94% of German trades have a website. What is missing

Published: 26 August 2026 · 21 min readSearch and AI visibilitySoftware and securityIndustry assessmentsRhein-Main

94% of German trades have a website. What is missing

We built the full model for a web studio serving trade businesses in the Rhein-Main region, then buried the idea. One number did it: 94% of German trade businesses already use their own website (Bitkom Research 2025, n=504). A problem that 6% of a target group has will not carry a company. What stayed open was the question nobody has answered since an industry study in 2018, which is whether the sites that exist are any good. So in August 2026 we measured it ourselves, drew 142 tradespeople's websites in Frankfurt and the surrounding towns, and read 122 of them end to end.

Nothing here is legal or tax advice. Your Steuerberater and Anwalt decide before anything binds.

The decision

We are not building a web studio for trade businesses, and we will not sell any firm a new website because the old one looks dated. The market for the plain brochure site is served: four providers publish a complete tradesperson's website for under €600, the cheapest at €329 including VAT in two days. Where we work is the gap our own audit found. Three in four of the sites we read offer no price, no appointment booking and no structured quote request. The customer who is already on the page and wants to buy finds nothing to press. If a repeat of this audit on a clean sample drawn from a business register rather than from directory listings finds a price or booking function on more than 40% of sites, this reading is wrong and we will say so here.

What we assumed and what the data said

The opening thesis was the usual one. Artificial intelligence lowers the cost of building a website, market prices stay where they are, and a margin opens between the two. Both halves failed the check.

The price had already moved. On 25 August 2026, four providers were publicly selling a complete tradesperson's website for under €600: €329 including VAT, €499 including VAT, €500 net as an introductory price for the first five projects, and €599 as a fixed price. All of them deliver remotely across Germany, so a Frankfurt postcode buys no protection.

Artificial intelligence was not the cause. The provider at €329 mentions AI nowhere on its page. Its mechanism is stated in the open: over 60 ready-made templates and "online in 2 days". Template shops pushed the floor down before AI tools were in wide use.

In our own model, price beat technology. We moved the levers one at a time. Raising the monthly price from €300 to €699 multiplied the result by 2.26. Halving build time per client from four hours to two, which is exactly the lever AI supplies, multiplied it by 1.59. Price moves this business harder than technology does, which reverses the thesis we started with.

What we could not answer was the interesting question. The last solid measurement of German SME websites is the SIINDA Landscape Study of 2018, covering 187,627 sites: 65% mobile-optimised, 43% on HTTPS, 23% updated in content within the previous 30 days, 8.1 seconds mean load time on a smartphone. The study is eight years old and its HTTPS figure has been overtaken by free certificates. We found no German study from 2024 to 2026 on the age, mobile fitness or maintenance state of small business websites. So we ran one.

One limit up front. There is no defensible German source for the sentence "a website raises your sales by X percent", so we do not write it. What can be checked is whether a customer finds you and whether your page gives him an answer.

What 122 trade websites in Rhein-Main carry

We worked through the category pages of public trade directories for Frankfurt am Main and thirteen surrounding towns across seven trades, drew 142 individual business websites from them, and fetched each one exactly once. 122 returned a complete read. Recorded per site: reachable over HTTPS, most recent visible year, Impressum link present (the Impressum is the legally required imprint page carrying the operator's name, address and register entry), phone number visible on the home page, and whether the site names a price or offers an online booking or quote request.

Trade Sites read HTTPS Impressum Phone visible Price, booking or quote Year 2025 or 2026
SHK (plumbing, heating, air conditioning) 19 19 19 19 8 (42%) 14 (74%)
Car workshop 30 28 30 27 11 (37%) 8 (27%)
GaLaBau (landscaping and groundworks) 15 15 15 15 4 (27%) 7 (47%)
Joiner, cabinetmaker 10 10 10 8 2 (20%) 4 (40%)
Roofer 16 16 16 14 3 (19%) 5 (31%)
Painter, decorator 18 18 18 17 3 (17%) 5 (28%)
Electrician 14 14 14 13 1 (7%) 5 (36%)
Total 122 120 122 113 32 (26%) 48 (39%)

As of August 2026. Own audit by Hamnett Enterprises GmbH, fetched 25 August 2026. 142 business websites drawn, 122 read in full. Not a random sample, one fetch per site, no JavaScript execution. Method and weaknesses below. Aggregates only, no company names and no addresses.

Four layers, and these firms have done exactly the three that somebody else takes off their hands.

The legal layer holds. 122 of 122 sites carry an Impressum link. §5 of the Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, the German act governing digital services, requires provider information to be "leicht erkennbar und unmittelbar erreichbar" and "ständig verfügbar", easily recognisable, directly reachable and permanently available. Whatever a German trade business gets wrong about its website, this is not it.

The technical layer nearly holds. 120 of the 122 sites we read came over HTTPS. The rest shows only when all 142 drawn addresses are counted together: 11 of 142 (8%) would not open over HTTPS, and 6 (4%) did not answer at all, one of them a domain still listed in a directory that no longer exists in DNS. Six of the eleven HTTPS failures are certificates issued to the hosting provider rather than to the firm's own domain. The visitor then meets a full-screen security warning before reading a word. That is a configuration error of roughly fifteen minutes.

Maintenance is where it slips. 48 of the 122 sites (39%) show 2025 or 2026 somewhere. Nine of those run on a trade-specific content system that prints today's date in the footer automatically, which says nothing about maintenance. Without those nine, 39 of 122 remain (32%). 27 sites (22%) show no year at all, 32 (26%) show only 2023 or older, and on five of those the sole visible year is the founding year in body copy, in one case 1904.

The commercial layer is missing. 32 of 122 sites (26%) name a price or offer an online booking or a structured quote request. 90 of 122 (74%) offer none of the three. In the two trades where we recorded it separately, not one site named a concrete price. Every yes in that column is an enquiry form or a booking flow.

The comparison with what firms say about themselves is the real finding. Bitkom asked 504 trade businesses which digital services they offer their customers. 48% named online appointment booking, 68% digital quote dispatch, 85% at least one digital service. On the home pages we read, a quarter carried any price, booking or quote function. Both can be true. The Bitkom question is about the service, not about the website. A firm that books appointments by phone or on WhatsApp answers yes with good reason. The difference is where the function lives, and it rarely lives where the customer is standing.

The spread between trades is wide: 42% for SHK, 7% for electricians. One caveat belongs with it. About half the SHK sample runs on a single trade-specific content system that ships an enquiry widget as standard. In that trade the column measures one vendor's product rather than an owner's decision.

A side finding from the directories themselves. Across all trades we reviewed 1,601 directory rows, of which 1,247 carried a usable statement about a website. 519 of those rows (42%) pointed to no website. That is not 42% of firms without a website. Directory rows go stale, and the same company appears twice on one page, once with and once without a link. It is the share of directory rows that send a searcher nowhere, and it sits beside the 94% from the Bitkom survey without contradicting it.

What a website costs today

The price ladder for a trade business today runs from ten times to fifty times the bottom rung, depending on who builds. Every row below stood on the provider's own price page or in a dated market overview on 25 August 2026.

Tier Price What the price buys
DIY site builder €10 to €50 a month (€120 to €600 a year) template, your own hours, rent rather than ownership
Template shop from €329 including VAT, one-off over 60 ready templates, "online in 2 days", no SEO claim, no mention of AI
Fixed-price provider with local SEO €499, €699 or €999 including VAT 2 to 6 service pages, from €699 a Google Business Profile set up, from €999 local SEO for several towns and a careers page
Fixed price or leasing €599 one-off or €39.90 a month including hosting, domain, maintenance and support maintenance packages separately from €14.90 a month
Freelancer €800 to €3,000 one-off, maintenance €0 to €100 a month bespoke build, one person to talk to
Agency for small firms €3,000 to €8,000 one-off, maintenance €50 to €200 a month concept, own design, copy, technical build
CMS site, 10 to 20 pages €8,000 to €15,000 content management system, several languages, booking or shop, integrations, accessibility check

As of August 2026. Rows 2 to 4 read on 25 August 2026 from the price pages of Werkerweb, HomepageHandmade and Goldfein. Rows 1, 5 and 6 from a dated market overview by meinBetrieb online (23 February 2026, updated 6 August 2026). Row 7 from our own price benchmark research, August 2026.

Two things stand out on that ladder.

Under €1,000 you are buying a template, and for a five-page brochure site that is the right call. The build is a routine job there, and nobody has ever shown that a more expensive brochure wins more work. What you buy above €1,000 is a different thing: structure for the questions your customers actually ask, an enquiry flow that qualifies the job, and technical work a machine can read.

The second point is new and costs money. Since 28 June 2025 the Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz has been in force, the German accessibility act that requires certain digital offerings to be usable by people with disabilities, usually shortened to BFSG. The test standard is WCAG 2.1 Level AA, an international standard for accessible websites. German providers put the extra cost on a new build at 10 to 15% (a second source says 5 to 15%), and considerably more on a retrofit. That is what pushed CMS project prices up in the German mid-market. Whether the act reaches your business is answered in the FAQ below, and for most trade firms the short answer is no.

What Google changed in 2024 and 2025

For years the Google Business Profile was the best argument against having your own website. It is free, it sits at the top of local search, and 88% of trade businesses hold an entry in directories of that kind (Bitkom 2025). Between July 2024 and early 2026, Google took two legs out from under that argument.

Date What Google switched off Where the function moved
31 July 2024 Chat and call history in the Business Profile. Asked whether customers can still request quotes, Google's own help page answers: "Nein, Kunden können keine Angebote mehr anfordern." (No, customers can no longer request quotes.) Google points to SMS and WhatsApp. The structured quote request no longer exists there.
3 November 2025 The interface for questions and answers (the Q&A API). –
from 3 December 2025 The public question-and-answer section in the profile, progressively, gone from most profiles by early 2026. AI answers in Search and Maps, drawing on the profile, the reviews and the firm's own website.

As of 25 August 2026. Row 1 quoted verbatim from Google's own help page. The Q&A retirement dates come from the Google Business Profile community and a dated trade write-up (as of 28 May 2026).

Both changes point the same way. The question a customer used to ask in the profile he now asks a machine, and the machine reads the answer off the firm's website. The quote request that used to live in the profile has nowhere outside the firm's own page. A site with no price, no booking and no enquiry flow supplies a source for neither.

We will not overstate it. Google routes the hesitant customer to WhatsApp, which costs nothing and works. What has shifted is the source a machine pulls the answer from, and that source is now the firm's own page.

Method

Sampling frame. Category pages of public trade directories for Frankfurt am Main plus Offenbach am Main, Hanau, Bad Homburg, Oberursel, Eschborn, Hofheim am Taunus, Neu-Isenburg, Dreieich, Langen, Bad Vilbel, Maintal, Rüsselsheim am Main and Kelkheim. Trades: painters and decorators, roofers, SHK, electricians, joiners and cabinetmakers, GaLaBau, car workshops.

Directories. Gelbe Seiten, the German yellow pages, returned complete result lists with a per-entry statement of whether a website is held, and is the source of every directory count here. Das Örtliche returned HTTP 404 on the category path and a town picker with no entries on the search path. 11880 returned entries but no usable website field, so it is excluded from the directory counts. Gelbe Seiten does not hand an entry's target domain to an automated fetch, only its own redirect link. The domains in the audit sample were therefore resolved through search-engine results for trade and town and matched against the company names in the same result lists, supplemented by a guild membership directory for roofers.

Fetch. 142 distinct domains, exactly one HTTP fetch each on 25 August 2026, no retry, no JavaScript execution. Franchise, portal and aggregator domains were removed before fetching.

One field failed and we are not estimating it. The sixth planned field was the viewport meta tag, the one line in a page's head section without which a smartphone renders a shrunken desktop view. The fetch tool converts pages to text and discards the head section. On 121 of 122 sites the tag was therefore invisible. We drop the field and publish no mobile-fitness rate. Anyone who needs it has to pull raw HTML or run a headless browser.

Data protection. No company names, domains or addresses were recorded or stored. Aggregates only are published.

Weaknesses, in order of weight.

  1. Self-selection. The frame is directory entries rather than a business register. A firm listed in no directory is not in the sample.
  2. The audit sample is search-resolved. Because the directory withholds target domains, the addresses came through search. Search engines rank up the firms that have invested in being visible. The 122 sites therefore overstate the healthy end, and the true values are probably worse than measured here.
  3. Rows are not firms. Radius search pulls in neighbouring towns, and the same company appears several times on one result page, sometimes with and sometimes without the website marker. The 42% without a website link is an upper bound.
  4. One fetch per site. No retry and no JavaScript. Three of the six non-answers are a bot block, a server error and a truncated page, and a working website can sit behind each.
  5. Not a random sample. Seven trades, fourteen towns, one week. Frankfurt is overweighted. Eschborn, Langen, Maintal, Kelkheim and Dreieich appear in the directory counts but contributed no locally based firm to the audit sample.
  6. A footer year is weak evidence of maintenance. Nine sites print today's date automatically, five show only a founding year in body copy. We report both readings.

What this means for you

For the owner of a trade business:

  • Your site is very probably reachable, encrypted and legally clean. Check instead the thing 74% are missing: can a customer get a price or an appointment without calling? A page that answers the five questions you hear on the phone every week, and a form asking for trade, address and preferred week, are an afternoon's work.
  • Type your own domain once with https:// in front of it. 8% of the addresses we drew fail that, and six of eleven cases are a certificate issued to the host instead of to your domain. The visitor sees a security warning, and the fix costs almost nothing.
  • Look at the year in your footer. 22% show none, 26% show 2023 or older. For a customer choosing between two firms that is a signal, and for an AI answer it is a cue about currency.
  • If the site needs rebuilding rather than repairing, we build the business website from €6,500 net, with structure, an enquiry flow and accessibility as a named deliverable: Websites and web applications. Under €1,000 the market delivers a good template, and you do not need us for that.
  • If the site stands and simply is not found, the technical review from €1,900 is the smaller entry point: SEO and GEO.

For a Steuerberater (tax adviser) or bank contact:

  • A website is usually Erhaltungsaufwand, an expense that is written off in the year it falls, or a low-value asset, rather than a capital project. The order of magnitude your client is discussing sits between €329 and €8,000, and the classification belongs in your hands rather than ours.
  • If a client says the law obliges him to buy an accessible website, ask him where he read it. For a plain presentation site run by a firm with fewer than ten employees, the exemption applies as a rule.

For a buyer of a trade business:

  • On the target's website, check function rather than design: does the Impressum carry the correct legal name, does an enquiry go anywhere, and when was something last changed? A domain listed in a directory that no longer exists in DNS came up in our draw.
  • Ask who built the site and who can maintain it today. A firm whose site came from a family member nobody can reach any more has a small, expensive handover problem.

Where we could be wrong

  • Our audit sample was assembled through search-engine results and therefore overstates the better-maintained firms. If a draw of the same size taken straight from a business register finds a price or booking function on more than 40% of sites, the commercial gap is smaller than described here and the order of our recommendations flips.
  • The mobile-fitness field failed. If a repeat using raw HTML shows that under 80% of sites carry a viewport tag, the mobile view is the larger problem and the missing enquiry flow is the smaller one.
  • There is no German source for how many jobs an appointment booking on a tradesperson's site actually produces. Until one exists, our 74% stays a description rather than a diagnosis. That is why we quote no uplift rate.
  • If Google's AI answers turn out to draw mostly on the profile and the reviews and hardly on the firm's own website, the one current reason we grant this product category disappears.
  • The 42% of directory rows without a website link sits against 94% website use in the Bitkom survey. We explain that with stale and duplicated rows. If a reconciliation shows the directories are current, the Bitkom figure is too high and the whole starting point of this piece moves.

FAQ

What does a website for a trade business cost?

Between €329 including VAT and €15,000, depending on what gets built. Several nationwide providers sell a complete template site for €329 to €599, a fixed-price provider with local SEO sits at €499 to €999, a freelancer at €800 to €3,000, an agency for small firms at €3,000 to €8,000, and a CMS site of 10 to 20 pages at €8,000 to €15,000 (prices as at 25 August 2026, detail in the table above). Hosting and a domain run about €15 a month on top, with optional maintenance from €14.90 a month. For a plain brochure site the bottom tier is the right one.

Is a Google Business Profile enough?

For being found, often yes. For closing the job, less than it was before 2024. 88% of trade businesses hold an entry in directories such as Google, and the profile sits higher in local search than any website does. Since 31 July 2024, though, customers can no longer request quotes through the profile, and the public question-and-answer section was removed from December 2025. Google's AI answers now draw their content from the profile, the reviews and the firm's own website. The profile puts you in view, and the answer to a specific customer question has to sit on your page.

What does the BFSG change for my website?

For most trade businesses nothing, and this is not legal advice. The Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz has applied since 28 June 2025. Under §1 Abs. 3 Nr. 5 it catches "Dienstleistungen im elektronischen Geschäftsverkehr", services in electronic commerce, which §2 Nr. 26 defines as digital services provided "im Hinblick auf den Abschluss eines Verbrauchervertrags", with a view to concluding a consumer contract. A plain presentation site with a phone number and a contact form concludes no contract. §3 Abs. 3 BFSG additionally exempts micro-enterprises providing services, with the threshold at fewer than ten employees and at most €2M annual turnover or balance-sheet total, and both conditions have to hold together. Anyone telling you that your brochure site is legally required to be accessible is asserting a legal duty, and §5 UWG, the German unfair competition act, treats a false assertion of that kind as misleading advertising. The moment your site sells, books bindingly or takes payment, the position changes, and then your lawyer decides.

Does a new website bring more work?

There is no defensible German figure for that, so we quote none. What can be measured is the path to it: of 122 tradespeople's websites audited in Rhein-Main, 90 offered no price, no appointment booking and no structured quote request. A customer standing on such a page who wants to buy today has to call or move on. A trade firm already spends €600 to €1,500 a year on lead platforms (our research, July 2026) because those visibly deliver enquiries, and its own site competes for the same budget.

Further reading

Sources

Nothing here is legal or tax advice. Your Steuerberater and Anwalt decide before anything binds.

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