The £500 mistake every UK tradesperson makes on their first website

The most common conversation we have with UK tradespeople goes like this:

“I’ve already got a website. I paid Dave-down-the-pub £500 for it about four years ago. It’s a bit basic but it’s there. Why would I pay you £30 a month?”

We always ask the same follow-up question.

“How many calls did it generate last month?”

About 90% of the time, the answer is some version of “I’m not really sure — none I think?”. Occasionally it’s “one or two”. Rarely it’s a confident number.

That’s the £500 mistake. Not the £500 itself — £500 is fine for a website if it works. The mistake is paying for a website that nobody can prove actually delivers leads.

This post is about why that happens, and the five questions that stop it.

How the £500 website typically gets built

We’ve collected the stories from over a hundred tradespeople. The pattern is depressingly consistent:

Stage 1: A tradesperson decides they need a website. Brother-in-law / friend’s son / Dave from the pub / a guy at the football says they can build one cheaply.

Stage 2: Brother-in-law shows up with a free Wix or WordPress template. The trade business owner is asked to provide:

• A logo (often pulled off the van photo)
• Some text “about your business”
• Photos of completed jobs (often there aren’t enough so a few stock photos get added)

Stage 3: A weekend’s work later, the site exists. It has 4 pages: Home, About, Services, Contact. The phone number is in the footer. The hero image is a stock photo of a wrench.

Stage 4: £500 changes hands. Brother-in-law is delighted. Tradesperson is moderately pleased. Brother-in-law disappears.

Stage 5: Three years later, the site still exists. The tradesperson has had no further help with it. They have no idea how many people visit, how many call, whether anyone has filled the contact form, whether they’re showing up in Google for their main town.

It looks like an investment. It’s actually a lottery ticket that’s never been checked.

The specific mistake — in one sentence

Paying for a website built but not measured.

You wouldn’t pay £500 for a van without checking it starts. You wouldn’t pay £500 for a tool without checking it works. But thousands of UK tradespeople pay £500-£2,000 for a website without ever knowing whether a single customer was acquired through it.

The most charitable view is that the website is “there if anyone googles us” — which is fine, except in most cases no-one’s measuring whether they do.

The five questions that stop the mistake

Before you pay anyone for a website, get explicit answers to these five questions. If they can’t answer them, you’re buying the lottery ticket version.

1. “How will I see how many visits this site gets?”

Acceptable answers:

• “I’ll set up Google Analytics 4 for you and email you a weekly summary”
• “There’s a dashboard at [url] showing visits, sources, popular pages”
• “Cloudflare Analytics is built in, you can log in and see daily numbers”

Unacceptable answers:

• “It’ll get plenty of visits, don’t worry”
• “I’ll add Google Analytics later”
• “You don’t really need that”

2. “How will I see how many of those visits became phone calls / form submissions?”

Acceptable answers:

• “Each phone-click on mobile fires a conversion tracker”
• “The contact form sends to your email AND logs to a spreadsheet you can see”
• “We’ll add call tracking with a forwarding number so we can attribute every call”

Unacceptable answers:

• “When the form is filled in you get an email”
• “People will just call you direct from the site”

The reason this matters: without conversion tracking you genuinely cannot tell if the site does anything. The £500 website that gets one anonymous call a year vs the £500 website that gets twenty look identical from the outside.

3. “What’s my mobile load time and what would you class as acceptable?”

Acceptable answers:

• “Anything under 3 seconds on 4G is what we aim for”
• “PageSpeed Insights score of 70+ on mobile”
• “We’ll show you the number before launch”

Unacceptable answers:

• “Should be quick”
• “Depends on your phone signal”
• “It’s a website, they’re all about the same speed”

Mobile speed isn’t optional. As we covered in another post, 53% of mobile visitors abandon sites that take over 4 seconds to load. Most £500 sites take 6-9 seconds. Half your traffic vanishes before seeing your phone number.

4. “What happens to the site if I want changes in 6 months?”

Acceptable answers:

• “You get a CMS / dashboard you can log into and edit yourself”
• “We have an hourly rate of £X for changes and a typical change takes Y hours”
• “Bigger changes are £X — here’s the full price list”
• “Monthly subscription includes Y hours of changes”

Unacceptable answers:

• “Just give me a call and we’ll sort it out”
• “Won’t be a problem, mate”

The reason: the cousin-of-a-friend who built your £500 site has a day job. When you want to update your phone number 6 months later because you’ve moved to a new phone, you’ll be told they “haven’t got round to it yet”. A month later you’ll be told the same thing. Eventually you’ll give up and the site will permanently have your old phone number.

This happens. We’ve seen sites with phone numbers that have been disconnected for years still serving as the contact number on the live site.

5. “Who owns the site if you stop working with me?”

Acceptable answers:

• “You own the domain (we’ll register it in your name)”
• “We host it but you can take a backup and move hosts any time”
• “You own all the content; the design template stays with us”

Unacceptable answers:

• “Don’t worry, we’ll always be working together”
• “It’s in my hosting account, no charge”
• “I can transfer it if needed but the design is my IP”

If your domain is registered in someone else’s name, the entire site can be held hostage from you — accidentally or deliberately. We’ve seen tradespeople lose 5+ years of accumulated Google ranking because the developer who registered their domain stopped paying for it without warning.

The honest economics of “cheap” websites

If you got a £500 site that generates one £180 job every two months — i.e. £1,080 a year — it would be slightly profitable in year 2 and a clear win by year 3.

Most £500 sites generate zero. Even at year 5, you’re £500 down. Most tradespeople we’ve spoken to in this position privately suspect this is the case but can’t prove it.

A site that demonstrably generates 1 call a month at £180 average job value = £2,160/year. Across 5 years that’s £10,800 of revenue from the site. Whether you spent £500 once or £30/month for 5 years (£1,800), you’re materially better off — provided it actually generates calls.

The whole argument is about the second clause. A £30/month site that generates 0 calls is worse than a £500 once-off site that also generates 0. A £30/month site that generates 1+ call/month is much better than the £500 cousin-of-a-friend site that generates 0.

The question isn’t price. It’s does the site work, and is anyone measuring it.

What we do differently

The five questions above sound suspiciously like a setup, because to some extent they are. Here’s how webfascia answers them:

Question	Our answer
How many visits?	Built-in Cloudflare Analytics, shown in your customer dashboard, no setup needed
How many converted?	Conversion tracking on every CTA and form, surfaced in the same dashboard
Mobile load time?	Every site lands 70+ on PageSpeed mobile by default. We won’t ship one slower.
Changes 6 months later?	Login to /admin on your site to edit copy, photos, hours, services. Bigger asks: email us, small ones same-day.
Site ownership?	You own the content. Domain registered in your name (or yours via webfascia.co.uk/yourname). All exportable on request.

Our £29.99/month pricing sounds expensive next to £500 once. It’s cheaper than the cousin-of-a-friend option on a per-call basis — provided we generate even a couple of calls a year.

If you’re considering paying someone £500-£2,000 for a first website, take this article to that conversation. Ask the five questions. If they can’t answer them, you’re not buying a website — you’re buying a lottery ticket that’s almost certainly going to lose.

What if you already paid £500 and got the lottery-ticket version?

The free 60-second site checker will tell you, honestly, what your current site is and isn’t doing — load speed, conversion signals, mobile-readiness, the whole list. If the answer is “it’s fine, keep it”, great — you’ve saved £30/month forever. If the answer is “it’s a lottery ticket”, at least you’ll know.

No card, no email required, no upsell unless you ask.