Why a plumber gets quoted £3,000 for a five page website
3 min read
A five page website for a plumber does not cost three thousand pounds to make. It costs that to sell, to manage, and to sign off.
The number that matters is the one for your own job, not a range. Send an enquiry.
Where three thousand pounds goes
The quote is usually honest and the work behind it is real. It is just that most of it is not work on your website.
- An account manager, whose job is to be the person you ring.
- A discovery workshop, which is a meeting about what you do for a living.
- Three rounds of design, on a site with five pages on it.
- An office, the people in it, and the software they run.
The design rounds are the tell. Three of them is a process written for a client with a marketing department to satisfy, and you are being sold it at what it costs to run.
What a trades website has to do
Not much, and it has to do it properly. Your phone number where a thumb can reach it. The jobs you do, in the words customers actually type. The places you cover. Photographs of your own work rather than a stock photo of somebody else's. A few reviews.
That is about a week of work. It is not a quarter of one, and the gap between those two numbers is most of what you are being charged for. There is a longer version of this list in what a trades website needs, written without me trying to sell you anything.
What I charge, and what is in it
£299 to build it, whichever plan you pick. Then one of these every month.
| Plan | A month | What the month buys | Term |
|---|---|---|---|
| Online | £15 | A smart, professional website built for your trade, live within a week. Set and forget: it just works. | Rolling, cancel any time |
| Managed | £29 | Everything in Online, looked after, so you never have to touch it. | Rolling, cancel any time |
| Growth | £99 for three months, then £179 | Everything in Managed, plus active work every month to put you in front of people who are searching right now. | 12 months |
One build fee rather than three is deliberate. Three would invite you to compare them, and the moment you do, the cheap plan reads as the cheap build. It is the same build every time.
The figures matter less than where they are. They are on the website, so you can hold them against anyone else before you pick up the phone. Most of this trade still makes you ring to find out. If you want a straight price for your own job, get in touch and I will give you one on the phone.
What that has produced so far
18 to 36 Google reviews in two months
Lanora House stands at 38 today, averaging five stars. You can check it, which is the point of quoting it: the reviews are on their Google listing with dates against them.
A website does not collect reviews. Somebody asking, at the right moment, every time, does, and that is the monthly plan rather than the build. The site is where people land once the reviews have done their job.