they sell. The problem is that all three call it a website, and in the UK trade market that one word does duty for five genuinely different products with very different amounts of human work inside them.
So this is the map I wish he had been holding. Five bands, each one anchored to a price I read off the seller's own page this week, and then the part nobody selling wants to put in writing: which band you are in barely predicts whether the thing ever rings.
Trade website quotes range from about £100 to £10,000 in the UK because the word covers five different products: a marketplace gig, a managed monthly plan, a small studio build, an agency project, and a website bundled inside an advertising contract. The price gap is mostly how much human time and aftercare is in the box, not how good the finished site looks. For a British one-van trade the sensible band is roughly £500 to £1,500 in year one.
Work out which product you are actually being quoted for
Before comparing two numbers, find out which of five products each seller is describing, because four of the five are priced on completely different clocks and only two of them include anybody looking after the site next year.
Run a quote through these five questions in order. The first that fits is your band, and once you know the band the number stops looking arbitrary.
What each band costs, read off the sellers' own pages this week
Every figure below came from the seller's own published page between 25 and 29 August 2026, and the spread between the cheapest and the dearest first-year commitment on this list is £8,288.
I priced this off the pages rather than repeating the ranges that circulate on other web design blogs, most of which are years old and none of which name a source. Where a company publishes no price I have said so instead of estimating one.
| Band | Live example | Published price | Year one |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · Marketplace gig | PeoplePerHour, responsive WordPress site | £100 fixed | £100 plus your own hosting |
| 1 · Marketplace, top of range | PeoplePerHour, 10 pages custom with hosting | £495 fixed | £495 |
| 2 · Managed monthly | Digital Tradies Starter | £49 / month, £0 upfront | £588 |
| 2 · Managed monthly | Sitework Website plan | £50 / 4 weeks, no build fee | £650 |
| 3 · Studio build | Tada Websites Launchpad | £750 one-off | £860 with hosting |
| 4 · Agency project | Typical UK agency, standard small business site | Rarely published | £2,500 to £10,000 |
| 5 · Bundled package | Yell Amplify, website included | from £299 / month | £3,588 or more |
| 5 · Bundled package | Yell Accelerate, website included | from £699 / month | £8,388 or more |
Two rows deserve a second look. The PeoplePerHour floor is real: the published fixed prices under web design on that marketplace start at £10 today and the highest visible offer is £495. And Yell's two figures are both marked "from", which in their advertising terms is a floor rather than a price, sitting on an initial period of twelve months. That is how a website with no price of its own ends up costing £3,588 to reach, which I went through in what Yell charges for a trade website.
The free options belong here too, less a band than a different bargain. A DIY builder costs you time instead of money, which I compared for a small carpentry firm in Wix against Squarespace. A lead platform may hand you a site for nothing and keep it, which is exactly what Checkatrade's TradeSite terms do. Neither is a swindle. Both are a trade you should make deliberately.
The same brief, priced at both ends
Put one real brief through Band 1 and Band 4 and the difference is not quality of design, it is roughly thirty hours of somebody's attention and two years of somebody answering the phone.
Take a five-page site for a plasterer covering four towns: home, services, gallery, about, contact. Forty photographs on a phone, no logo, no written copy. Here is where the money goes at each end.
Band 1, the £100 fixed price on a marketplace
| Template selected and recoloured | Included |
| Your forty photographs, uploaded as sent | Included |
| Words for five pages | You write them |
| Hosting, domain, SSL, backups | Yours to arrange |
| Changes after handover | Quoted separately |
| Somebody to ring in eighteen months | Nobody |
| Cash out, year one | £100 plus hosting |
The build is genuinely delivered. Everything that keeps a website alive after the build is simply not in the transaction.
Band 4, the same brief as a £7,500 agency project
| Discovery, scoping and a written proposal | ~6 hours |
| Design, with two revision rounds | ~20 hours |
| Copywriting for five pages | ~8 hours |
| Photography direction, or a shoot | Often extra |
| Build, testing and launch | ~25 hours |
| Account management across the project | ~10 hours |
| Hosting and support after launch | Separate retainer |
| Cash out, year one | £7,500 plus retainer |
Roughly seventy chargeable hours at agency rates. Nothing on that list is invented or padding. The question is whether a four-town plasterer needs seventy hours spent on him.
Side by side, the £7,400 gap buys attention and accountability, not pixels. That is a fair thing to sell and a fair thing to refuse. It is also why the honest comparison for a sole trader is never headline against headline but three years against three years, the sum I keep on the tradesman website cost page.
Why the middle of the market is the widest part
Bands 2 and 3 overlap because a monthly plan and a one-off build are the same work billed on two different clocks, and only one of them ever tells you the total.
A £750 one-off and a £50 monthly plan are not really competing on price. One takes the money before the work and hands you a finished thing. The other spreads it and keeps working. Over five years the plan is dearer in cash and cheaper in effort, and which of those you would rather spend is a question about your life, not a maths problem.
The number that is missing from most quotes
Almost nobody quotes a three-year total, because on a monthly plan it is a bigger and less comfortable number than the one on the flyer. Ask anyway. It is the only figure that puts a £495 marketplace build, a £588 plan and a £3,588 package on the same page, and a seller who will not work it out has told you something useful.
Four things decide whether it rings, and none of them cost extra
In a hand audit of 100 real UK trade websites, the four faults that dominated all cost nothing to avoid at any price band, which is why an expensive site fails exactly as quietly as a cheap one.
This is the part I care about. I have looked closely at the live websites of hundreds of tradespeople while building call lists, then audited a clean sample of a hundred against the same checklist: plumbers, electricians, carpenters, builders, roofers, gardeners and decorators, all one-person or small firms across England, Scotland and Wales. Eighty-eight of the hundred failed at least two basic checks.
Notice what is not on that list. Nobody lost a job because the animation was ordinary. The faults are decisions, not line items, and the first three are free in every band from £100 to £10,000. That is the honest reason a £7,500 site can sit silent while a £495 one takes calls: the expensive one bought hours of design and none of the four decisions.
Fault one is the biggest and the cheapest. Customers do not search for your business, they search for a job and a place, and the words on your page have to match. I pulled the actual phrasing people use in how people in Sussex search for a tradesman, and the pattern holds nationally: job, then town, and almost never a company name.
What genuinely does cost more, and is sometimes worth it
Four things really do move a quote for good reasons, and if a seller cannot point at which of them applies to you, the higher number is decoration.
I am not arguing that every quote above the middle band is a con. Real work costs real money, and these are the four places it goes.
Words that were written rather than templated. Copy naming your jobs, your towns and your certifications takes hours, and it is the biggest quality gap between bands. Photography. A morning on site with a camera beats any design decision, and it is the one thing I cannot do from a desk. Structure for a genuinely more complicated business. Two trading names, twelve service areas, a commercial arm and a domestic one: that is more thinking and it should cost more. Somebody who answers. The difference between a site that is three years old and fine and one that is three years old and embarrassing is entirely whether anybody has touched it, which is the whole argument for a plan rather than a purchase.
And what does not
Page count barely matters once the structure is right, and neither does the framework, whatever a quote calls it. An SEO line bolted onto a build quote with no monthly work behind it is a phrase, not a service. Buy that as its own thing and judge it on reporting.
How to read the next quote you get
Five questions will explain almost any gap between two UK website quotes, and a seller who answers all five in writing is a different proposition from one who sends a number.
Put these in an email to everyone who has quoted. The replies sort the bands faster than any comparison table, mine included.
The verdict
That is where I put my own price, and it is not the cheapest row on the table above. £50 every four weeks is thirteen payments and £650 across a year: £62 more than Digital Tradies, and £7,700 less than a package with a website tucked inside it. There is no build fee, so day one costs nothing, and after twelve months the site and the domain transfer to you. What I am selling in that gap is the four decisions, and somebody still answering in year two.