Do tradies need a website? (And what should it cost?)

Short answer: if you want work from people who don't already know you, yes. Every referral Googles you before calling, and every “plumber + your suburb” search goes to whoever shows up. The real questions are what it should cost and what it actually needs to do — and that's where most tradies get taken for a ride.

What a tradie website costs in 2026

• DIY builders (Wix, Squarespace): $200–$500 a year. Fine as a business card; usually slow, rarely ranks.
• Template WordPress from a freelancer: $1,000–$3,000. Looks fine on day one; ages badly and often loads slowly on phones.
• Custom agency build: $3,000–$10,000+. Quality varies wildly — the price tells you little about whether it will rank or convert.

The trap isn't paying too much — it's paying anything for a site that doesn't produce jobs. A $500 site that books nothing costs more than a $6,000 site that books two jobs a month.

The three things that make a site pay for itself

We rebuild sites for our own trades businesses and publish the before-and-after numbers, so this list comes from data rather than opinion:

• Speed. One site we took over took 23 seconds to load on mobile — most visitors never saw it. Our rebuilds load in about a second; one went from a 40/100 Google performance score to 97.
• One clear action. Every page should end in “call now” or “book online”. When we rebuilt our own money pages around that, enquiry conversion went from 4.8% to 10.1% — double the jobs from the same traffic.
• Your reviews, up front. Buyers can't compare workmanship from a screen, so they use your Google rating as the tie-breaker. Put it everywhere, and keep it honest.

When you genuinely don't need one

If you're a solo operator, booked out months ahead entirely by word of mouth, and you don't want to grow — skip it. A Google Business Profile with strong reviews might be enough. Just know that's a choice to stay exactly the size you are.

The bottom line

Don't buy a website. Buy a booking machine that happens to be a website — fast, reviewed, measurable, with one job: turning searches into calls. And make whoever builds it show you their numbers first.