For a car dealer, the website is the stock list. Everything else, the about page, the history, the photograph of the forecourt, is trim around it. If a visitor cannot see what you have today, with prices and proper photographs, nothing else on the site matters.
That makes a dealer website a different job from most small business sites. It is not a brochure that gets built once. It is a list that changes every week, and the whole design question is how vehicles get onto it and off it again without somebody spending their evenings on it.
How does stock actually get onto the site?
Three ways, and picking the right one is the most important decision in the project.
Manually, on the website itself. You or a member of staff add each vehicle, upload photographs, type the details. Fine for a small forecourt with a handful of cars and a slow turnover. It becomes a burden fast, and the failure mode is sold cars sitting on the site for a fortnight.
From a feed, out of your existing stock system. Most dealers already load vehicles into a management system or an advertising portal. A feed pulls that data onto your own site automatically, so you carry on working the way you do now and the website keeps up on its own. This is what most dealers want, and it is the thing to ask about before you talk about design.
A hybrid. Stock comes from the feed, and you add your own description and a few of your own photographs to the vehicles you want to push. Slightly more work, noticeably better results, because the copied manufacturer description is identical on every other dealer's site.
Whichever you pick, establish who owns the feed and what it costs. This is often a third party charging monthly, and it should be on the cost sheet next to the website rather than discovered later.
Getting sold cars off quickly
The most common complaint about dealer websites, and it is worth solving deliberately rather than hoping.
Decide what happens the moment a vehicle sells. Does it disappear, or does it stay with a "sold" flash on it. There is an argument for leaving it a few days, because a sold sticker on a car like the one somebody is looking at is quiet proof that stock moves. There is a stronger argument for removing it promptly, because nothing annoys a buyer more than driving forty minutes for a car that went last Tuesday.
Whichever you choose, make it automatic. If it relies on somebody remembering at the end of a busy Saturday, it will not happen.
What a vehicle page needs
- Photographs, plenty of them. This is the whole thing. Twenty to thirty per car, in a consistent order, taken in the same spot with the same light. Interior, boot, wheels, engine bay, service book, and honest pictures of any marks.
- The full specification, pulled from the feed where possible: mileage, year, registration date, engine, gearbox, fuel, doors, colour, previous keepers, service history, MOT expiry.
- The price, plainly, with any admin fee stated clearly rather than mentioned at the desk.
- Your own two or three lines about that particular car. This is the single cheapest way to stand out from every other listing of the same model.
- A way to enquire that is not just a phone number, because a good share of car enquiries now arrive in the evening.
- Where the car is, if you have more than one site.
Photograph quality matters more here than design does. A dealer with average web design and excellent, consistent photographs will outsell a dealer with a beautiful site and twelve dark pictures taken on a wet Tuesday.
The enquiry forms a dealer needs
Three different ones, doing three different jobs.
- Enquire about this vehicle. Attached to the car, pre filled with which car it is. Name, number, email, and a question. Keep it to four fields.
- Book a test drive. Same, plus a preferred day and time. Say what someone needs to bring, because a licence check saves a wasted appointment.
- Part exchange valuation. The one worth building properly. Registration, mileage, condition honestly described, service history, outstanding finance, and photographs if they will send them. The better this form is, the fewer awkward conversations happen on the forecourt.
Put a realistic response time next to each and keep to it. In this trade, the dealer who replies within the hour on a Sunday afternoon very often gets the sale, and that is a working practice rather than a website feature.
Finance wording: get this checked
If you offer finance, introduce customers to a lender, or advertise anything with monthly payments, you are into regulated territory. Consumer credit brokering requires authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority, and financial promotions rules govern what a representative example on your website has to show and how prominent it must be.
This is not something to take from a web designer or from another dealer's website, both of which may be out of date or wrong. Get your finance wording from your lender's compliance materials or your own adviser, check it against the current FCA position, and keep a note of when it was last reviewed. The same goes for advertised prices, warranty claims and anything about the condition or history of a vehicle, which sit under consumer protection and advertising rules.
Practically, the website should make it easy to update that wording, because it changes. If a compliance change means ringing your web designer and paying for an hour, it will get put off, and that is the wrong thing to have put off.
Is a video walkaround worth doing?
For used cars, yes, more than almost anything else you could add. A two minute walkaround on a phone, filmed in one take with you talking, does something no photograph can: it shows the car is real, it shows you are real, and it lets a buyer two hundred miles away decide to get in the car and come.
Keep it simple. Daylight, a steady hand, start at the front and walk round, open the doors, show the boot, sit in and start it, and be honest about the scuffed alloy rather than avoiding it. Buyers trust the dealer who points out the mark far more than the one who photographs around it.
Two practical notes for the website. Host video somewhere designed for it rather than uploading the file to your own site, because a big video file will make the page crawl on a phone signal. And put it below the photographs, not instead of them, because plenty of people will be browsing somewhere they cannot play sound. A heavy homepage video is one of the commonest reasons a dealer site crawls on a phone, which is covered in why a slow website costs you work.
Prices, admin fees and the negotiation question
Every dealer worries that publishing a firm price removes room to move. In practice, hiding it costs you more enquiries than it protects.
What buyers react badly to is not the number, it is the surprise. An admin or documentation fee discovered at the desk sours a deal that was otherwise fine. Put it on the vehicle page, in the same size text as everything else. The same goes for delivery charges if you offer delivery, and for how a holding payment on a vehicle works and what happens to it if the sale falls through, which is worth stating plainly in your terms.
If you would rather not invite haggling by email, say what you do instead: "Our prices are set against the market weekly and we do not hold back a margin for negotiation." That is a position, it is honest, and it saves everybody a conversation.
What else earns its place on a dealer site?
Not much, and that is the point. A few things do pull their weight:
- Reviews, prominently. Used car buying is a trust purchase above all else, and independent reviews with names on do more than any amount of copy about family values.
- A proper about page with faces. Who runs it, how long you have been there, what you specialise in.
- Servicing and MOT, if you do them, with a booking form. This is where repeat contact comes from.
- Where to find you and when you are open, including Sundays and bank holidays, because that is when people go looking.
- Cars wanted, if you buy. A simple form and a clear invitation.
What does not earn its place: a news section nobody updates, a finance calculator you have not had checked, and a homepage video that makes the site slow on a phone in a car park.
Getting found, against the portals
Be realistic. You are not going to outrank the big advertising portals for "used cars", and you do not need to. The portals are where people browse stock, and a good share of your enquiries will always come through them. Your website's job is different.
It wins on your name, because everyone who sees you on a portal or drives past the forecourt will search your business before making contact, and what they find decides whether they ring. It wins locally, for your town plus the thing you specialise in. And it wins on the vehicles you list with your own descriptions and your own photographs, which the duplicated listings cannot.
The other half of that job is your Google Business Profile, which for a forecourt is doing at least as much work as the website. The method is in getting found on Google when you only work locally.
What should a dealer website cost?
More than a plain brochure site, because of the stock handling. In the UK, a dealer site with a working stock feed usually starts around £2,000 to £6,000 as a one off, and there are specialist automotive providers selling monthly packages with the feed and portal integrations included, which is often the practical route for a small independent.
Ask three questions of any of them: what does the feed cost and who charges it, what happens to the site if you change stock system, and can you edit vehicle descriptions yourself without paying for the privilege.
If you are a small dealer with a handful of cars and no feed, a straightforward site listing your stock manually can be perfectly adequate, and that is ordinary small business territory. With us that is the ten page bracket at £149 a month excluding VAT, with the first three months paid up front and no setup fee, one design revision with the build, and content changes unlimited and free, which for a small forecourt means adding and removing vehicles does not cost you anything extra. You can price up your website to see where you land, and the wider price bands are in why UK website quotes vary so much.
The short version
Sort out how stock gets on and off the site before you discuss a single design decision. Photograph every car properly and consistently. Build a part exchange form that asks the awkward questions up front. Get your finance wording checked by somebody qualified. Then answer enquiries fast, because in this trade that is most of the game.
