Should You Put Prices on Your Website? (UK Trades)

Should you put prices on your website as a tradesperson? For fixed-shape work, yes: publish a from-price or a clear price range, because it filters out the customers who were never going to pay your rate and wins the ones who value certainty. For genuinely variable work, publish how you price instead: your call-out fee, your day rate, what a survey costs if anything. Silence is the only option that helps nobody, and it mostly helps your competitors.

Here is the reasoning, and how to do it without boxing yourself in.

Why do most trades hide their prices?

Two fears, both understandable:

• "Competitors will undercut me." They already know your rough prices. They quote against you every week. The only people locked out by a hidden price are customers.
• "Every job is different, I can't put a number on it." Often true. But notice what the customer does when they find no number at all: they either assume you are expensive and move on, or they ring four firms and make price the whole conversation. Hiding the number does not remove the price question. It just makes you have it later, with less trust.

What customers are actually doing on your website at 9pm is risk assessment. Am I going to be embarrassed by the quote? Is this firm roughly in my budget? A price, a range, or even an honest "how we price" paragraph answers that, and the customer who books after reading it arrives pre-qualified. The tyre-kickers filter themselves out before they cost you a site visit.

What kind of price should you publish?

Match the format to the shape of the work:

• Fixed-shape jobs get a from-price. Boiler service from £90. Consumer unit replacement from £550. Outside tap from £120. "From" protects you on the awkward ones while giving the customer their anchor.
• Variable jobs get a range. "Most bathroom refits we do land between £4,500 and £8,000, depending on tiling and fittings." A wide range still beats silence, because it sorts the £2,000 shopper from the £6,000 one before anyone books a survey.
• Truly unquotable work gets a how-we-price section. Your hourly or day rate, your call-out fee if you charge one (here is the case for and against), whether the first visit is free, and what happens next. If you are not sure your underlying rate is right, start with how much a tradesman should charge per hour.

Whatever you publish, date it in your own head and review it when your costs move. A published price you have outgrown is a discount you never meant to give, and raising prices is easier when the number was public and reasonable all along.

Does publishing prices lose you jobs?

It loses you a specific kind of enquiry: the one that was only ever going to happen if the customer imagined you were cheaper than you are. That conversation was always ending in a no, but first it was going to cost you a phone call, a visit and a written quote. Letting it end on your website instead is not a loss, it is admin you did not do.

What it wins you is the customer who is tired of firms that make them work for a number. For that customer, a published price reads as confidence: this firm knows what it charges and is not embarrassed by it. Price transparency is a trust signal precisely because it is still rare in the trades.

One honest caveat: in high-end design-led work, where every job truly is bespoke and your market expects consultation first, a how-we-price page beats numbers. Know your corner of the market.

Where OptiTech Automation fits

We publish every one of our prices on our pricing page, for exactly the reasons above, so this is advice we take ourselves. And the follow-through matters as much as the number: when a customer arrives off a published price, OptiTech Automation lets them book a real slot straight away, pay a deposit by card where the job calls for it, and get their confirmation without waiting for office hours. Every payment lands straight in your own account, because we take 0% commission. The price said "we're straightforward". The booking experience proves it.

Where we are the wrong choice: if your work is entirely word-of-mouth referrals who never see your website before ringing, published prices and booking pages will not move your needle yet.

The step for this week: pick your three most common jobs, write an honest from-price for each, and put them on your site. Then watch what changes in the enquiries. Fewer of them, better ones, is exactly the trade you want.