Checkatrade vs your own website — which wins UK trades more work?

Let's be fair to the lead sites, because the case against them only holds up if we're honest about what they do well. When you're brand new, have no website, no reviews and no reputation, a directory gives you something hard to build from scratch: visibility and trust on day one. A profile on a recognised platform puts you in front of people who are ready to hire, today, without you having to rank in Google or spend a penny on ads first.

Directories are also a reasonable way to fill gaps. A quiet week, a new area you're expanding into, a new service line you want to test — buying a few leads can keep the diary full while your own marketing catches up. And the review systems on these platforms are real, verified and visible, which reassures nervous homeowners who've been burned by a cowboy before. None of that is nothing. The problem isn't that directories don't work. It's what they cost you, and what they quietly keep for themselves.

Here's the part that eats your margin. On most lead sites, the enquiry you pay for isn't yours alone — it's sent to several trades at once, so you're often quoting against three, four or five competitors who all got the same job. That pushes everyone toward the lowest price, turns you into a quoting machine, and means a chunk of the leads you pay for were never realistically going to choose you.

Then there's the cost structure. Lead sites typically charge either a monthly or annual membership, a fee per lead, or some combination of the two — and those fees keep coming whether the leads convert or not. Win the job and the platform still takes its cut on the next one. Lose it to a cheaper rival who got the same lead, and you've still paid for the privilege of being in the auction.

The deeper issue is ownership. On a directory, you're building your reputation on rented ground. The reviews live on their platform, the customer relationship runs through their system, and the rules — pricing, ranking, how prominent your profile is — are theirs to change whenever they like. You can do everything right for years and still be one policy update away from a worse deal. You're growing someone else's asset, not your own.

A good website flips almost every one of those problems. When someone finds you through your own site — via Google, your Google Business Profile, a recommendation or a van sign-write — that enquiry comes to you and only you. No shared auction, no five-way quote war. You're not the cheapest option on a list; you're the trade they chose to contact. That alone tends to mean better-quality leads, higher quote-to-job conversion and customers who haggle less.

You also own everything. The reviews you collect can live on your own site and your Google Business Profile, where they help you rank and build trust for free, every day, forever. The customer's details are yours, so you can follow up, ask for repeat work, and earn referrals without paying a middleman each time. And the site itself is an asset that compounds: every page, every review, every bit of SEO you build makes the next lead cheaper than the last. Directory leads cost the same (or more) every single time. A website's cost per lead falls as it matures.

It's worth being realistic, though. A website isn't an overnight switch. It takes a bit of time to rank, and a cheap, slow, badly built site won't convert the visitors it does get. That's exactly why how it's built matters — which we'll come back to at the end.

A website on its own isn't magic — it has to be found. This is where most trades go wrong: they pay for a brochure site, it sits there invisible on page eight of Google, nothing happens, and they conclude "websites don't work" and crawl back to the directories. The site wasn't the problem. The lack of a way to be found was.

Getting found directly comes down to three things working together. First, a properly optimised Google Business Profile — for many local trades this is the single biggest source of direct enquiries, showing you in the map pack when someone searches "electrician near me". It's free, and most trades barely touch it. Second, local SEO so your site ranks for the services and towns you cover. Third, targeted ads (Google or Meta) to top up the diary fast while the SEO matures — the difference being that those ads send people to a site you own and a phone that rings only for you, not into a shared lead pool.

Do those three things and the directory starts to look less like a necessity and more like an optional extra. You're no longer renting access to customers — you have your own front door, and you keep everyone who walks through it.

For most established trades, the right answer is both, with the balance shifting over time. If you're just starting out or breaking into a new area, lean on the directories: they get you visible and reviewed fast while you have nothing else. There's no shame in that — it's a sensible bootstrap.

But the moment you have a steady reputation and a few solid reviews, start building the channel you own in parallel. Stand up a fast, well-built website, get your Google Business Profile humming, and let your own SEO and direct enquiries grow. As those exclusive, lower-cost leads start coming in, dial the directory spend down. You're not ripping the plaster off — you're moving from rented ground onto land you own, one job at a time.

The trades who get this right end up in a strong position: a diary filled mostly by people who found them directly and chose them specifically, a wall of reviews working for them around the clock, and zero per-lead fees skimming their margin. The directory becomes a tool they use on their terms — not a tax they can't escape.