Best Website Builders for UK Trade Businesses (2026)

There are only three real routes to a trade website: build it yourself, pay someone to build it, or have it built and run for you. The eight options below are ranked on what a working tradesperson actually gets for the money, not on how many templates the builder offers.

1. Tradehand trader website. Best for traders who want the site built, kept current, and the enquiries it creates actually answered. Free, with no monthly fee and no setup fee. The office team earns 5% of the invoice payments it chases and collects.
2. Built Local. Best for a done-for-you trade site live in days with no contract. £49 a month plus a one-time £99 setup fee.
3. Sites4Trades. Best for a one-off build you pay for up front and then keep cheap. £249, £399 or £749 setup plus £35 a month.
4. Wix. Best for the cheapest self-build with a domain included for the first year. Plan prices are published openly on its pricing page and vary by region.
5. Squarespace. Best for the best-looking result with no design skill, if you are prepared to write the pages yourself.
6. WordPress, self-hosted. Best for full ownership and portability. UK hosting starts around £7 a month, and everything else is your time.
7. A local web designer. Best for bespoke work and a person you can ring. A standard five to ten page small business site runs £1,500 to £3,000, plus £50 to £300 a month afterwards.
8. Yell. Best for traders who want a website bundled into directory advertising. Yell publishes no price for it.

Every price above was read from that vendor's own live page on 19 August 2026. If you already have a site and want to know why it is not bringing work in, the free Tradehand AI report scores it and names the competitors ranking above you.

Four questions separate a trade website that wins jobs from one that just exists. They are the four this ranking uses on Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, Sites4Trades, Built Local, Yell, a local designer and the Tradehand trader website.

• Who writes the pages? This is the hidden cost of every self-build. Wix and Squarespace give you a beautiful empty site and then you write eleven pages of copy after work. Built Local, Sites4Trades and Tradehand write them for you.
• Who keeps it current? A site frozen on the day it launched stops ranking. Ask what a price change or a new service costs you next year.
• Do you own the domain? Wix, Squarespace and WordPress all end with a domain in your name. A directory profile does not.
• Who answers the enquiries it creates? Every option here except Tradehand hands the enquiry to you. A contact form that nobody replies to for two days is a website that loses jobs politely.

Every pound figure in this article was read from the vendor's own live page on 19 August 2026. Wix and Squarespace price their plan pages by region, so this article describes their billing model and links to the page rather than printing a figure that could not be verified for the UK. Yell publishes no price at all, and that is stated where it applies.

The Tradehand trader website is not a builder. There is nothing to drag, nothing to lay out and no template to choose. The office team writes the site from facts you already have, your real services, the areas you cover and your reviews, gives every service and every area its own page, and keeps it current as your prices and photos change. Then it answers the person who arrives on it, by web chat, phone, text, email or WhatsApp, and carries the enquiry through to a quote, a booked slot and a chased invoice.

Pricing. The website is free. No monthly fee, no setup fee, no card fees and no contract. The office team earns 5% of the invoice payments it chases and collects, so a month with nothing collected costs nothing. The honest comparison is not Wix at a few pounds a month, it is the office manager you would otherwise hire at £25,000 a year or more, paid whether or not the invoices land.

Pros

• The pages are written for you, including one per service and one per area, which is the part that takes a self-builder several weekends.
• It stays current without you touching it, so it keeps ranking.
• The visitor who asks a question at 10pm gets an answer at 10pm, which no other option on this list does.
• Nothing to pay in a quiet month.

Cons

• It is built for UK trade businesses. If you want a bespoke portfolio site with unusual design, a local designer is the better fit.
• You are not hand-building the layout yourself, which some traders enjoy doing.

Best for: a sole trader or small trade firm who wants a site that brings work in and does not want to become their own web admin. Details on the free trader website page, and the full build guide is in how to create a trade business website that wins jobs.

Built Local builds websites specifically for UK trade businesses and publishes a single flat price: £49 a month plus a one-time £99 setup fee, stated on its own page as "No contract · Cancel anytime · UK support" with sites live in 72 hours. The package includes Google Business Profile setup, a physical review card and three monthly content update requests, and the site runs on your own domain.

Pros

• One number, published openly, with no contract and no minimum term.
• Trade-specific, so the pages are shaped around services and areas rather than a generic small business template.
• Google Business Profile setup is included, which is the listing that actually drives local calls.
• Live in days rather than weeks.

Cons

• Content changes are capped at three requests a month, so a trader who updates prices and photos often will feel the ceiling.
• £49 a month is charged in the quiet months too, which for a seasonal trade is £588 a year regardless of work won.
• It is a website and a listing. Nobody answers the enquiry, writes the quote or chases the invoice afterwards.

Best for: a trader who wants a proper trade website handled by somebody else this week and is comfortable with a fixed monthly cost.

Sites4Trades publishes three packages, all with the same low ongoing fee: Starter at £249 setup plus £35 a month, Professional at £399 setup plus £35 a month, and Growth at £749 setup plus £35 a month. The £35 covers keeping the website online, help with your web address, reasonable text and photo changes, technical upkeep and direct support. Optional extras are priced too: business email setup at £50, logo design at £125, A5 flyer design at £195 and business cards at £75.

Pros

• The lowest published ongoing fee of any done-for-you option here at £35 a month.
• Three build sizes, so a one-page trader and a multi-service firm are not paying the same.
• Reasonable text and photo changes are included rather than metered by request count.

Cons

• Real money up front. £249 to £749 before the site exists is a barrier for a trader watching cash flow.
• Major redesigns and new sections are quoted separately, so the low monthly figure only holds while the site stays as built.
• Its .co.uk address currently serves an error page rather than a website, so make sure you are on the working site before you pay anything.
• Again, no answering. The enquiry lands on you.

Best for: a trader happy to pay once for the build in exchange for the cheapest published ongoing cost.

Wix is the default answer when a tradesperson asks a mate how to get a website, and for a self-build it is a reasonable one. It publishes its plan tiers openly on its pricing page, prices them by region, discounts them when you pay a year up front, and includes a free domain for the first year on the paid tiers. The free tier exists but puts Wix branding on your site, which is not what you want in front of a customer comparing three quotes.

Pros

• Cheapest credible route to a real site on your own domain.
• No setup fee and no contract beyond the year you prepay.
• Enormous template library and an editor a non-technical person can learn in an evening.
• You own the domain, so you can leave and take it with you.

Cons

• Nothing about it is trade-specific. There is no idea of a service page or an area page until you build one.
• You write every word. That is the real cost: several weekends of evenings for a site that needs a page per service and a page per area.
• Nobody answers the contact form, chases the quote or updates the prices next spring.

Best for: a trader who enjoys building things, has the evenings free, and wants the lowest cash cost. Our guide on the fastest way to set up a trade business website compares the same routes on time rather than money.

Squarespace publishes its plan tiers on its pricing page, prices them by region, offers a 14 day free trial, discounts annual billing, and includes a year of free domain registration with annual subscriptions on new sites. Where it beats Wix is the finished look: a Squarespace site built badly still looks better than a Wix site built badly, which matters when a homeowner is comparing you against two other trades on a phone screen.

Pros

• The strongest templates of any self-build option, so the result looks professional without a designer.
• A free trial before you pay anything.
• Domain included with an annual plan, and it is yours.

Cons

• It is a design tool, not a trade tool. Nothing in it knows what an EICR is or that you need a page for every town you cover.
• Card processing on its own payment features carries a percentage plus a fixed fee, so taking deposits through the site is not free.
• You still write and maintain every page, and you still answer every enquiry it produces.

Best for: a trader who cares most about how the site looks and is happy to write the content themselves.

WordPress is free software you install on hosting you rent, which makes it the only option here where nothing about your site is anybody else's product. UK hosting is cheap: Krystal, a UK host, publishes web hosting plans starting at £7 a month, rising through £11, £19, £37, £67 and £97 a month for larger sites. On top of that you pay for a domain, and then you pay in time.

Pros

• Total ownership. The site, the content and the domain are yours and can move host at any time.
• Cheapest long-run cost of any route if you do the work yourself.
• No limits on pages, so a page per service and a page per area costs nothing extra.

Cons

• You are the web admin now. Plugin updates, security, backups and the day the site breaks are all yours.
• Hosting is only the floor. The build itself is either your weekends or a designer's invoice.
• The most likely failure mode for a busy trade business is a WordPress site that goes six months without an update and quietly stops ranking.

Best for: a trader who is genuinely comfortable with computers and wants to own everything outright.

Hiring a local designer is still the route many established trade firms take, and it buys something the builders cannot: a human who answers the phone and understands your business. It is also the most expensive. UK freelance rates run £25 to £120 an hour depending on experience, with day rates averaging £300 to £400. A standard five to ten page small business site costs £1,500 to £3,000, regional agencies quote £3,000 to £8,000 for a similar site, and ongoing costs run £50 to £300 a month afterwards.

Pros

• Bespoke design and a real person accountable for it.
• A designer can take your photos, your certificates and your job history and make something no template will match.
• Local designers often understand the town you work in, which helps the area pages.

Cons

• By far the highest upfront cost, and the ongoing £50 to £300 a month is easy to forget when you sign.
• Designers do not know what an EICR costs in your town, so you still supply the services, prices, areas and photos.
• The site is frozen the day they invoice you unless you keep paying. Ask before you sign who updates prices next year and what that costs.

Best for: an established firm with a marketing budget and a genuine need for something bespoke.

Yell sells websites to trade businesses as part of its wider advertising packages. Its own page describes a 30 page website, typically live within 10 working days, included with its Amplify and Accelerate packages at no extra cost. It publishes no price for any of them. The only routes to a figure are a callback request or a phone call to its sales line.

Pros

• A recognised brand with real directory distribution behind the site.
• The website comes bundled with the advertising rather than as a separate bill.
• Managed for you, with a defined build timescale.

Cons

• No published price. You cannot compare it against Built Local, Sites4Trades or Wix without a sales call.
• The website is bundled into a package, so you cannot buy just the site and you cannot see what the site itself costs.
• A directory-led package points a share of your money at a listing where your competitors are shown alongside you. Our piece on why traders should stop paying for leads and own their customers covers that trade-off properly.

Best for: a trader who already advertises with Yell and wants the website inside the same account.

Prices are the vendors' own published figures, read on 19 August 2026. "Published by region" means the vendor shows its tiers openly but prices them by country, so check the page for your figure. "Not published" means no figure is shown anywhere and the vendor quotes on request.

Option	Upfront	Ongoing	Who writes the pages	Who answers the enquiries	Best for
Tradehand trader website	Free, no setup fee	No monthly fee. It earns 5% of the invoice payments it chases and collects	Your office team, from your real services, areas and reviews	Your office team, on every channel, at any hour	Traders who want the site and the enquiries handled
Built Local	£99 setup	£49 a month, no contract	Built Local, with three update requests a month	You	A done-for-you trade site live in days
Sites4Trades	£249, £399 or £749	£35 a month	Sites4Trades, with reasonable text and photo changes included	You	The cheapest ongoing fee if you can pay up front
Wix	None, domain free for year one	Plan tiers published by region, cheaper paid annually	You, every service page and every area page	You	The cheapest self-build on your own domain
Squarespace	None, 14 day free trial	Plan tiers published by region, domain free with an annual plan	You	You	The best-looking self-build
WordPress, self-hosted	Domain, plus your build time	UK hosting from £7 a month	You, and you maintain it too	You	Full ownership and portability
Local web designer	£1,500 to £3,000 for a five to ten page site	£50 to £300 a month	The designer builds, you supply services, prices, areas and photos	You	Bespoke work and a person you can ring
Yell	Not published	Not published, bundled into an advertising package	Yell	You	Traders already advertising with Yell

Read the last two columns together. Seven of these eight options end with a website and an inbox. Only one of them answers the person who fills the form in.

Monthly figures hide the real number. Here is what each route costs a trade business over three years, using the published prices above and ignoring the domain, which is a few pounds a year on all of them.

• Built Local: £99 setup plus £49 a month is £1,863 over three years.
• Sites4Trades: the Professional package at £399 setup plus £35 a month is £1,659 over three years, and the Starter package is £1,509.
• WordPress on UK hosting at £7 a month: £252 over three years, plus every hour you spend on it.
• A local web designer: £1,500 to £3,000 to build plus £50 to £300 a month is £3,300 at the bottom end and £13,800 at the top.
• Wix or Squarespace: the smallest of these numbers in cash, and the largest in evenings.
• Tradehand: nothing, unless it collects. The office team earns 5% of the invoice payments it chases and collects.

Then set all of them against the thing they are really replacing. An office manager is £25,000 a year or more, paid whether or not the invoices land. Any of these routes is cheaper than a hire. Only one of them does what the hire would have done after the enquiry arrives.

Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, Sites4Trades, Built Local, Yell and a local designer all deliver the same thing in the end: a website and an inbox. Four jobs remain, and they are the four that decide whether the site pays for itself.

1. Writing a page for every service and every area. Google matches a page to a search. One page saying "electrical services" cannot match "EICR in Peckham". This is the single biggest reason trade websites do not rank, and it is the work every self-build route hands back to you.
2. Keeping it current. Prices change, services get added, photos get better. A frozen site slides down the results whatever it cost to build.
3. Answering the enquiry. A form submission at 8pm that gets a reply on Thursday has usually already gone to somebody else.
4. Turning the enquiry into money. The quote, the chase, the booking and the invoice. None of that is a website's job, and all of it is still yours.

Two further pieces cover the parts a builder cannot: how to get your trade business found on Google for the search side, and how to get found on ChatGPT and AI search for the assistants that now answer instead of listing links. Your Google Business Profile matters more than the website for local calls, and it is free. If the answering side is your bottleneck rather than the site, compare the best AI receptionist and call answering services for UK trade businesses.

Pick on how much of the work you want to keep.

• You want to build it yourself and spend the least cash. Wix, or Squarespace if the look matters more than the price.
• You want to own everything outright. WordPress on UK hosting from around £7 a month, if you will genuinely maintain it.
• You want it done for you this week at one flat price. Built Local at £49 a month plus £99 setup.
• You can pay once and want the cheapest ongoing fee. Sites4Trades from £249 setup plus £35 a month.
• You want bespoke and a person to ring. A local designer at £1,500 to £3,000, plus £50 to £300 a month.
• You already advertise with Yell. Yell, once you have a written price from them.
• You want the site built, kept current, and the enquiries answered, quoted, booked and chased. The Tradehand trader website, free, with the office team earning 5% of what it collects.

Whichever you choose, check what customers are told about you today before you spend anything. The free Tradehand AI report scores your site and your Google listing and names the competitors ranking above you, and the free trader website page shows what the done-for-you route looks like.