Of all the things business owners disagree about when it comes to their website, this is the one that comes up most. Should you put your prices on it, or keep them off and wait for people to get in touch?
Both sides feel strongly. One camp says prices scare people off and every job is different anyway. The other says hiding prices wastes everyone's time and makes you look expensive. I have sat on calls where two partners in the same business argued it out for twenty minutes.
The honest answer is that it depends on what you sell and who you sell it to. But "it depends" is a useless thing to leave you with, so let me break down when each approach actually works, and how to show pricing in a way that brings you better enquiries rather than fewer.
Why some businesses are right to hold prices back
If every job you do is genuinely different, a flat price on the page can do more harm than good. A builder quoting a loft conversion, a landscaper redesigning a garden, an accountant taking on a limited company with three years of messy books, none of these have a single number that fits. Put "lofts from £30,000" on the page and you either frighten off the person whose job would have come in at £18,000, or you anchor everyone to a figure you cannot honestly hold to.
There is also the competitor point, which people worry about more than they should. Yes, a rival can see your prices. But rivals can ring up and ask, or send a fake enquiry, and most of them already have a rough idea what you charge. Keeping prices off the site to hide from competitors usually just hides them from customers too, and customers are the ones who matter.
So if your work is truly bespoke, holding back a headline price is defensible. What is not defensible is holding back everything. Which brings me to the real problem.
"No prices at all" is usually the mistake
Here is the pattern I see most often. A business decides its work is too variable to price, so the website says nothing about money at all. Every route to a number runs through a phone call or a form. It feels safe. It quietly costs them work.
People shopping for a service are trying to answer one question before they contact anyone: is this business roughly in my budget? If your site gives them no way to answer it, a good number of them will not ring to find out. They will click back to Google and try the next firm, and you will never know they were there. This is one of the more common reasons a site gets visitors but no enquiries, and it rarely shows up in your enquiry count because the people it affects never appear.
The other cost is quality, not just quantity. When there is no pricing signal at all, you attract everyone, including the person with £500 who wanted a job worth £5,000. You spend time on quotes that were never going to land. A little pricing on the page does a quiet job of filtering, so the enquiries that reach you are closer to the work you actually want.
The middle ground that works for most people
For most service businesses, the answer is not a full price list and it is not silence. It is giving people enough to place themselves, without pretending every job fits a fixed number. A few ways to do that:
Show a starting-from price for your most common job. "Boiler services from £90" or "Basic websites from £50 a month" gives people a floor to work from. It is honest, it filters, and it does not tie you to a figure for the complicated jobs.
Give a range for typical projects. "Most kitchen installations we do land between £4,000 and £9,000 depending on units and worktops." That single sentence answers the budget question and teaches people what moves the price, which makes the quoting conversation far easier when it comes.
Explain what changes the cost. Even with no numbers at all, telling people that a rewire depends on the age of the property, the number of circuits and whether you are chasing walls does two things. It shows you know your trade, and it makes the eventual quote feel fair rather than plucked from the air.
It is worth being honest here: we take this approach ourselves. Our pricing is on the site in plain view, because the businesses we want to work with are the ones who value knowing where they stand. Not every enquiry that would have come through does, and that is the point. The ones that do are better fits.
Where prices matter even more: paid traffic
If you are running Google Ads, the pricing question stops being optional. When someone clicks a paid ad, you have paid for that click whether they enquire or not. Send them to a page with no pricing signal and a chunk of that paid traffic bounces straight off to compare, and you have bought a visit that goes nowhere.
Pages built for ad traffic tend to convert better when they set expectations early, which is one of the things that separates a proper landing page from a generic service page. You do not need a full price list. You need enough for a stranger who has never heard of you to think "yes, that is about what I expected" and carry on to the form. Manage that and you get more from the same ad budget, and fewer of the tyre-kickers that eat your time.
How to show pricing without it backfiring
If you do decide to show prices, a few things make the difference between it helping and hurting.
Put the number next to what it buys. A price floating on its own reads as expensive. The same price sat beside a clear list of what is included reads as fair value. Context is doing the heavy lifting, not the digit.
Keep it current. Nothing erodes trust faster than a customer discovering your "from £X" is a couple of years out of date. If you are going to publish numbers, someone needs to own keeping them right.
Be clear about what the price does not cover. "From £90, extra parts charged at cost" is far better than a bare "£90" that turns into an awkward conversation later. People forgive a higher final number far more readily than they forgive a surprise.
So, should you?
If your work is genuinely bespoke, you do not owe anyone a fixed price list, and forcing one on yourself can do real damage. But almost every business can, and should, give people something, a starting-from figure, a typical range, or an honest explanation of what drives the cost. Total silence on price is rarely the safe option it feels like. It filters out the wrong people less than it filters out the right ones.
If you are not sure how much to show, or your current site says nothing at all and you suspect it is quietly costing you enquiries, that is exactly the kind of thing worth a second opinion. Have a look at how we approach websites for local businesses, and if you would like a straight view on your own site, get in touch and I will tell you what I would change.