Website essentials for a landscaping or lawn care company
The seven jobs a landscaping website has to do, why before and after galleries beat everything, what pages to build, and what a fair build actually costs.
34.6% of landscaping and lawn care companies on Google link no website at all. Companies that link one have a median of 13 reviews; companies that do not have 2. The website is not causing the reviews, but the gap is wide enough to be the clearest marker in the whole dataset of who is running a business and who is running a mower.
A homeowner will hire an unlisted crew off a yard sign for a $50 cut. Nobody hands over a $9,000 patio deposit to a company with no site. If installs are where your margin is, the website is not optional.
The seven things it has to do
- Load in under two seconds on a phone on cell data. Half your traffic is a homeowner standing in the yard. Compress every photo, drop the hero video, and check on a real phone away from wifi.
- Put a tap-to-call button in the top right, visible without scrolling, on every page. Make it a real
tel:link, not an image of a phone number. - Say what you do and where in the first sentence. "Weekly lawn maintenance, cleanups and paver patios in Westfield, Southwick and Agawam." Not "your outdoor living partner."
- Show before and after photos above the fold. In this trade, the gallery is the sales pitch. Text describes work; photos sell it.
- Publish price ranges. Not exact prices, ranges with conditions. Companies that publish get fewer calls and better ones.
- Separate maintenance from installs. They are different buyers with different budgets and different timelines, and forcing them through the same page loses both.
- Have a form that a person answers within an hour during season. A form nobody watches is worse than no form, since the customer thinks they contacted you.
The pages, in build order
Home. Headline with service and towns, tap-to-call, three before and after pairs, a short "what we do" split into maintenance and installs, review count and rating pulled straight from Google, service area list, form.
Lawn maintenance. What is in a visit (mow, trim, edge, blow), weekly versus biweekly, price ranges by lot size, what a season costs, whether a contract is required, how billing works. Most companies leave out billing and it is one of the top two questions homeowners have.
Landscape installation. Sod, beds, plantings, mulch, grading, drainage. Project photo pairs with a one-line description and a rough cost for each: "Front bed rebuild and 12 yards of mulch, Longmeadow, about $2,400."
Hardscape, if you do it. Patios, walls, walkways, fire pits. This page carries the most revenue per visitor on most landscaping sites, so give it the most photos, a price per square foot range, and a paragraph on base prep, which is what separates you from the guy who lays pavers on sand.
Seasonal services. Spring cleanup, aeration and overseeding, fall cleanup, irrigation blowout, and in cold states snow removal and holiday lighting. This page carries the winter offset and should be live in September, not December.
Service area. A real page per town if you have content for it, one combined page if you do not. Ten near-identical town pages with the name swapped will not help you and may hurt. The AI search guide explains what a real town page contains.
About. Owner photo, when you started, crew size, insurance and license numbers, the towns you live in. Homeowners are deciding whether to let strangers into the backyard while they are at work. This page answers that.
The gallery, done properly
- Shoot before from a fixed spot, then stand in that exact spot for the after. Different angles kill the effect.
- Caption each pair with town, job type and rough cost: "Retaining wall rebuild, Chicopee, 34 feet, $8,600." Costs make the gallery a pricing tool.
- Twenty pairs beats a hundred singles. Order them by job type so a patio buyer sees patios first.
- Compress to about 150KB each. A gallery of unresized phone photos is a 40MB page nobody waits for.
- If a photo shows an identifiable house, ask the customer. Most say yes when you ask while they are happy.
Speed and the technical minimum
- Images in WebP, sized to the width they display at.
- No page over 2MB total.
- HTTPS, a real domain you own, not a builder subdomain.
- Schema markup for LocalBusiness with your name, address, phone, service area and hours. It is a block of code in the head, added once.
- Google Analytics or a lightweight alternative, plus call tracking so you know which page produced the call.
- Mobile tap targets at least 44 pixels, and forms that do not demand an address before the person has decided to talk to you.
What it should cost
- A five to seven page site done well: $1,500 to $4,500 one-time, or $150 to $350 a month on a build-and-maintain arrangement.
- DIY on a builder: $20 to $40 a month plus a weekend of your time. Perfectly acceptable if the seven items above are met.
- A $12,000 custom build with animations: almost never worth it for a company under $2M in revenue. That budget buys three years of ads.
Two rules regardless of who builds it. You must own the domain, registered in your name with your card. And you must be able to get a copy of the site. If an agency says the site is only rentable and disappears if you leave, that is a hostage arrangement, not a website. More on that in the agency guide.
Things to leave off
Stock photos of yards that are not yours, a slider that cycles through five headlines nobody reads, a live chat widget nobody staffs, an instant online quote tool for install work where the price depends on grade and access, a blog with three posts from 2021, and the word "solutions."
Frequently asked
Can I get by with just a Facebook page? For a mowing route, for a while. For install work, no. A Facebook page is not indexed the same way, cannot be cited cleanly by AI answer engines, and does not appear when someone searches your company name and wants to check you are real.
Do I need a booking calendar? For maintenance signups it can help. For install estimates it usually hurts, because a site visit needs to be scheduled around drive time and crew availability. A call is faster.
How many pages before it is enough? Five is functional. Nine to twelve is where most companies stop growing traffic from adding more, and effort is better spent on reviews and on the Google profile.
A website build is one of the services in the free 14-day trial, first draft usually inside a week, and it is yours either way. Text or call (385) 832-6175.