The one-hour website check every landscaper should run before spring
Grab your phone and a timer. Ten checks that show whether your landscaping website books calls or loses them, with a fix for each one you can do today.
Your website might be losing calls right now and you would never know. Nobody emails you to say "I left because your phone number was hard to find." They just tap back and call the next landscaper.
Fall is the right time to check, while the crews are winding down and before spring inquiries start. This list takes under an hour. Do it on your phone, because that is where most of your customers will see it.
Before you start
Open your site on your phone, not your laptop. Turn off Wi-Fi so you see the real load time on cellular data. Have a notepad ready. For each check, write pass or fail. Fix the fails after you finish the list, starting with the top three.
The checklist
1. Your phone number is visible without scrolling. (3 minutes) Load the home page. Can you see a phone number in the first screen? Can you tap it and have it dial? If either answer is no, that is the first fix. A homeowner standing in an overgrown yard wants to call, not read.
2. The page loads in about three seconds or less. (3 minutes) Count while it loads on cellular data. If you are past five, the usual culprit is giant photos. A 6 MB photo straight off your camera should be resized to under 300 KB. Most website builders have a setting for this.
3. The first sentence says what you do and where. (2 minutes) "Lawn care, landscaping and fall cleanups in [town] and [town]." Not "Welcome to our website" and not your company story. If a stranger cannot tell your service area in five seconds, rewrite the top line.
4. Each main service has its own page. (8 minutes) Mowing, fall cleanup, mulching, hardscaping, snow removal, whatever you sell. One page each, with a few sentences, two or three real photos and a call button. One page that lists everything in a paragraph will not show up when someone searches "leaf cleanup near me."
5. You show at least a starting price. (5 minutes) "Weekly mowing from $45 for most yards under a quarter acre" filters out bargain hunters and gives serious buyers a reason to call. Our earlier post on posting mowing prices covers how to word it.
6. Real photos of your own work. (5 minutes) Stock photos of a perfect lawn with a smiling model do not help. Photos of your truck, your crew and an actual before-and-after do. If you have none, make it a rule: two photos per job this week.
7. The quote form is short. (5 minutes) Fill out your own form. Count the fields. Name, phone, address and "what do you need" is enough. Every extra field loses people. If the form asks for lot size in square feet, delete that field.
8. Someone gets the form submission fast. (5 minutes) Submit a test request with a fake name. Time how long until it reaches your phone. If it goes to an inbox you check once a day, fix that. A lead who waits until tomorrow has often booked someone else. The missed calls and follow-up guide explains how to set up an instant text-back.
9. Your service area is listed by town name. (3 minutes) Write out the towns and neighborhoods you serve. "We serve the greater metro area" tells Google and AI search tools nothing. Town names help you show up when people search with a place in the query.
10. Your site matches your Google profile. (6 minutes) Same business name, same phone number, same hours, same towns. Mismatches confuse Google and customers. While you are there, make sure your profile links back to your site.
That adds up to about 45 minutes, leaving time to fix one item before the hour is up.
Why this is worth an hour
Across 91,717 landscaping and lawn care listings in our data, 34.6% have no website at all. The ones with a site have a median of 13 reviews, compared with 2 for those without. A site does not cause reviews by itself, but busy, established companies tend to have both, and customers can tell the difference. The benchmark report breaks this down further.
What to fix first
If you failed several checks, do them in this order:
- Tap-to-call phone number at the top.
- Form submissions reaching your phone instantly.
- A clear first line with your towns.
Those three cost almost nothing and stop the biggest leaks. Service pages, photos and prices come next, and the website essentials guide walks through each one.
A hypothetical example
Say your site gets 200 visitors a month in spring, and right now 2% of them call. Fixing the phone button and the form might move that to 4%. That is four calls a month becoming eight from the same traffic. If one in three becomes a weekly mowing client at $45 a visit across a 30-week season, each extra client is worth well over $1,000 a year. Run your own numbers in the calculator.
If you would rather have someone handle the fixes for you, try a free 14-day trial of any service, no card, text or call (801) 701-3271.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, landscaping and lawn care companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor