An electrician in Reading runs a tidy business. Three vans, eight years going, mostly domestic and small-commercial work. His website is a £49 a month Wix template he bought during the first lockdown. It looks fine. It loads in roughly six seconds on his own phone. It has a contact form that emails him whenever someone fills it in, which he reads in the evenings on the sofa. He pays his £49 every month and considers the website handled.
By our reckoning, that £49 is one of the most expensive line items in his business. Not because of what it costs him to keep. Because of what it costs him not to fix.
The four things the £49 site does not do.
A cheap template site is not bad because it is cheap. It is bad because of what it leaves out. Specifically, four things that an owner-run service business cannot afford to be without in 2026.
- It does not load fast enough. Six seconds on mobile is a 53% drop-off, before anyone has read a single word.
- It does not capture leads intelligently. A static contact form is the slowest, leakiest way to convert traffic into work.
- It does not rank locally. No schema, no service-area pages, no Google Business Profile hooks. Invisible to the people searching.
- It does not follow up. Form fills go to an inbox the owner checks in the evenings. The lead has already booked someone else.
Each of those costs money on its own. Stacked, they cost an entire stream of revenue the owner does not know is missing.
A cheap site versus a working site, side by side.
Take the same traffic, the same business, the same average job value. Run it through the two different funnels. The delta is the cost of the £49 site, every month, forever.
Figures illustrative. Based on industry benchmarks (Google CrUX, HubSpot Trades Report 2025) and three migrated trades businesses, January to April 2026. Average job value £280.
A note on what we will not do.
We get asked for the cheap version. Owners hear our prices, do the back-of-envelope on a Wix subscription, and ask whether we can just build them something similar but better. We cannot, and we do not. Not because the work would be hard. Because the work would not solve the problem.
A site that looks fine and converts at one percent is a worse outcome than no site, because it occupies the budget and the attention that should have gone to the working solution. If the math does not add up, we will say so on the discovery call, and we will not take the work. There are plenty of businesses where our system pays for itself in the first thirty days. Those are the businesses we want to work with.
What we would build instead, in order.
The same three pieces we build for every owner-run trade. Nothing exotic. All of it ships in two to three weeks for a business the size above.
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01 · Week 1
A mobile-first site built for the click.
One page if that is all the business needs. Fast on a four-year-old phone. Schema and local SEO done properly so Google understands the service area. Reviews and trust signals above the fold. A clear path from "I have a problem" to "I have an appointment" in under thirty seconds.
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02 · Week 2
Smart capture wired to phone, email, and WhatsApp.
A chat assistant that answers the obvious questions, books the obvious jobs, and routes the rest to the owner on whichever channel he actually reads. The "I'll get back to you in the evening" failure mode goes away. The owner sees the lead while it is still warm.
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03 · Week 3
Speed-to-lead, around the clock.
Every form fill, every WhatsApp message, every missed call triggers a personalised reply within five minutes. Twenty-four hours a day. This is the single workflow that turns a working site into a compounding asset. Without it, the rest is a brochure.
The honest payback math.
For a trades business with the traffic profile above, the working stack pays for itself in the first month, comfortably. Inside ninety days the owner is doing roughly eighteen to twenty-two extra jobs a month off the same advertising spend. The £49 a month gets cancelled. The site does the work it was supposed to do all along.
If the numbers do not look like that for your business, we will tell you on the discovery call. The math is the only argument that matters.