Checkatrade or your own website: what each does

You are comparing two different purchases

Set the two side by side and they do not line up. A directory listing buys attention from people who have never heard of you. Your own website is where attention goes once you have it — the place a stranger lands when somebody passed on your number, when the van went past, when your name came up in a Facebook group and they wanted to see whether you were real before ringing. One is a supply of strangers. The other is what happens to a stranger who already found you.

So the concession goes first rather than in a paragraph near the bottom. A directory pays out on day one and a new website does not. You join, the profile goes up, and work starts arriving inside a fortnight. You build a website and for the first month or two almost nobody sees it. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you the website.

This page says Checkatrade because that is the name people type, but it is the same decision for MyBuilder, Rated People, Bark and the trade boards. Some charge a membership and list you, some sell access to a job somebody has posted, some do both. The part that matters is identical in every case: the listing is theirs and the site is yours, and everything below follows from that one sentence.

Note. If you are reading this beside a renewal date, the useful question is not which one wins. It is what you would still hold on the morning after you cancelled, and that is answerable from your own records in ten minutes.

What a directory genuinely does well

This part goes before anything critical, because a page that lists only the drawbacks was written by somebody who wants you to buy something else.

The main thing a directory sells is not advertising. It is a reputation you have not earned yet. A homeowner who has never hired a tradesperson in their life, and is frightened of getting it wrong, opens a list of people whose identity and insurance somebody has at least looked at. That is a real service, it is worth money to them, and it is why the model works.

It also solves the problem a new business cannot solve for itself. In your first year you have no reviews, no photographs of finished work, no history on Google and nobody to vouch for you. A website in that state is a business card. A directory profile in that state still puts you in front of somebody who has already decided to spend money this month.

And it ranks for words you are not going to rank for. A national site with years behind it sits above a one-van business for the broad searches and will keep doing so; any page implying that your own five pages are about to take that position was written to sell you a build. It does not need to happen. The searches you can win are your own name, your town paired with the specific job, and the map results, which is a different fight entirely.

The reviews are the real product. A review on a platform with a moderation process behind it does work that the same words on your own site cannot, because the reader knows you did not write it and can go and look without going through you.

The part of the price that is not the fee

People reach for renting versus owning at this point. It is too tidy a picture and it lets the real costs stay abstract, so here they are concretely. None of them appear on the invoice.

You compete on their terms. When somebody is looking at four profiles in a list, the field easiest to compare is price, so price is what gets compared — not because the platform is unfair, but because that is what any list does. On your own site there is no list, and the comparison a reader makes is with whatever they looked at an hour ago.

The profile is theirs to arrange: what it shows, in what order, and who appears beside it are decisions somebody else makes and can change without asking you. The customer's relationship is with them, too. Somebody who found you through a directory tends to go back to the directory next time, because that is the thing they remember using. Somebody who found your site and saved your number rings your number.

And the contact record lands in their system first, which leaves your own list of past customers with a hole in it exactly where a repeat job would have come from. That one has a fix and it costs a minute. Copy every customer into your own records the day the job is confirmed — name, address, number, what you did, when. That list is yours, and it is the only part of a directory relationship that transfers.

Note. A phone number the platform supplied so calls can be counted is not your number. It routes to you while you pay and stops when you do not. Your own number is what belongs on the van, the invoices, the site and anything printed.

The reviews you earn there stay there

This is the sharpest point on the page and nobody raises it when you join. Years of reviews are the most valuable thing you build on a directory, and they are the one thing you cannot take with you. The day the profile comes down they come down with it, along with every link anybody ever sent to it.

The obvious response is to copy them onto your own site, and it half works at best. A star rating retyped onto your own page is no longer evidence, because its whole force came from sitting somewhere you do not control. Once you have typed it out yourself it is a sentence you wrote about yourself. Most platforms also have rules about republishing reviews and using their branding, so read those first.

The answer is to start collecting on something that survives you leaving, and honestly that is not your website either. A page of testimonials on your own site is weaker evidence than the same words on a platform that vouched for them, and that gap does not close however well the page is written. What closes it is a Google Business Profile with real reviews on it: still a third party, still checkable, free, and the one people see first when they search your name.

So the work is to move where you ask, not to move what you already have. Most customers leave one review in one place, and the place is decided by whoever asks first and asks properly.

• Claim the Google Business Profile first. It is free and it outlives every platform.
• Ask out loud, on site, on the day you finish — not in an email a fortnight later.
• Name the place you want it left, and get the phone out and show them if they are willing.
• Ring the customers who reviewed you on the directory two years ago. Most will do it again elsewhere.
• Keep your own record of every job: name, town, the work, the date, and whether they agreed you could use their words and photographs.

Tip. Do this while you are still paying for the listing, not after you have cancelled. Reviews have the longest lead time of anything on this page, and they are the one thing you cannot hurry when you need them.

What is yours on the morning after you cancel

The clean way to decide is to stop arguing about which is better and write down what survives. The first column stays with you whatever any platform does. The second was always a tenancy.

Note. Read that table before the renewal rather than after it. Half of the first column can be arranged in an afternoon while you are still a paying member, and none of it can be arranged afterwards.

The build is the cheap part, which is the awkward bit

An interest to declare, because this is the section to read with one eye open. This site belongs to a website builder. We sell the thing I am about to tell you is not the expensive part.

Nearly every page answering this question is published by a web agency, and that shapes what those pages can conclude. If replacing a directory means a four-figure invoice, then leaving is a serious decision that needs their help, and the page has somewhere to end. The build is not the expensive part any more, here or on several other tools. Take it out of the sum and the real cost of leaving becomes visible, and it has nothing to do with software.

Photographs are the actual bill. A directory profile can carry a handful of pictures and coast on the star rating; your own site cannot, because photographs are the only evidence a stranger has that you can do the work. If you have traded ten years and never photographed a finished job, that is not a fortnight's problem. It costs a phone and the discipline of taking three shots before you pack the van, and it takes a season to build up.

The words are the slow part of every website job there has ever been. What you do, which towns, what you will not touch, how you quote, what you charge to come out. Nobody can write that from nothing, because the facts exist only in your head, and a builder that invents them has made you a site that lies about your own business.

Then the fourth thing, which is what the directory was actually supplying: a stream of people who had never heard of you. Replacing that means a finished Google Business Profile, pages that name the towns and the jobs you want, and months rather than weeks. That is the honest reason to keep paying for a while, and a much better one than the argument that the build is expensive.

Note. Nothing on that list is bought. It is why leaving feels expensive even when the replacement is not, and why the people who manage it cleanly started collecting photographs, words and reviews a year before they cancelled anything.

When leaving would be the wrong move this year

There are situations where the answer is to keep paying, and it does us no good to pretend otherwise. If you started this year and have no reviews anywhere, the listing is doing the one job you cannot yet do for yourself. If your diary depends on it and you have never had a job from any other source, cancelling is not a strategy, it is a gap in April. If your work is subcontract or trade to trade, neither a directory nor a website changes your month much, and your time is better spent on the four people who hand you work.

The other one is a patch where you can see for yourself that the directory occupies the results your customers use. None of these are permanent, and each has something you can start this month that changes it by next year.

The order to do it in, and how to know when

Run both and then taper is what every page on this subject concludes, and it is right, which is why it is not worth dressing up as an insight. The part worth your attention is the trigger, because that is the bit the other pages leave as a feeling. Make it a measurement instead. A crude one is enough: one column, in whatever you already use, and one question asked on every call.

1. Keep paying. Do not cancel anything on the strength of a website you have not built yet.
2. Claim and finish the Google Business Profile. Free, an evening's work, and the piece that survives everything else.
3. Build the site, with your own domain and your own number on it and nothing routed through anybody else.
4. Point everything at it: the van, the invoices, the social profiles, and the website field on the directory profile where they allow one.
5. Photograph every job from now on. The problem before you started, one shot mid-job, the finished thing from the same spot.
6. Ask for a review, out loud, in the place you want it, on the day you finish. Every job.
7. Ask every caller how they found you, and write the answer in the same place every time.
8. Read that column after three months. Then reduce rather than cancel, and read it again three months later.

Note. The column is the whole decision. When the jobs you want arrive with your own name, your Google profile or a recommendation beside them, three months running, the listing has become a top-up rather than a supply — which is a fact about your business rather than an argument from a page like this one.

Common questions

Can I put my Checkatrade reviews on my own website?

You can quote one, with the first name, the town, the month and a link to the profile so a reader can still check it. What you cannot do is transplant the star rating and have it mean what it meant, because the value was in it sitting somewhere you do not control. Read the platform's own rules on republishing reviews and using their logo before you copy anything.

If I cancel, do I lose the reviews I have already earned?

In practice yes. They live on the profile, and the profile is what you are cancelling. No export turns them back into evidence on your own site, which is the strongest single argument for building up a Google Business Profile while you are still a member rather than after.

Will my own site outrank the directory for my trade and my town?

For the broad search, almost certainly not, and any page promising otherwise is selling you something. Where you can win is your own business name, the map results near you, and a specific job paired with a specific place. Those are where the customers who ring rather than compare tend to come from anyway.

I get all my work from a directory. Is a website worth it at all?

Yes, for a reason that has nothing to do with replacing the listing. Plenty of the people who see your profile will search your name before they ring, and what they find is either your own site or nothing. It also gives you somewhere to send people who came from a recommendation, which is work the directory never touched.

Is MyBuilder, Rated People or Bark a different decision?

The shapes differ, but what you hold at the end is identical. The profile, the reviews and the position are theirs. Your domain, your words, your photographs, your number and the customers you wrote down are yours. Judge each on whether the work it sends turns into paid jobs, and keep your own records either way.