When to put prices on your website, and how to show them.

The short answer

Show prices if you can. A visitor who sees a price can decide in a minute whether you fit their budget, and the ones who then get in touch already know roughly what it costs. A visitor who finds no price has three choices: guess, ask, or open the next search result and see whether that business says.

How you show them depends on the kind of work:

• Work priced the same every time, such as a haircut, a dog groom, a standard car service or a one-hour lesson: publish the full price list.
• Work that varies within a known pattern, such as an end-of-tenancy clean or a local house move: give a starting price and the things that raise it.
• Work quoted after a visit or a call, such as a roof repair or a bathroom refit: give a typical range or the price of the first step, and explain how the quote works.
• Work that repeats each month for business clients, such as bookkeeping or office cleaning: publish packages with the limits of each.

The fair reasons to hold back are narrower than most owners think. They are covered below, and so is how to test the change, because your own enquiries are a better guide than anyone's opinion, this guide's included.

What a page with no price costs you

When the price is missing, the work of finding it moves to the visitor and to your team. Someone planning a kitchen deep clean at 10pm will not phone. They open the next result, where a cleaning company says what a deep clean of a two-bedroom flat costs, and book there.

The visitors who do ask send the thinnest enquiry possible: "How much for a deep clean?" Your team replies with questions, waits, replies again, and sometimes learns the budget was never close. Each round trip is time spent on someone who would have ruled themselves out in seconds if the page had said.

A missing price also sends a message. To some visitors it reads as expensive, or as a price that depends on how much you think they can pay. Neither impression helps a small business that charges fairly.

The cost is hard to see, because the people who left never reach your inbox. That is why the test later in this guide counts bookings as well as enquiries.

When a fixed price list is right

If most customers buy the same thing at the same price, publish it in full. Hair and beauty, dog grooming, tutoring, physiotherapy sessions, car servicing and fitness classes usually belong here.

A good price list answers the follow-up question next to each price:

• What is included, in one line: "Full groom: bath, dry, cut, nails and ears."
• What changes the price, in the customer's terms: by the size of the dog, the length of the hair, the number of rooms.
• How long it takes, if customers plan their day around it.
• What costs extra, said before the booking rather than at the till.
• The unit: per visit, per hour, per person, per month.

Put each price on the page for that service, near the booking button, as well as on the full list. Someone reading about a puppy's first groom should not have to open another page to find what it costs.

Booking tools hold a price for every service, so copy the website's prices from there, or the other way round, and change both on the same day. For salons and spas, this matters most at the last step: a client who sees one price on the website and another on the booking page stops to wonder which is true.

From prices that hold up

A starting price works when jobs vary but most fall into a pattern. The risk is a "from" price so low that almost nobody pays it. A customer who books at the starting price and hears a much bigger figure at the door feels misled, and may say so in a review.

Keep a from price honest with three habits. Base it on a job people really buy, not the smallest job you have ever done. Say what it covers in one line. And name the things that most often raise it.

Two examples, with your own figures in place of the brackets:

• A cleaning company: "End-of-tenancy cleans from [price]. That covers a one-bedroom flat, including the oven, the fridge and the inside of every cupboard. Larger homes, carpet cleaning and balconies cost more, and the full list is below."
• A removals firm: "Local moves from [price] for a one-bedroom flat with two movers and a van. Most two-bedroom moves cost between [price] and [price]. Stairs without a lift, a long walk from the van and packing add to it."

The second sentence of the removals example does more work than the first. A typical range tells most visitors where they will land, and the starting price on its own does not.

Ranges, and what moves the price

For work quoted after a visit, a typical range and the reasons behind it are often more useful than a single starting price. A bathroom fitter might write: "Most full bathroom refits we do cost between [price] and [price], fitted. What moves the price most: moving the toilet or shower to a new position, tiling floor to ceiling, the fittings you choose and whether the floor needs work. We give a fixed quote after a free visit."

Write the reasons in the customer's words, not the trade's. "Moving the toilet" means something to a homeowner. "Alterations to the waste run" does not.

To find the reasons, look at your last ten quotes and ask why the expensive ones cost more. The answers are usually the same few things, and those are your list.

If even a range is too wide to help, price the first step instead: the survey, the consultation or the diagnostic check. A garage that cannot price a repair before it sees the car can still say what the diagnostic check costs, and whether that comes off the bill when the customer goes ahead.

Packages for business clients

Business clients compare suppliers on paper, often with a colleague, and a page of packages makes that easy. Packages suit work that repeats each month, such as bookkeeping, office cleaning or IT support.

Each package needs a limit that a client can check against their own business, and a plain answer for what happens past it. A bookkeeper might publish:

• Essentials, from [price] a month: one bank account, up to [number] transactions a month and a monthly report.
• Standard, from [price] a month: up to three bank accounts, up to [number] transactions and payroll for up to [number] staff.
• Over the limit: "If you go over your package for two months in a row, we suggest the next one and tell you before anything changes."

Name the limit in units the client already counts. An office manager knows how many desks and visits a week they need. They do not know how many hours your team takes per visit.

Large or unusual contracts can still be priced on request, as long as the page explains how you price them: who visits, what you need to see, and how soon the written quote follows. A bookkeeper can do this for year-end accounts while publishing the monthly packages. The questions clients ask before they choose one are on our page for accountants and bookkeepers.

Competitors will read your prices

They will, and they can already find them by asking you for a quote. Hiding prices from competitors mostly hides them from customers.

What a competitor learns from your price list is a figure. What decides most jobs is everything around it: what is included, how fast you reply, the photos of your work, your reviews and how easy you are to book. Put those next to the price, and a cheaper rival has to match the whole page, not one number.

If you worry about being undercut, describe what the price includes in more detail than anyone else does. "Two cleaners, all products and equipment, inside the oven and fridge, and a free return visit if your letting agent finds anything we missed" is hard to compare with a bare figure.

There are fair reasons to hold back:

• Work won through tenders or negotiated contracts, where the price depends on terms agreed with each client.
• Prices that move every week with materials or supplier costs. Publish the reasons and a recent range with the month it was checked.
• Work where a published figure could be read as a promise about a case you have not seen, such as a legal dispute or a structural repair.

Even then, publish what you can: the fixed-price parts, the first step and how a quote is worked out.

Where prices go on the page

Where the price sits matters as much as whether it is there:

• On each service page, near the button that books or asks for a quote. A separate prices page is useful too, but it should not be the only place.
• With what is not included, in the same place as the price.
• With the season or the year when prices change on a timetable, such as next year's wedding packages.
• In text on the page, not in a photo of a printed price list.
• The same everywhere else: your booking tool, your Google Business Profile and any listing site.

For some categories, Google Business Profile lets you add services with a price and a description. Google's help page says to keep prices out of a custom service's name and put them in its details. If your category has the option, use the same figures as the website. A price that differs between the site and the profile makes both look unreliable.

If you add a compulsory fee on top of a price, such as a booking fee or a service charge, check how the rules where you trade say it must be shown before you publish it, and ask your adviser if you are unsure.

When you cannot give a number, explain the quote

Some jobs cannot be priced from a web page. A roof leak can be one slipped tile or a rotten valley, and nobody can tell from a photo. The page can still answer what a visitor wants to know about the quote itself:

• Is the visit or the call free, and how long does it take?
• What do you need from me: photos, measurements, a plan, the age of the boiler?
• When will the quote arrive, and in what form?
• Is it a fixed price or an estimate, and what could change it?
• How long does the quote stay valid?

A roofer might write: "We price every repair after a look at the roof. Send two or three photos from the ground with the form below and we will tell you whether we need to visit. Visits are free within our area, and the written quote follows within two working days. The price on the quote is the price you pay, unless we find hidden damage, and we show you any before we do extra work."

That paragraph gives no figure and still answers most of what a homeowner would phone to ask. For trades and home services, it also sets up the conversation after the quote: how to follow up on a quote has messages to copy.

Test it on one service first

You do not have to decide for the whole site at once. Pick the service with the most enquiries and run a simple test:

• Count, for the last few months, the enquiries for that service, how many became quotes or bookings, and how many first replies only asked the price. Your inbox and booking tool hold most of this.
• Add the price, range or starting price to that page, and change nothing else on the site at the same time.
• Count the same things for the same length of time afterwards. Compare like with like: not December against March in a seasonal trade.
• Ask new customers what they expected to pay, and whether the page helped them decide.

Read the results the right way round. Fewer enquiries is not a failure if bookings held steady, because the people who dropped out were the ones who would never have booked. Look for more enquiries that turn into work, fewer first messages that only ask the price, and fewer quote visits that end with "that's more than we thought".

If bookings fall, compare your price and what you include with the businesses customers mention. Showing the price may have made a gap visible that was already costing you work.

Mistakes that cost trust

• A from price that almost nobody pays.
• A price list from two years ago, and staff who quote higher on the phone.
• Extras that appear only at the till or on the invoice.
• Different prices on the website, the booking tool and Google.
• "Competitive rates" or "affordable prices" instead of a figure. Every business says it, so it tells a visitor nothing.
• A price with no unit, so nobody can tell whether it is per hour or per job.
• Asking for a phone number before showing any price at all.

How we show our own prices

We publish ours on the prices page, so you can see what each part costs before you talk to anyone. Each service shows where it starts and what it includes, and the page lists what makes a project cost more: more pages, an online store, payments, booking software that needs custom work and more than one language. The free consultation turns that into a written quote, and the quote names each of those before you agree.

It is the structure this guide recommends: a starting price, what it covers, what moves it and how the quote works. The words on your service pages are where most of that lives, and how to write the words for your website covers writing them.