Web Hosting for Groundworkers and Concrete Finishers

Short answer: groundworks websites are compliance libraries with a few photographs attached. Insurance certificates, RAMS, CSCS and CPCS records, waste carrier licences, and for adoptable work a growing set of Section agreement documentation. Storage, file sizes and version control are what your hosting has to handle.

Looking for plans rather than guidance? Our web hosting plans start at £39 a year and renew at £39, with the storage and daily backups a document library needs.

The document library is the site

A contract manager checking whether they can use you wants paperwork, and how you publish it matters more than how it is designed. Three practical problems, all common.

File size. A scanned certificate is often five or six megabytes for one page, because it was scanned as an image at high resolution. On a site connection that is a long wait for someone with three other groundworkers to check. Scan at 200dpi, save as PDF rather than as a photograph, and aim for under a megabyte.

Findability. Documents buried three clicks deep get emailed for instead. One clearly labelled page holding everything beats a tidy structure nobody navigates.

Superseded versions. Upload this year’s insurance certificate without deleting last year’s and the expired one stays at its URL, still indexed, still findable. A contractor landing on it concludes your cover lapsed. Worth auditing what is actually still live.

Adoptable work generates more documentation than most trades

If you do Section 104 drainage or Section 278 and 38 highways work, you accumulate technical submissions, approvals and as-built records on top of the usual compliance set. Developers will ask for evidence of previous adoptable schemes.

That is a genuinely growing archive, so check your storage allowance and how it scales rather than assuming an entry plan’s figure will last. And keep the file sizes manageable, because a 40MB drainage submission nobody can open has cost you the effort of publishing it.

Where uploaded documents actually sit

By default in your WordPress media library, in a directory frequently reachable by direct URL to anyone with the link.

For public documents like accreditation evidence that is fine. For site-specific RAMS carrying a client’s address, a project name or commercial terms, it is worth thinking about, because an unlisted URL is not access control. Either restrict the directory properly or keep live-site paperwork off the website.

Free SSL is a baseline regardless and any decent plan includes it.

Photographs: fewer, but worth doing right

You need some, mainly to show scale and quality: clean trench walls, drainage laid to a consistent fall, a power-floated finish shot at a raking angle. But you are not gallery-led, so storage pressure comes from documents rather than images.

Resize what you do upload to around 1600px wide and let a CDN serve it. Bear in mind WordPress creates several resized copies of each upload. Our plain English guide to Core Web Vitals covers load speed.

Your enquiry form is carrying contracts

Groundworks enquiries are commercial and frequently substantial, so a silently failing form is expensive. It submits, the sender sees a confirmation, the email never arrives, and nothing looks broken.

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 a shared address checked daily rather than one person’s inbox
• Test monthly from a different device, with and without an attachment, since contractors send drawings and programmes

Our guides to contact forms not sending emails and SPF, DKIM and DMARC cover both.

Email deliverability, because you send to main contractors

Quotations, RAMS and programme submissions go to main contractors and developers, who run stricter mail filtering than consumers. A tender response in a spam quarantine is a lost job you never hear about.

Authentication records are the fix. Our email hosting plans include unlimited mailboxes on your domain with 10GB each, which matters when you are sending and receiving PDF documents daily rather than text.

Backups and continuity

Daily backups covering files as well as database, so the document library is included rather than just the pages. Check that specifically, since some backup tools exclude the uploads folder by default to keep backups small, which would leave out the part that matters.

Register the domain in the company’s name with a shared contact address and set auto-renew. Make sure more than one person can access the hosting account. Our complete guide to UK domain names covers registration and renewals.

What plan you actually need

Entry-level shared hosting covers it, provided the storage allowance is comfortable for a growing document archive. SSD storage, a CDN, free SSL, daily backups, unlimited mailboxes. Around £39 a year.

If you run separate sites for different divisions, our multi-site plans run several from one account and one bill.

Check the renewal figure rather than the introductory rate. Our guide to cheap web hosting in the UK covers what should be standard.

Frequently asked questions

How should I publish certificates and RAMS?

As PDFs under a megabyte, on one clearly labelled page, with superseded versions deleted rather than left alongside the current ones.

Why are my PDFs so large?

Usually scanned as images at high resolution. Scanning at 200dpi and saving as PDF typically takes a six-megabyte file under one.

Can contractors still find my expired certificates?

Yes, if you uploaded new ones without deleting the old. Old files remain at their URL and stay indexed. Worth auditing.

How much storage does adoptable drainage documentation need?

More than you expect, and it only grows. Check how your plan scales and keep individual files manageable.

Why do my tender responses land in spam?

Usually missing SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. Main contractors filter more aggressively than consumer mail providers.

Explore more

Our guide to web hosting for tradespeople covers the requirements common to every trade, and our guide to scaffolding contractors covers the other trade whose site is largely a compliance library.

Our hosting plans start at £39 a year, with a free trial if you want to test document download speeds first.