A website for a New Zealand trades business usually lands somewhere between about $2,500 and $6,000, and a bigger building firm that wants the full gallery-and-blog treatment can push past ten grand. The spread is that wide because a one-van sparky and a ten-person construction outfit are not buying the same thing, even though the invoice says the same word.
So before you grab the cheapest quote or flinch at the dearest one, it pays to know what the number is actually made of. Here is the honest shape of it.
So what is the real range for a trades site?
Treat these as the shape of the market, not a price list pinned to a wall. A tidy five-page brochure site for a sole operator, your services, your area, a few real photos and a contact form, tends to sit around $2,500 from a freelancer or a small studio. A proper lead-getter for a plumber or electrician running a couple of vans, with a page for each service, local search done properly and a quote form, is closer to $6,000. A twenty-page authority site for a building company, fully custom with a big project gallery, starts around $12,000 and climbs from there. Freelance and agency time in New Zealand runs roughly $100 to $200 an hour, which is where all of those numbers come from.
For comparison, a sharp, fast, custom build from WEB GRENADE usually lands around $4,000 to $5,000. Most Auckland agencies start at six and head toward ten and up for the same brief. We sit under that on purpose. The full breakdown of what an Auckland site should cost runs the same maths for any small business.
What actually moves the price up?
Two trades quotes land miles apart for real reasons, not just cheek. The levers that matter:
- Pages. A five-page brochure is a different job from a site with a page for every service and every suburb you cover. More pages means more design, more copy, more search work.
- Who writes the words. Someone has to write the service pages and chase down the photos. If nobody is named for that job, it quietly becomes yours, or the site launches with placeholder text and a gallery of one blurry van.
- Online booking. A proper booking system usually adds about $1,000 to the build. Worth it for some trades. For most, a click-to-call button and a short quote form does the same job for nothing extra.
- The search basics. Getting you to show up when someone in your area googles your trade is real work, and it is the first thing a lowball quote quietly drops off the stack.
Roughly seven in ten people who land on a tradie site are on their phone, often standing in the leaking bathroom they want fixed. If the site is slow or fiddly on mobile, the enquiry you paid for never arrives. Same money, no job.
What does it cost once it is live?
The build is a one-off. Keeping the thing online is the part that catches people out, so budget for it up front. In New Zealand you are looking at a domain name at $15 to $30 a year, hosting somewhere from $10 to $50 a month, and if you want someone keeping it updated and secure rather than doing it yourself, maintenance tends to run $50 to $200 a month depending on how much hands-on work it needs. None of it is huge, but a quote that leaves it off is not cheaper, it is just hiding the bill. We wrote the full rundown of NZ hosting and maintenance costs if you want the detail.
Is a cheap template site enough for a tradie?
Honestly, sometimes. A Wix or Squarespace site at twenty or thirty dollars a month is perfectly fine if you just need a tidy place to point people and you are happy to build and maintain it yourself. Templates are not the rubbish option, and custom is not automatically better. We will say that plainly.
The trap is what the cheap end costs you later. A stock template with your logo dropped in looks like every other tradie in your region, which is a problem the moment a customer is choosing between you and the next name on the list. And a build you cannot own or touch strands you the day you need a phone number changed before a long weekend. The little you saved up front turns into a real bill, or a full rebuild, right when you are flat out. That is the maths that actually matters.
If you have a quote in front of you and cannot tell whether it is fair, flick it over. We will tell you straight what the work should cost, what it is missing, and whether you are paying for craft or for somebody else's reception desk. Sites that go boom, not bust.