Website builder or agency? What actually pays off for trade businesses

First, the situation on our own doorstep

In July 2026 we reviewed Yellow Pages listings for five trades across eight towns in the Märkischer Kreis — roofers, electricians, painters, carpenters, and heating/plumbing (SHK) firms from Iserlohn to Meinerzhagen. 1,097 listings in total.

The result: 38 percent of these businesses have no website at all. Not an outdated one. None.

Among the businesses that do have one, we ran a random sample of 120 websites through Google's official PageSpeed test (as of July 2026, mobile measurement):

Half of them don't reach a performance score of 70 out of 100; the median sits at 69.

Why this matters: over half of searches for tradespeople happen on mobile, often at the exact moment the roof starts leaking. If the site still shows a blank screen after four seconds, the job goes to whoever ranks next.

This is the market your website competes in. The bar is low. That's bad news for the industry — and fairly good news for you.

What the website builder actually costs

Wix, Jimdo, and similar tools charge between 12 and 36 euros a month depending on the plan. That's the part that shows up on the price list.

The part that doesn't: you build the site yourself. Be honest about the hours — writing copy, picking photos, clicking together a menu, testing on mobile, redoing it. For most people that adds up to 20 to 40 hours of work. As a master tradesperson, your hourly rate on site runs somewhere between 60 and 90 euros. The website you build at the kitchen table therefore costs, in real terms, 1,500 to 3,500 euros — paid in evenings and weekends. It just never shows up on an invoice.

And then the actual problem starts: the site exists, but nobody finds it. Website builders deliver the technology, not the visibility. Copy that ranks on Google for "roof renovation Iserlohn" is not something the builder writes for you.

There are cases where the builder is still the right call. More on that below — a chapter most agency guides skip, for obvious reasons.

What an agency actually costs

We looked at published prices from web agencies in North Rhine-Westphalia that specifically serve trade businesses and small firms. The entry-price range: 800 to 2,500 euros, with more elaborate trade-business websites running 2,500 to 4,000 euros. On top of that come ongoing hosting and maintenance costs, ranging from 20 to 180 euros a month depending on the provider.

Our own prices are published openly on our pricing page — we're not playing hide-and-seek here. The point of this guide is different: whether you buy from us or from someone else, you should know how to weigh price against return.

The calculation that actually matters

Example calculation — the assumptions are stated; check them against your own numbers:

A roofing business in the Märkischer Kreis. Average job value for a roof repair: around 2,000 euros, considerably more for full renovations. Assumed margin: 15 percent, or 300 euros per job.

• Agency website: 4,000 euros one-off, plus 100 euros a month in maintenance → 5,200 euros in year one
• For that to pay off, the site needs: 5,200 ÷ 300 = roughly 17 extra jobs in year one. So one or two a month.
• From year two, the threshold drops to 4 jobs a year — one per quarter.

One or two extra jobs a month, in a region where four in ten competitors have no website at all and three-quarters of the rest load too slowly, is a low bar to clear. The reverse also holds: a website nobody finds won't even deliver those four jobs. Visibility is the real goal here — a finished site alone doesn't get you there.

Run the same logic for your own business: job value times margin, divided by annual cost. If the required number of jobs sounds unrealistic, skip it. If it sounds laughably low, you know what to do.

When the builder is enough

Honest answer: more often than agencies admit.

• Your order book is full for months and you don't want to grow — then you just need a digital business card with opening hours and a phone number. Jimdo, done.
• You live entirely on repeat customers and referrals, and want to keep it that way.
• You're testing a business idea and don't know yet whether it'll still exist in a year.

In these cases, 15 euros a month is the right price, and any agency that sells you a 4,000-euro website anyway earns the industry's bad reputation.

When it isn't

• You want to grow, hire new people, or build a second line of business. Applicants check the website first these days — a business without a decent online presence simply doesn't exist for a 25-year-old journeyman.
• You want customers to find you, not just confirm you. That takes copy, structure, and speed that hold up on Google and, increasingly, on ChatGPT and similar tools — exactly where the builder sites in our measurement failed en masse.
• The next job is worth four figures. Then a single extra customer alone covers a substantial share of the website cost.

Methodology, for verification

Survey conducted July 2026: 1,097 industry listings (Yellow Pages) for roofers, electricians, painters, carpenters, and SHK firms in Iserlohn, Lüdenscheid, Menden, Hemer, Plettenberg, Altena, Werdohl, and Meinerzhagen. Of these, 675 had a website, 422 did not. Performance sample: 120 randomly selected websites, tested with Google PageSpeed Insights (mobile measurement); 99 produced usable results, the rest were unreachable during testing or returned no result. Price ranges: published list prices from agencies with a trade-business focus in North Rhine-Westphalia, as of July 2026. The example calculation is a model — plug in your own numbers.