Your own site, or renting leads from Checkatrade and Bark.

It depends what you want from it. It gets you enquiries quickly, which is real. But the cost isn't small: membership runs anywhere from £60 to £500 a month depending on trade and area, prices aren't public and rise at renewal, and most plans add a per-lead fee on top. A busy plumber or electrician can spend around £400 a month all in, for leads shared with three or four rivals. As a fast start it works. As your whole strategy it's expensive and you own nothing.

Because you pay once for the asset and a flat monthly fee to run it, instead of paying per lead forever. Bark charges you credits to quote jobs sent to several trades. Checkatrade stacks a membership and per-lead fees. Our sites are from £49 a month with unlimited direct enquiries and no per-lead charge, so the more work it wins, the cheaper each job gets.

Not at all. Most trades run both at first: the platform keeps leads coming while your own site builds up its rankings. Over a few months the site starts bringing enough direct enquiries that you can decide whether the platform is still worth it. No pressure either way.

That's the entire job of it. We build service and area pages targeting the searches your customers make, mark them up so Google and AI tools understand them, and show your reviews to build trust. It isn't instant like buying a lead, but once it ranks the enquiries come direct, and they're yours alone.

Faster, yes. Easier, not really. A shared lead means you're one of several quotes, usually competing on price, for a customer who was never yours. A direct enquiry from your own site is someone who found you, liked what they saw, and picked up the phone. Those convert better and haggle less.

With a lead platform, nothing. Stop paying and you disappear the same day. With a Zenlio site you own the site, the content, the domain and the reputation you've built on it. It's an asset that keeps its value whether or not you keep working with us.

Pausing still stops your listing showing to homeowners, so new leads generally stop the same way as cancelling. The usual difference is that pausing can keep your profile and existing reviews intact for a quicker restart later, rather than leads carrying on while you're not paying. Terms change and aren't published in one place, so always check directly with the platform before you decide. Either way, it's a good reminder that your visibility, and your leads, stop the moment you stop paying, paused or cancelled.

A rough patch of reviews on a platform sits inside their system, attached to their profile, not yours. What we do instead is build a site that leads with your best, most recent evidence: fresh Google reviews, real completed jobs, before-and-afters, and lets you tell the story your way rather than leaving it to a platform's review feed. It won't erase what's already out there. It does give anyone who searches for you directly a fuller, fairer picture than three old reviews taken out of context.

It depends on your trade, your area and how much competition is already ranking there, so we won't invent a number that doesn't hold for every trade. What we can say honestly: it isn't instant, expect real movement over a few months rather than days, and it builds gradually rather than switching on overnight. That's exactly why running both together during that period, the platform for immediate work, the site building for the future, is the sensible way to make the change.

For some trades, yes. A site gives Google Ads somewhere proper to send people instead of a shared platform profile that looks like everyone else's, and the enquiries from ads still land direct and unshared, the same as organic search. If you're weighing it up, the sensible order is usually to get the site live and working first, then layer in ads once there's somewhere worth sending the click. Worth a conversation about whether it earns its keep for your specific trade.

No. Reviews left on Checkatrade, Bark or similar sit inside that platform and stay there if you leave. They don't transfer to your own site or to Google automatically. That's part of the real cost of renting a reputation instead of owning one: the goodwill you've earned belongs to the platform's page, not yours. A Zenlio site is built to collect and show your Google reviews directly, which is the one review pot that's genuinely yours wherever you go.

Yes, quite a bit. If you do occasional big jobs, extensions, full rewires, large renovations, a single won job can cover months of a platform's cost outright, so even an expensive lead can pay for itself. If your work is smaller and recurring, boiler servicing, routine call-outs, the maths tightens fast, because you're paying a per-lead fee repeatedly for jobs with thinner margins. In that second case, owning a site that brings repeat and referral business direct, with no per-lead fee at all, tends to matter more, sooner.

You don't create a gap, you run both. Keep the platform ticking over exactly as it is while the site goes live and starts ranking. There's no point cutting off a working source of enquiries on day one. The whole point of the transition is that you're never relying on just one channel while the other finds its feet. Most trades only wind the platform down once the site is reliably paying its own way.

We build the trust signals that matter for a site you own: your real Google reviews, photos of completed work, and clear proof of who you are and where you operate. That's not the same as a platform's own verification badge, which only means something inside their directory. What replaces it is your own reputation, shown properly on a site that's unmistakably yours, which counts for more once someone's already looking at you directly.

Yes. Trades often start on Starter to get something live and own it, then move up as the site earns its keep and they want more pages, more area coverage, or more built into it. There's a three-month minimum on any plan, then thirty days' notice if you ever want to change or leave, so you're never locked into more than you need.