A removals website has one job: get a survey booked. Most of them were built to win a design award instead, and they are quietly costing their owners work.
If your site is five years old and you suspect it is losing you enquiries, this is the checklist. The pages that matter, why customers judge you in seconds, what the quote form should ask, and why being able to change it yourself is not a luxury.
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The site's job is to get a survey booked. Every page is judged on whether it moves someone towards that.
A page for every town you send a van to and every service you sell. One page listing them all ranks for none.
Customers decide whether you are real in seconds: reviews, accreditations, photos of your crew and vans, and a phone number they can tap.
Most removals enquiries start on a phone. If the site is slow or the form is fiddly on a mobile, you lose them there.
You must be able to change prices, areas and photos yourself. A site you cannot edit is a site that goes stale.
What is a removals website actually for?
Not to look good. Not to describe the company's history. It is there to turn someone who is moving house into a booked survey, either by a form or a phone call, as quickly and with as little friction as possible.
That sounds obvious, and yet most removals sites we audit are built as brochures. A homepage with a slideshow, an about page, a services page with everything on it, a contact page with a form nobody tracks. They describe the business. They do not book the work.
Every decision below follows from the one job. If a page, a photo or a form field does not move a customer closer to a survey, it is decoration.
Which pages does a removals site need?
Fewer pages of the wrong kind and more of the right kind.
A page for every service you actually sell. House removals, office removals, packing, storage, man and van if you do it, European or long distance if you do it. Each one a real page with the process, the pricing basis and the proof, not a paragraph on a shared page.
A page for every town you send a van to. Someone searching removals plus a town name is the highest intent customer in the industry, and a page that mentions twenty towns at once competes for none of them. We cover how to do this in location pages for removal companies.
A reviews page that pulls in the real ones, with dates and names, from Google and Trustpilot.
A quote page with a form that works on a phone, and a phone number at the top of every page.
An about page, short, with the people and the vans in it. Customers want to know who is turning up.
Every one of those needs to be linked from the homepage and from each other. Pages that exist but nothing points at are the most common fault we find on removals sites. Google reads a page nobody links to as a page the business does not rate.
Why do customers judge a mover in seconds?
Because they are handing strangers everything they own. Before a customer reads a word of your copy, they are scanning for evidence that you are real, insured and not going to disappear with the deposit.
What they look for, in roughly this order: a star rating with a number of reviews next to it, a trade body logo they recognise, photos of your actual vans and crew rather than stock images of smiling couples with boxes, a landline or a proper business mobile, and an address. If those are visible in the first screen, the copy gets read. If they are not, the back button gets pressed.
This is also why stock photography hurts more than it helps. The customer has seen the same picture on three other sites. A slightly worse photo of your real van outside a real house in the town they are moving to does more for trust than anything a photographer sells you.
Why does mobile decide it?
Most removals enquiries start on a phone. The customer is standing in the kitchen of the house they are leaving, or sitting in the car outside the one they are buying, and they search on the device in their hand.
On that screen, a site that takes four seconds to load is a site that never loaded. A phone number that is text rather than a tappable link is a call that never happened. A quote form with twelve fields and a tiny date picker is a form abandoned on field three. Check your own site on your own phone, on mobile data rather than the office wifi, and try to request a quote. Most owners have never done it.
What should the quote form ask, and what should it not?
The form is where the job is won or lost, and most of them try to do the survey instead of booking one.
Ask for what you need to call them back: name, phone, email, moving from, moving to, and a rough date. Six fields. Everything else, the number of bedrooms, the piano, the parking, the packing, is the surveyor's job, and asking it on a form filters out customers who do not know the answers yet.
Do not ask for a full address before they have spoken to you. Do not make them create an account. Do not hide the phone number behind the form for people who would rather call. And make sure every submission and every call is tracked, so you know which page and which channel produced it. Without that, you cannot tell whether the new site is better than the old one, and neither can anyone you pay to improve it.
Why does being able to edit it yourself matter?
A removals business changes. Prices go up in spring, a new town gets added to the run, a van gets wrapped, a crew member leaves and their photo needs to come off. If every one of those means emailing a developer and waiting a week, the site goes stale, and stale sites lose trust.
When we hand a site over, the owner is shown how to change text, swap photos and add a page themselves. Read our Trustpilot reviews and the two things clients mention more than anything else are that the site was delivered in the timeframe agreed and that they can make their own small changes afterwards. That is not a technical nicety. It is the difference between a site that stays accurate and one that quietly drifts.
What does a site that does its job look like in numbers?
More Than Movers in Folkestone had no website of their own, one van and a diary that depended on comparison sites. The site we built for them has a page for every service and every Kent town the vans serve, the reviews and accreditations on every page, a quote form on every page, and every form and call tracked. In eleven months it recorded 448 enquiries, around 40 a month, and the business now runs multiple vans. The More Than Movers case study has the detail.
Essex House Removals had a dated site and broken tracking on a six van business. The rebuild, with pages for the Essex towns that bring in the bigger moves, tracked 1,352 enquiries across forms and calls in twelve months. The fleet is now twelve vans. That story is in the Essex House case study.
Neither site is unusual to look at. Both do the one job.
What should a mover check on their own site this week?
Load it on your phone on mobile data. Time it.
Try to request a quote from your phone. Count the fields.
Tap the phone number. Does it dial?
Find your reviews, your accreditation logos and a photo of your real van on the homepage without scrolling.
Count how many towns and services have a page of their own.
Change one word on one page yourself. If you cannot, that is a problem.
If more than two of those fail, the site is costing you work. What a rebuild involves is set out on website design for removal companies.
Frequently asked questions
What pages should a removals company website have?
A page for each service you sell, a page for each town you send a van to, a reviews page with real dated reviews, a quote page with a short form, and a short about page with your people and vans. All linked from the homepage.
What should a removals quote form ask?
Name, phone, email, moving from, moving to and a rough date. Leave the bedrooms, the piano and the parking to the survey. Fewer fields means more enquiries.
Do removals customers use their phones to get quotes?
Yes, most removals enquiries start on a phone. If the site is slow or the form is awkward on a mobile screen, the enquiry is lost before it starts.
Should I use stock photos on my removals website?
No. Customers are checking whether you are real. Photos of your own vans and crew, even imperfect ones, build more trust than stock images they have seen elsewhere.
Should I be able to edit my removals website myself?
Yes. Prices, areas, photos and staff change through the year. If every change needs a developer, the site goes stale. A proper handover shows you how to make small changes yourself.
Related reading
How removal companies get more leads online
