How much does a tradie website cost, and what should you buy?

The short answer, in Australian dollars

For most tradies, a website that brings in job enquiries costs $2,000 to $6,000 plus GST to build, and $50 to $250 a month to keep running. A tight five-page site at the lower end of that range, paired with a properly filled out Google Business Profile, will usually generate more calls than a $20,000 build with a video header.

Here are the bands you will actually get quoted, ex GST:

• Do it yourself on a hosted builder: roughly $300 to $700 a year, plus a few of your own weekends. A fair option when you are starting out and cash is tight.
• Freelancer or small studio, five pages: roughly $2,000 to $6,000 once off. This is where most trade businesses should land.
• Lead-focused build with copy, real job photos and call tracking: roughly $6,000 to $15,000. Worth it when one job is worth thousands and you want more of a particular type.
• Custom build with booking, quoting or job-management integrations: $15,000 and up. Only when the site is doing real work beyond taking enquiries.
• Ongoing: domain, hosting, backups, updates and small changes, roughly $50 to $250 a month depending on who does them.

Treat those as ranges to sanity-check a quote against, not a price list. Prices move with scope, photography, and how much copy someone has to write from scratch. If a quote lands well outside the band it is not automatically wrong, but you should get a straight answer about what the extra buys. For the wider picture across industries, we broke it down in how much a website costs in Australia.

What actually wins jobs on a tradie website

The features that turn a visitor into a phone call are boring, cheap, and usually the first things cut. Most of your traffic arrives on a phone, often from someone standing in a laundry with water on the floor. Build for that person.

• Click-to-call on every screen. Your number as a tappable link in the header, at the end of every section, and in the footer. Not an image. Not buried on a contact page they have to hunt for.
• A quote request form with four fields. Name, phone, suburb, what needs doing. Every extra field costs you enquiries, and you can ask the rest when you call back.
• Photos of your own jobs. Before and after, on real sites, mess included. Stock photos of someone else’s ute do nothing for you.
• Service areas named as suburbs. People type the suburb into the search box. If your site only says “servicing greater Adelaide”, you are invisible for the search that matters.
• A page that loads fast on mobile data. Google’s Core Web Vitals are a decent proxy: if the page takes more than a couple of seconds in a driveway, you are losing calls you will never hear about.

What does not win jobs: a video header, an “our philosophy” page, a live chat widget nobody staffs, and a blog you will never write. A site that looks great and never rings is an expensive business card.

The five pages a trade business actually needs

1. 1Home. What you do, where you do it, your license number, your phone number, and a quote form. Visible without scrolling.
2. 2Services. One section per service you want more of. If you are chasing switchboard upgrades, that gets its own heading, its own photos, and its own form.
3. 3Our work. Ten to twenty real job photos with a line of context each. This page closes more work than any amount of clever copy.
4. 4Service areas. The suburbs you cover, written out. If you cover thirty and most of your work comes from six, give those six their own paragraph.
5. 5Get a quote. Short form, your number, your hours, and what happens next. The rules that make a landing page convert apply here too, and we covered them in what makes a high converting landing page.

That is the whole site. Add pages later when there is a reason to. Most tradie website projects die of scope, not of simplicity: the build stalls because someone is waiting on copy for a page nobody was ever going to read.

Your Google Business Profile beats a bigger website

If you have a fixed budget for getting found, put the money into a simple site and put your time into your Google Business Profile. The profile is free, and for local trade searches the map results sit above the regular ones. That is the position your website is spending thousands trying to reach.

Filling it out properly means correct categories, service areas, hours, license details, a real description, photos added regularly, and the habit of asking every happy customer for a review. Google publishes the rules in its guidelines for representing your business, and they are worth ten minutes before you write anything.

Your website supports the profile rather than replacing it. Matching business name, address and phone details across both, plus LocalBusiness structured data on the site, help Google connect the two. If you want the longer version of that work, our guide to working with a local SEO agency covers what it looks like month to month.

If you only do one thing this month, claim and complete your Google Business Profile. It costs nothing, it sits above the search results your website is competing in, and it works even while your site is average.

When you should not spend a cent on this

If every job you have booked for the next six weeks came from word of mouth, do not build a website yet. You are not being held back by your online presence, you are being held back by hours in the day, and a new site will not add any.

Same goes if any of these are true:

• You are booked out and turning work away. Fix your pricing or your capacity first, not your marketing.
• Nobody answers the phone during the day. Enquiries you never return cost more than enquiries you never got.
• You have no photos of your work. Take photos for a month, then build the site around them.
• You cannot name the work you want more of. A site built for everything converts for nothing.

The point of a tradie website is not to exist. It is to change the kind of work you get: bigger jobs, better suburbs, commercial instead of domestic, planned instead of emergency. If you cannot name the change you are after, a good agency should say “not yet” and then get out of your way until you can.

How to brief it without getting stung

1. 1Own the domain yourself. Register it in your business name, with your own email address on the account. It is the one asset in this whole exercise you cannot afford to lose.
2. 2Ask what happens if you leave. Can you take the site with you? Who holds the hosting login? A straight answer tells you most of what you need to know about the person quoting.
3. 3Insist on your own photos. Budget half a day of someone competent shooting your work. It will do more for enquiries than another $2,000 of design.
4. 4Get call and form tracking from day one. If you cannot tell how many enquiries the site produced last month, you cannot tell whether it paid for itself. This is the gap we find most often.
5. 5Agree who makes changes. New service, new suburb, new photos. Either you can do it in ten minutes or you are paying someone every time.
6. 6Be careful with monthly-only deals. A “$99 a month, no upfront cost” website is a rental. Fine if that is what you want, expensive over five years, and you usually own nothing at the end.

None of this needs an agency. Plenty of tradies get a good result from a competent freelancer, their own photos, and an afternoon of effort. If you would rather hand the whole thing over, that is the job our lead generation websites are built for: five pages, real photos of real work, tracked enquiries, and a Google Business Profile that pulls its weight.

Frequently asked questions