You've seen the posts. Free website for tradesmen, first ten to comment, no catch. And I'm not going to stand here and tell you they're all cowboys, because they're not. Some are decent people building a portfolio. A free site can beat no site. The question that matters isn't what the website costs. It's who's still looking after it in month two.
I've spent twenty years building websites and running web programmes, for Joblogic, and before that for Dropbox, Oracle and ServiceNow. The single most reliable lesson from all of it fits in one sentence: the sites that win work aren't the prettiest ones. They're the ones somebody kept turning up for.
Follow the moneyNobody builds websites for free
Someone offering free websites is paying their mortgage somehow. That's not an accusation. It's arithmetic. There are usually three models behind the offer, and only one of them is a problem.
The portfolio builder. Someone new to the game doing free work to get examples and reviews. Fair play. Everyone starts somewhere, and if they tell you that's the deal, you can decide with your eyes open.
The loss leader. The build is free; the hosting, the domain, the "care plan" and the surprise add-ons are not. Also survivable, if the monthly number is written down before you say yes. Ask for the 12-month total and watch the reaction.
The volume merchant. Build it fast, screenshot it for the Facebook ad, move on to the next ten comments. Nobody touches your site again. This is the one that costs you, because the build was never the product. The build is the advert.
A website gets sold like a thing you buy once. It behaves like a van. Skip the servicing and it quietly stops getting you to jobs.
Google stopped rewarding finished websites years ago
Here's the uncomfortable mechanics of it. Google, and now the AI tools sat on top of it, don't rank websites. They rank evidence. Fresh pages are evidence you're still trading. Consistent details across your site, your Google Business Profile and the directories are evidence you're reliable. New reviews, new photos of jobs, new pages for the areas you cover: all evidence.
A site that launches and never changes stops producing evidence. It doesn't fall off a cliff. It slides, slowly and then suddenly, while the rival two streets over with a maintained site hoovers up the searches you used to get. And AI search has made this stricter, not looser. When ChatGPT or Google's AI answers "best electrician near me", it cross-checks your details across everything it can see. Stale reads as unreliable. Unreliable doesn't get recommended.
The rival nicking your work doesn't have better reviews than you. He's got a website somebody still bothers with.The after-launch job
What your site needs somebody doing every month
This is the work a build-and-vanish provider isn't doing, whatever the build cost. None of it is glamorous. All of it decides whether the phone rings.
New content, on a schedule
New blogs, new area pages, updated service pages. Google notices a pulse. A site with something new each month reads as a live business; a site frozen in January reads as a maybe.
Details kept identical everywhere
Same hours, same phone number, same services on your site, your Google Business Profile and every directory that lists you. Machines cross-check. One old number in one forgotten listing plants doubt.
Schema kept current
The invisible plumbing that tells AI tools what you do, where you do it and what you charge. It's not set-and-forget. Services change, areas change, and the markup has to change with them.
Someone watching the numbers
What's ranking, what's slipping, which pages bring enquiries and which bring nothing. You can't fix a leak you never look for. A monthly report should tell you in plain English, not in charts you need a degree for.
Someone answering when you call
New price, new service, a cracking photo of yesterday's job. If getting a change made takes three weeks and two chase-up texts, the site will always be out of date, and out of date is the whole problem.
When a free site is a decent shout
If the person offering is straight about why it's free, the ongoing costs are on paper, the domain sits in your name, and there's an actual answer to "who updates it in March?", then take it with my blessing. Some of these folk are at the start of the same road I've been down, and everyone deserves the chance to be good at this.
But get the answers before the build, not after. Once a site exists and the login lives with someone who's stopped replying, your options shrink to "start again". If you want the exact questions to ask, I've written them up in seven questions that sort the pros from the cowboys, and there's a printable cheat sheet below you can keep by the phone.
Running the numbersWhat one missed job costs
Say you're a bathroom fitter and your average job is £4,300. If a maintained website wins its owner one extra job a month that yours doesn't, that's £51,600 a year going to the bloke down the road. Not because he's better. Because his website kept producing evidence and yours went quiet in February.
Against that, "free" and "£49 a month" aren't really the two prices on the table. The real comparison is between a site somebody looks after and a site nobody does. The gap between those two is measured in jobs, and it dwarfs anything you'll ever pay a provider.
Don't ask what the website costs. Ask what it costs you when nobody's looking after it.
A website that wins work is never finished. That's not a flaw. That's the job.
If you're weighing up an offer right now, free or otherwise, grab the cheat sheet below and ask the seven questions on a call. Any provider worth hiring will enjoy answering them. Me included.