Is it time to upgrade your landscaping website? Get inspired by the best landscaping websites, learn about the essential characteristics of a high-performing site, and get tips for optimizing yours, too.
Wondering if your landscaping business needs a new or better website? If you’re hoping to grow your client base, drive sales or increase your brand awareness, you need a site that effectively converts visitors to customers.
In this guide, we’ll tell you why an effective website is important to your landscaping business, show you what makes it effective, share some examples of the best landscaping websites, and give you tips for improving your current website or building one that sets your business high and above its competition.
4 Characteristics of an Effective Landscaping Website
It’s estimated that there are roughly 1.7 billion websites in the world with more than 500,000 added each day. What makes one good and another bad can be subjective, but what makes them effective is fairly scientific. Effectiveness is often based on how many visitors to a website convert, in other words, how many complete a desired action, such as subscribing to a newsletter, buying a product, or contacting a sales agent.
Regardless of their industry, effective websites share some common characteristics:
Easy Navigation
According to WebFX, 89% of website visitors will move over to a competitor’s website if they have a bad user experience on a site. Being able to easily move around a site and find what they need, when they need it is one of the biggest indicators of a positive website experience.
It’s because customers don’t want to have to work or search for what they need. A general rule of thumb is not to make visitors click more than two or three times to get to what they need on your site.
Mobile Optimization
It’s estimated that a whopping 91.4% of the world’s population has a mobile device. That means having a mobile friendly website is no longer a nice-to-have, but a must for doing business.
A website that is optimized for mobile viewing ensures that content is adjusted to be accurately viewed, and scrolled, on a smaller screen. Users can quickly locate what they need and be able to access or activate it as easily as they could on their desktop computer.
Visual Appeal
In our quick moving, instant gratification society, websites must be visually appealing to draw and keep visitors’ attention. The caveat is that they should attract attention, yet not cause distraction. To find the balance, experts advise using high-quality images, a coordinated color scheme, easy to read typography, and sufficient whitespace.
Clear Calls-to-Action
Websites are often asking a lot from visitors, for instance, encouraging them to click to join a mailing list, activate a promotion, share content, visit a new page or their social media site, and to buy a product or schedule a service. An effective website design makes these calls to action clear and quick and easy to activate.
Best Landscaping Websites
What better way to grasp what makes for a good website than to take a look at landscaping websites that are optimized for mobile use and visually appealing with easy navigation and clear calls to action?
We’ve rounded up a few to give you a look:
- Four Seasons Garden Center
- Auman Landscaping
- Durham Artificial Grass
- Muskoka Landscapers
- Trifecta Lawn Care
Tips for Optimizing Your Landscaping/Lawn Care Web Design
Now that you have a better grasp of what makes an effective landscaping business website and have seen examples, let’s get to work creating or enhancing your website. Here are tips for ensuring your success:
Use Messaging That Resonates with Your Target Audience
Your website should speak directly to the people who are most likely to be your customers. When crafting your messaging, keep in mind your target customers’ age, gender, location, hobbies, and interests. This valuable info will help you to draw their attention and provide what they are looking for from your business. Here’s a helpful article that will help you determine and reach your target.
Use High-Quality Images
Your landscaping business website is an excellent place to shine a spotlight on your work. Include photos of jobs that reflect your talents and showcase your capabilities. While it may be tempting to throw any old photo from your phone, it’s important to limit photos to those that are high quality and optimized for web use. Otherwise, images don’t only look amateur and unprofessional, they also detract from the user experience by slowing your website and negatively impacting your chances of appearing in a Google search.
For best results, rely on these best practices, distilled from some solid advice provided by a web design firm:
- Be aware of stock photos that look dated or spammy
- Consider hiring a professional photographer
- Choose only images that reflect your brand and your business (look and feel are important)
- Check to see if you need permission to use the photo and remember to give credit where credit is due
- Limit choices to high-resolution images
Provide Detailed Information on Services
While photos of your work bring your business to life and speak volumes about what you offer, it’s just as important to provide detailed information about your service offerings.
Along with an easy-to-locate About Us section that explains your business, its history, the team and your mission and a Contact Us section, you’ll want to create pages that define your services. Some landscaping businesses that offer a full range of services find it helpful to include separate tabs for each offering, along with detailed descriptions and photos.
Highlight Customer Reviews
What’s just as important as photos and detailed descriptions of what you do? Reviews from your customers. Customer reviews give credibility to your business and help to enhance your reputation as a dependable, professional business choice. And, they improve your chances of making a sale or bringing on a new customer. According to NiceJob, website visitors are 74% more likely to contact a company that shows customer reviews online than a company that doesn’t.
Make it a regular business practice to ask customers to share feedback or write a review when you complete a job, and you’ll soon have a valuable database of reviews to leverage on your site and social media channels.
Have the Right Tech Stack in Place on the Back End
Building and continually enhancing a website for your landscaping company is important, but it can be time consuming and difficult to manage while you’re busy running a business. Having the right technology in place can help by streamlining operations and setting you up for success.
Questions? We have Answers.
The general consensus is that building a website can take anywhere from a few weeks to several months, although you can certainly get one started within a few minutes. Some landscape business owners choose to hire a professional or a design firm to do the work while others take a DIY approach with easy-to-use, no-code tools that even non-techies can handle.
An LMN survey shows that landscape business owners rely on a mix of traditional offline advertising and online advertising to reach potential customers and find employees to hire. Effective digital advertising includes paid social ads, like those on Facebook and Google, and email advertising. Before you dive into advertising that drives people to your website for more info about your business, make sure your website is polished and ready to impress.
You have lots of options for landscape website builders. Lawn Care Web Design Experts cater specifically to the landscaping industry. Some website creation companies, including Wix, provide templates for lawn care businesses, and almost all builders offer templates that are easily customizable to any industry or business. Popular website choices for building your own site include Squarespace, Weebly and GoDaddy.
Have additional questions?
Chat with us live during business hours or contact sales.
Ready to Build a Better Website to Showcase Your Landscaping Business?
After reading the tips and resources provided in this guide, you likely have a better understanding of why an effective website is important to your landscaping business, what a site-done-right looks like, and know how to dive into the process of creating a site you can be proud to call your own.
Remember, we’ve got your back. Check out our blog for more helpful advice and links to game-changing webinars and workshops. And, reach out to learn more about how our technology, built by landscapers for landscapers like you, can help your business stand out.
