Web Hosting for Painters and Decorators
What a decorator’s website needs from hosting: why compression damages colour on flat painted walls, balancing mobile speed against image quality, handling customer room photos, and what plan level fits.
Short answer: decorating is sold on colour, and colour is the one thing a website handles badly. Photographs that look right on your phone can look wrong on a customer’s laptop, and heavy compression makes it worse. That makes image quality and how they are served the hosting question, alongside the usual mobile speed and form reliability.
Looking for plans rather than guidance? Our web hosting plans start at £39 a year and renew at £39, with SSD storage, a CDN and daily backups included.
Colour is where compression actually hurts
Most trades can compress photographs hard without anyone noticing. You cannot, because a customer is looking at a finished room to judge a shade, and aggressive compression shifts colours and produces banding across flat painted walls. A smooth wall in one tone is exactly the kind of image that compresses badly.
What to do about it:
- Resize rather than crush. Bring images down to around 1600px wide before uploading, which cuts file size dramatically without touching colour fidelity.
- Let a CDN handle format conversion, which produces better results at a given size than heavy JPEG compression.
- Avoid plugins that re-compress at low quality by default. Several popular optimisers do, and the banding is the giveaway.
- Shoot in consistent daylight so a colour looks the same across your gallery rather than varying by room.
Say on the page that screens vary and offer to bring samples. That manages the expectation the website cannot fully meet.
Mobile speed, without wrecking the images
Your visitor is usually on a phone, comparing two or three decorators. A gallery page carrying twenty unresized photographs is a very large download and you lose people before they see anything.
The balance is resizing properly and using a CDN with lazy loading, rather than compressing quality away to make the page light. SSD storage and a CDN handle the server side. Our plain English guide to Core Web Vitals covers how this is measured.
Bear in mind WordPress creates several resized copies of every upload, so storage goes further than the originals suggest. Check your allowance if you photograph every job.
Your enquiry form will fail silently
The form submits, the visitor sees a confirmation, the email never arrives, and nothing looks broken. It can run for months.
WordPress sends mail through PHP by default, which is frequently filtered as spam or rejected, particularly without authentication records on your domain.
- Send form mail through authenticated SMTP rather than PHP mail
- Add SPF, DKIM and DMARC records to your domain
- Deliver to an address you check daily
- Test it monthly from a different device, and with a photo attached since customers send pictures of the room
Our guides to contact forms not sending emails and SPF, DKIM and DMARC cover both.
If customers send photos of the room
Useful for quoting, and it has two hosting consequences. Check your upload limit, since a couple of phone photographs will exceed a default WordPress cap. And know that uploads land in your media library, which may be reachable by direct URL, so photographs of the inside of someone’s home are worth restricting rather than leaving open.
Email on your own domain
An address at your own domain rather than a free webmail account is included with most plans and reads better on a quotation. Our email hosting plans include unlimited mailboxes with 10GB each, which is worth having when customers send image-heavy emails.
Backups
Daily backups turn a broken theme update into a five-minute restore. Check the uploads folder is included, since some backup tools exclude it by default and your photographs are the part worth keeping.
Register the domain in your own name with auto-renew set. Our complete guide to UK domain names covers registration.
What plan you actually need
Entry-level shared hosting with SSD storage, a CDN, free SSL and daily backups. Around £39 a year. Be reasonably generous on storage if you photograph every job.
Check the renewal price rather than the introductory rate. Our guide to cheap web hosting in the UK covers what should be standard.
Frequently asked questions
Why do my finished rooms look wrong on the website?
Usually over-compression, which shifts colour and causes banding on flat painted walls. Resize instead of compressing hard, and let a CDN handle format conversion.
What hosting does a decorator need?
Entry-level shared hosting with a CDN and reasonable storage. The requirement is driven by image quality and volume rather than by traffic.
Can customers send me photos of their room?
Yes, but check your upload limit and where the files land, since photographs of someone’s home should not sit in a publicly readable folder.
Why are my enquiry emails not arriving?
Usually WordPress sending mail through PHP and being filtered. Authenticated SMTP plus SPF, DKIM and DMARC fixes most cases.
Are my job photos in my backups?
Not always. Some backup tools exclude the uploads folder by default. Check, because that folder is your portfolio.
Explore more
Our guide to web hosting for tradespeople covers the requirements common to every trade, and our guide to flooring fitters covers the other trade where colour accuracy matters.
Our hosting plans start at £39 a year, with a free trial if you want to test your own photographs first.
Looking to get started on Switchweb? Take a look at our website hosting plans or message us about a free trial.
