How Much Should a Small Trade Business Website Cost in the UK?

How much should a small trade business actually pay for a website? There’s no single number: “a website” can mean a template edited on a budget builder plan, a freelancer-built brochure site, or a full agency build with online booking and ongoing SEO. The price swings enormously depending on which of those three routes you take, and on a handful of features that push the cost up regardless of route. Here are the real UK price bands for each, what changes the price, and whether a free Facebook page can do the job instead.

What DIY builders, freelancers and agencies actually charge

Three routes exist for a small trade business website, and the gap between them is large. A DIY builder such as Wix or Squarespace typically costs £9-£29 a month for a paid plan, working out to roughly £100-£350 a year once a custom domain and business email are added on top [1]. A freelancer charges more like £500-£10,000 for a full project, with a simple three-to-ten-page brochure site for a trade business most commonly landing in the £500-£3,000 band, and freelancers themselves typically billing £25-£120 an hour or £200-£550 a day [1]. An agency build runs £3,000-£30,000 or more, with regional UK agencies most often quoting £3,000-£8,000 and London-based agencies typically starting from £8,000 [1].

Route	Typical UK cost	Turnaround
DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace) [1][2]	£9-£29/month, ~£100-£350/year all-in	Live same day
Freelancer [1]	£500-£10,000 per project	2-8 weeks
Agency [1]	£3,000-£30,000+	4-16 weeks

A straightforward five-to-ten-page brochure site, which covers most trade businesses that just need services, an about page, photos and a contact form, most commonly costs £1,000-£4,000 whether it comes from a freelancer or a small agency [1].

What changes the price: pages, booking forms and SEO

A handful of specific features move the price far more than the choice of builder alone. Extra pages: agencies commonly charge roughly £200-£500 for each additional page beyond the initial set, so a longer site costs meaningfully more even from the same studio [1]. Online booking: adding booking or scheduling functionality to a freelancer or agency build can add roughly £3,000-£10,000 to the project cost, or push the whole build into a £5,000-£12,000 band if booking is designed in from the start rather than bolted on later [3]. Ongoing SEO and maintenance: a maintenance and content retainer commonly costs £50-£500 a month covering updates and support, with one-off content changes billed separately at £30-£100 an hour [1]. A content management system or blog, useful for a trade business that wants to publish its own job photos and reviews without paying someone else to do it, typically adds £1,000-£3,000 to a freelancer-built site [3].

DIY builders in detail: what a Wix-style plan gets you

Take Wix as a representative example, since it publishes its full UK pricing. The entry-level Light plan costs £9 a month on annual billing, Core costs £16 a month, Business costs £25 a month, and the top Business Elite tier costs £119 a month, and paying month-to-month instead of annually adds roughly 16-28% to each of those prices [2]. Card payments taken through the built-in payment processor cost 2.1% plus 20p per UK transaction, with no separate platform commission on top [2]. None of the headline prices are quite the full picture: domain renewal after the first year, a business email address, and any paid add-on apps can add a further £10-£30 a month on top of the base plan [2].

Is a Facebook page enough instead of a website?

A free Facebook Page costs nothing to set up and is genuinely useful for reaching a local audience and posting job photos. But relying on it as the only online presence has real downsides for a trade business. Facebook’s own terms grant Facebook a broad licence to use anything posted to a Page, whereas content on an owned website stays the business’s own [4]. A Page can also be restricted, glitched or removed by the platform with little recourse, taking reviews, posts and contact details down with it, and a business that has only ever had a Facebook presence has no easy way to recover that history [4]. Facebook also gives a business no way to remove a false or unfair review, where an owned website lets the owner respond directly and show its own record of the work instead [4]. None of this makes a Facebook Page pointless: the pattern used by trade businesses that get this right is to run both, posting regularly on Facebook and sending that traffic through to a website the business fully owns and controls [4].

What to do next

Work backwards from what the site actually needs to do before picking a route. A straightforward, booking-free brochure site with reviews and contact details doesn’t need agency pricing, but a business that lives or dies on online bookings usually needs more than a bare templated page can offer. Loomwork Ai runs a short paid review for trades weighing up a new website build or a redesign, checking a proposed spec and quote against what similar trade businesses are actually paying before any money changes hands.