Automotive Web Design

Automotive web design is website design built for dealerships, workshops, parts suppliers and industry bodies. The differences are practical rather than cosmetic. Your customer is comparing you against three other tabs, usually on a phone, and they want stock, fitment and availability rather than a brand story.

A site designed for a general small business tends to fail on all three. It assumes one product, a short decision, and a customer who wants to be persuaded rather than shown what you actually have.

Automotive websites start from $3,000 + GST for a straightforward site, and run to $15,000 + GST and up once online ordering, stock feeds or system integrations are involved. Most automotive projects land between $8,000 and $16,000 + GST.

Where yours sits comes down to three things: how many vehicles or products need listing and how they get organised, whether you have branches or a dealer network to map, and what the site has to connect to. We quote on scope rather than a package price, so you are not paying for functionality you will never use.

A straightforward automotive site takes 4 to 8 weeks from kick-off to launch. A larger build with a full design process behind it takes 8 to 12 weeks.

The thing that moves that most is content. If your vehicle photos, service descriptions and branch details are ready to go, the build runs to schedule. If they still need gathering, that becomes the critical path rather than the build itself.

Most of our automotive clients sit on managed hosting at $100 + GST per month. That covers the server, free SSL, nightly backups, uptime monitoring, and us doing the WordPress core and plugin updates rather than you.

That is the one we recommend here, for the simple reason that you are usually on the floor or in the workshop rather than at a desk when something needs attention.

If you have someone in-house who would rather handle the updates themselves, hosting-only plans start at $50 + GST per month. Same servers, same backups, but WordPress maintenance sits with you and any help is billed by the hour.

Domain registration and premium plugin licences are quoted separately rather than bundled in.

Yes, as long as the data is available to pull. If your stock lives in a dealer management system, a supplier feed or a spreadsheet your team already maintains, we can bring it onto the site and keep it in sync rather than having someone retype it.

What that costs depends entirely on the system at the other end. A clean feed or a documented API is straightforward. An older system with no export is where the cost goes up, so tell us what you run at the quote stage rather than after.

Yes. Online booking is one of the most common things we add for workshops and service centres.

The simple version captures the vehicle, the job and a preferred time, then lands in the right inbox. The larger version connects to your existing scheduling system so the slots shown on the site are the real ones. Both work. Which one is right depends on how many bookings you take and whether double-booking is a genuine risk.

It will be built so it can. Every page ships with a sensible heading structure, meta titles and descriptions, structured data and a sitemap, and we connect Search Console and Google Analytics before launch.

Automotive search is unusually specific. People look for a make and model, a part number, or a service in a suburb, so the pages have to be organised around those searches rather than around your internal departments. We set that structure up during the build.

Ranking for the competitive terms on top of that takes ongoing content and SEO work, which we quote separately. Anyone promising page one as part of a build is guessing.

Usually you, because you know your stock and your workshop better than we do. We give you a page-by-page outline of what each section needs and roughly how long it should run, so it is never a blank page.

Product and vehicle detail is the part that tends to stall a build. Specifications, fitment data and branch details are worth gathering before the design starts rather than after.

If writing it genuinely is not going to happen, say so at the quote stage and we will work out an option. What we will not do is launch a site full of placeholder text.

Completely. The site, the domain, the content and the hosting account are all in your name.

That extends to anything the site collects. Your enquiries, bookings and customer records are yours, and we will export the lot if you ask.

WordPress is open source, so no licence ties you to us. If you ever want to move to another host or another agency, the whole thing goes with you.

Yes, and it is a decision we make up front rather than an afterthought. We build on structured content types and flexible sections rather than a page builder, so adding a branch, a new service or a whole product category later is a small job instead of a rebuild.

Several of our clients started with a straightforward site and grew it into something much larger over a few years.

Sometimes repairing is the right answer and we will tell you so. If the design still holds up and the real problem is speed, security or search, a website health check will find what is actually wrong before you spend money on a rebuild.

A rebuild earns its keep when the structure is the problem rather than the styling. Stock nobody can filter, a parts catalogue nobody can navigate, or a booking form that loses enquiries are all structural, and no amount of patching fixes them.