Do I need a website if I already have a Google Business Profile?

Not necessarily, and if you can only do one thing, do the profile. It is free, it puts you on the map when somebody searches nearby, and reviews arriving on it steadily are the single thing most likely to get you shown. A website earns its place when you need to show prices, be found by name by somebody who is not on Google, or take a booking and a deposit at eleven at night. If your profile is strong and you are already at capacity, wait.

How much should a small business website cost in the UK?

Four honest bands. Around £15 a month if you build it yourself on Squarespace or Wix. £250 to £500 for a local developer to build something simple. £2,000 to £3,000 for a small agency, usually WordPress. £5,000 and up for a bespoke build with search and booking designed in rather than bolted on. Mine start at £5,000, plus £400 to get it live and £1,000 for the search work, and I ask for £750 a month afterwards because unmaintained sites rot fast. Any of those bands can be the right answer. The wrong answer is £2,500 for something nobody maintains.

Will a website actually bring me more work, or just make me look professional?

On its own, neither. A small website almost never makes a phone ring by itself. What it does is stop you being ruled out by people who were told about you and found nothing, and catch enquiries at the hours you cannot answer. If you already get recommendations, it converts them. If nobody is recommending you, a site will not fix that, and the money is better spent on doing work people talk about.

Is a Facebook page enough instead of a website?

It works right up until it does not. A page you post on every week does a real job, particularly through local groups. But it is hard to find by name outside Facebook, plenty of people cannot see it properly without an account, it rarely shows prices clearly, and it cannot take a deposit. If your last post is over a year old it is costing you, because a stale page reads as a business that has closed.

How do I know if my current website is doing its job?

One test. Can somebody find you, book you and pay you without speaking to you? Try it on your own phone as though you were a stranger. Search your business name, then search your trade plus your town. If you can get from there to a confirmed booking with money taken, it works. If you land on a contact form, it does not, because a form is a request to be contacted later, and later is where enquiries quietly die.

← Notes from the street

WEBSITES · 5 Aug 2026 · 6 min

I get all my work by word of mouth. Do I need a website?

'A website rarely wins the work in a business built on referral. Its job is to protect the recommendations already earned, by giving anyone passed your name somewhere credible to land. Sometimes the honest answer is still no, and we say so, alongside the standard a site has to meet before it is worth commissioning at all.'

Matthew · No11 Studio

No. If you are booked three weeks out, your phone rings without you doing anything, and you would turn away another job if it landed tomorrow, you do not need a website. Put the money into a better van, or leave it in the account.

Four or five people have probably told you otherwise this year. Every one of them sells websites. So before I make the case for one, here is where they are wrong.

When the answer is genuinely no

Three situations. I have said all of them to people’s faces on Wanstead High Street.

You are at capacity and content. Not “busy, but I would take more”. Actually full, actually happy, no plans to grow. A website is a growth tool. If you do not want growth, it is an expense with a job description nobody has written.

You work almost entirely for two or three main contractors who already know you. Your customer is a site manager with your number in his phone. He is not going to google you.

You are a year or two from winding down or selling. A site that has been live for eighteen months is worth close to nothing to a buyer, and it will not have earned its cost back by then.

Then there is a fourth case, and it matters more than the other three put together. If you have no Google Business Profile, or you have one with nine reviews and the newest is from 2022, a website is the wrong thing to buy first. The profile is the free listing that puts you on the map when somebody searches nearby, and it is where your reviews live.

Darren Shaw runs the annual survey the local search trade uses to work out what actually moves a business up in those map results. Every year it lands in the same place. Reviews, arriving steadily, do the work. Filling in every field, keeping your address written the same way across the internet, getting into directories, posting weekly updates: mostly busy work. So claim the profile, get people leaving reviews, and read this again in six months. You will be better off, and you will have spent nothing.

So what does a website actually do, if it does not win work?

It does not win work. I have never seen a five page site make a phone ring on its own, and anyone promising you theirs will is describing something that has not happened.

The real job is duller. A website stops you being quietly ruled out, and it catches demand at the hours you are not there.

A plumber in the south east asked almost this exact question on a small business forum last year. Busy on word of mouth, some odd quiet lulls, web builders ringing him every week. The reply everybody agreed with was not from a marketer. It came from a customer, who said flatly that he does not use companies with no website and no Google listing, and that web builders charge well over the odds. Both halves of that are true. The people selling you a site only ever quote the first half.

Nobody rings to say “I would have used you, but I could not find anything about you, so I went with the other bloke.” That call does not exist. Which is how you end up busy and losing work in the same month and never knowing it.

The moment it costs you money

Half nine on a Saturday night. A kitchen table in Woodford. Somebody has just had their bathroom done, a friend asks who did it, and your name gets said out loud with a compliment attached.

That is the best marketing you will ever get. It cost you nothing but doing a good job.

Now watch what happens next.

They type your name into their phone at the table, because that is what people do now. Facebook page, last post 2023, mobile number in a photo caption. The recommendation cools right there. Not because they distrust you. Because there is nothing to do with the feeling except wait until Monday, and by Monday there is a school run and a leaking tap and your name has gone.

Or they do find a number. They are still not ringing a tradesman at half nine on a Saturday. Same problem, slower.

A recommendation has a short shelf life. Hours, not weeks. A website is what stops it going off before Monday morning, because it is the one thing you own that is awake while you are asleep.

That is the whole argument. Not more customers. Fewer wasted ones.

What about people asking ChatGPT for a plumber?

Ofcom, the communications regulator, runs a survey each year on what British adults actually do online. The most recent one has more than half of UK adults using something like ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, up from under a third the year before. Among 16 to 24 year olds it is roughly four in five.

What that does not tell you is whether a single one of them used it to pick a barber in E11. Nobody has measured that here. So when somebody waves a figure at you saying most UK businesses are invisible in AI search, ask who paid for the research, because it is nearly always the firm selling the fix, and ask whether there was a cafe, a salon or a plasterer anywhere in the sample.

What I can tell you is how these things behave, because I ask them the same questions over and over. They name businesses that somebody else has already written about somewhere. They change their mind between Tuesday and Thursday. If nothing anywhere on the internet mentions you, you are not in the answer. Your own website is not all of that. It is the part of it you own outright.

What does a website actually cost? Here are real numbers

Nobody publishes this, which is exactly why every quote you get feels like a number someone made up in the van.

Free. A Google Business Profile. Half an hour to claim, an hour on a Saturday to fill in properly with twenty real photographs. Where it stops: you cannot show prices sensibly, you cannot take a deposit, and you are a tenant. Profiles do get suspended. When yours is, you have nothing.

About £15 a month. Squarespace or Wix, built by you. Perfectly respectable, and I am not going to sneer at it. Where it stops: a weekend of your time now, and another weekend in eighteen months when you notice the opening hours have been wrong since Christmas. Most of the ones I look at in Leytonstone and South Woodford were built with real enthusiasm in month one and never touched again.

£250 to £500. A local developer, or somebody’s capable nephew. Usually decent value for the build itself. Where it stops: nobody owns it afterwards. Contact forms break silently. You find out four months later, and you will not know who to ring.

£2,000 to £3,000. A small agency, usually WordPress. You get a design, a couple of rounds of changes, and somebody to shout at. Where it stops: booking and payment get bolted on at the end rather than designed in, and who looks after it afterwards is a separate conversation nobody has until something breaks.

£5,000 and up. What I charge, so read this as interested. A bespoke five page site starts at £5,000. The domain, the hosting and getting it live is £400. Making it properly answerable, so Google and the assistants can pull a straight answer about what you do and where you do it, is £1,000 on top. A real one from me lands around £6,400, and I will not build one without at least £750 a month behind it afterwards, because an unmaintained site is worse than no site by year two. If that is more than the work is worth to you, buy one of the rungs above. I would rather say it here than find it out with you at month three.

“I have been fine for eleven years without one”

You have, and I believe you. Two things changed, and neither of them is that Google got clever.

One. The phone came to the kitchen table. The recommendation and the search now happen inside the same thirty seconds, in the same room. That gap used to be a day long, and you could survive a day.

Two. Your quiet lulls are not random. They are the weeks when the word of mouth happened and nothing caught it. You cannot see that anywhere, which is why it feels like weather.

If you genuinely do not get lulls, ignore all of this. You are the exception. Enjoy it.

One test, and everything else is decoration

Here it is.

Can somebody find you, book you and pay you without speaking to you?

Not whether the site looks smart. Not whether it comes up first for anything. Not whether you have a blog. If a stranger who heard your name at half nine on a Saturday can land on it, see that you do their thing in their area, pick a slot and hand over a deposit before they put the phone down, the site is doing its job.

Most of the sites I look at in E11 fail on the last two words. Plenty have a form. Almost none can take money. A form is a request to be contacted later, and later is where enquiries go to die.

So: claim the profile, get the reviews, then buy the cheapest thing that passes the test. If the £15 a month version passes it, buy that.

And if you want to know what an assistant says today when somebody asks it for your trade in your bit of east London, I will run the checks and send you what comes back. It is called an Answer Audit. It costs nothing and takes me about an hour.

Questions people ask

Do I need a website if I already have a Google Business Profile?: Not necessarily, and if you can only do one thing, do the profile. It is free, it puts you on the map when somebody searches nearby, and reviews arriving on it steadily are the single thing most likely to get you shown. A website earns its place when you need to show prices, be found by name by somebody who is not on Google, or take a booking and a deposit at eleven at night. If your profile is strong and you are already at capacity, wait.
How much should a small business website cost in the UK?: Four honest bands. Around £15 a month if you build it yourself on Squarespace or Wix. £250 to £500 for a local developer to build something simple. £2,000 to £3,000 for a small agency, usually WordPress. £5,000 and up for a bespoke build with search and booking designed in rather than bolted on. Mine start at £5,000, plus £400 to get it live and £1,000 for the search work, and I ask for £750 a month afterwards because unmaintained sites rot fast. Any of those bands can be the right answer. The wrong answer is £2,500 for something nobody maintains.
Will a website actually bring me more work, or just make me look professional?: On its own, neither. A small website almost never makes a phone ring by itself. What it does is stop you being ruled out by people who were told about you and found nothing, and catch enquiries at the hours you cannot answer. If you already get recommendations, it converts them. If nobody is recommending you, a site will not fix that, and the money is better spent on doing work people talk about.
Is a Facebook page enough instead of a website?: It works right up until it does not. A page you post on every week does a real job, particularly through local groups. But it is hard to find by name outside Facebook, plenty of people cannot see it properly without an account, it rarely shows prices clearly, and it cannot take a deposit. If your last post is over a year old it is costing you, because a stale page reads as a business that has closed.
How do I know if my current website is doing its job?: One test. Can somebody find you, book you and pay you without speaking to you? Try it on your own phone as though you were a stranger. Search your business name, then search your trade plus your town. If you can get from there to a confirmed booking with money taken, it works. If you land on a contact form, it does not, because a form is a request to be contacted later, and later is where enquiries quietly die.