There's a quiet suspicion a lot of business owners carry: that a website is a vanity purchase. Something you're told you should have, that sits there looking nice and does very little. It's a fair suspicion, and the honest way to settle it isn't with a statistic you have to take on faith. It's with a sum you can do yourself, on your own numbers, in about a minute.
The only sum that matters
Take what the website costs you in a year. Divide it by the profit you make on one typical job or sale. That gives you the number of extra pieces of work the site has to win, across a whole year, before it's paid for itself.
On our pay monthly plan, year one is £199 to start plus £49 a month, which is £787 before VAT. Call it under a thousand pounds for the year. If a typical job earns you around £300 in profit, the site has to bring you roughly three extra jobs across twelve months to break even. Not three a month. Three a year.
That's the whole test. Everything else is detail.
Three extra jobs a year. Not three a month. Three a year.
Where that break even is trivially easy
For a lot of trades and services, three jobs a year is nothing. A roofer, a plumber, a physio, a solicitor, a private clinic: one extra job can be worth hundreds or thousands on its own. If your work is high value or repeat, the site clears its own cost almost as an afterthought, and everything past that is profit.
The higher the value of a single customer to you, the more absurd it becomes to argue the website doesn't pay. One course of treatment, one extra installation, one new retainer client, and you're already ahead for the year.
Where it isn't
It would be dishonest to pretend this works for everyone. If your margins are wafer thin, or you already turn away more work than you can take, or your customers genuinely all come from foot traffic on one street, a website is a weaker lever. It might still be worth having for credibility, but don't expect it to transform the numbers.
If that's you, be honest about it. A website is a tool, not a miracle, and a tool is only worth buying when it does a job you actually need doing.
What a website can't do
Whatever the sum says, keep this in mind. A website is a shop window and a way for the right people to reach you. It's not a fix for a deeper problem.
It won't make a bad business good, and it won't fix a phone that nobody answers.
The cheapest way to find out
If the sum comes out in your favour and you're still not sure, we'll redesign your homepage for free before you spend anything. You see the work, on your own business, and then you decide. The offer is the proof: if we didn't think it would earn its keep, we wouldn't give the first bit away.