Logistics website design done right is not a brochure — it is an inbound lead channel: route landing pages, a cost calculator, trust blocks showing your fleet and insurance, and a form that captures the customer before they phone a competitor. A haulier's one-pager starts at £800; a corporate freight company website with a calculator starts at £3,500.
Logistics is one of the few industries still run on cold calls, load boards and word of mouth. That works — up to a ceiling: a salesperson makes 60–80 calls a day at single-digit conversion, and a customer who was cold-called owes you no loyalty. An inbound enquiry is the opposite: the customer searched for the route themselves, priced the job themselves and left their number themselves.
Below we break down how a B2B freight site differs from a moving company website, which blocks actually generate enquiries, what shipment tracking realistically costs, and what the budget looks like. We are a Ukrainian studio working with clients across Europe — European quality at sensible rates, which matters in a margin-driven industry like freight.
B2B freight and B2C removals are two different websites
The most common mistake is an everything-site: international haulage, groupage and house removals on one page. The audiences never overlap: a manufacturer's logistics manager is vetting a contractor with CMR insurance and its own fleet, while a family moving house wants two loaders and an all-in price for tonight.
What a B2B client looks for
- Routes and geography: which corridors you run, whether departures are regular, typical transit times.
- The fleet: how many vehicles, tonnage, body types — curtainsider, reefer, tipper. With real photos, not stock.
- Paperwork: operator licence, CMR insurance, contracts, VAT invoicing. B2B clients sign contracts, they do not take your word for it.
- A fast quote: a request form with route, weight and cargo type fields — and a promised response time.
What a B2C client looks for
- A price up front: a calculator, or at least a range — “two-bedroom move from $X”.
- Speed of response: a call-back button, messengers, a “we ring back in 5 minutes” promise.
- Simplicity: two or three fields and clear packages — flat, office, long-distance.
| Website block | B2B freight | B2C removals |
|---|---|---|
| Hero section | Routes, tonnage, “quote in 30 min” | Calculator and phone number above the fold |
| Trust | Fleet, CMR insurance, company registration | Reviews, crew photos, “no prepayment” |
| Enquiry form | Route, weight, cargo type, company | 2–3 fields plus a call-back |
| Content | Pages per route and cargo type | Fixed-price service packages |
| Deal cycle | Long contracts and tenders | One-off jobs, often same-day |
If you serve both segments, split them at the structure level — separate landing pages, separate forms, separate ad campaigns. On a single corporate website the two lines live as independent sections with their own funnels, which is far cheaper than running two sites.
The cost calculator is your strongest lead magnet
A freight customer always compares three to five contractors, and the one who names a sane price first usually wins. A calculator does that automatically: the visitor picks a route, vehicle type and weight — and either sees an estimate or leaves a contact for an exact quote.
The nuance: the calculator does not have to be perfectly accurate. Its job is to trade a number for a contact. Three patterns that work:
- Instant range: a distance-times-rate formula shows a bracket immediately; a manager confirms the exact price by phone.
- Price for a contact: the form calculates in the background, but the result is sent by SMS or email — you capture even the window-shoppers.
- Quote request: for awkward cargo it is more honest to offer a “describe your load” field with a 30-minute response promise in working hours.
In our experience, forms with an intermediate result convert two to three times better than a bare “leave a request”. You can feel the mechanic from the customer's side on our own website cost calculator — same idea: questions, an interim figure, a contact.
Shipment tracking: what is realistic and what costs like a platform
“We want clients to see where their cargo is” is the most common request we hear from logistics owners. The key is to separate the tiers — their budgets differ by an order of magnitude.
- Manual statuses (included in a corporate site): a manager updates the order status — accepted, in transit, at customs, delivered — and the client sees it by order number or gets an SMS/email. Simple, reliable, and answers 80% of “where is my truck?” calls.
- GPS integration (£1,000–3,000): if your fleet already runs on a telematics system, the site can show the vehicle on a map inside a client account. Impressive, but it needs API access and proper handling of edge cases.
- A full TMS-style platform (from £6,000): client and driver accounts, document flow, shipment history, accounting integrations. That is an internal product, not a website — and the wrong place to start before you have a steady flow of enquiries.
Our advice: start with manual statuses. Enquiries come from fast quoting and trust, not from tracking. Tracking is a retention argument for contracted B2B clients — add it as phase two.
Trust blocks: fleet, insurance, company details
Cargo is the client's money travelling in someone else's vehicle hundreds of miles away. So a freight company website sells confidence, not a service. The non-negotiables:
- Fleet with real photos: blur the plates if you must, but stock photos of American trucks are spotted instantly — and they kill trust.
- Insurance and paperwork: CMR cover, operator licence, VAT registration — as a dedicated “fully compliant” block, not scans buried in the footer.
- Company details: registration number, legal name, physical address. B2B clients check the registers before the first contract — let them find you in ten seconds.
- Numbers: years in business, vehicles in the fleet, loads per month, corridors served. Specifics instead of “a dynamic company with an individual approach”.
- Attributed reviews: the client company's name or a link to a Google profile. Anonymous praise does nothing in B2B.
Route SEO: ranking for “freight + city” searches
The most valuable organic traffic in the niche comes from route and local queries: “freight company Manchester”, “removals London to Leeds”, “groupage to Poland”. Competition is lower than for the head term, and the intent is hotter.
The working pattern is a dedicated landing page per key route or city: its own headline, transit times, rates, vehicle types on the corridor and a quote form. Ten to twenty such pages cover semantics that load boards and aggregators cannot touch locally. How to keep those pages useful rather than doorway spam — see our guide to local SEO and the Google Maps top 3.
The second layer is a Google Business Profile in the right category with reviews and fleet photos: for “moving company + city” searches the map pack sits above organic results. Ongoing SEO for a logistics company starts at £300/month and, over a 4–6 month horizon, brings enquiries cheaper than any paid channel — we covered the mechanics and timelines in our SEO pricing guide.
What a logistics website costs
The brackets below are our studio's real prices, not a freelance-marketplace race to the bottom. What each format includes:
| Format | Price | What is included | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Haulier's one-page site | from £800 | 1–3 screens: services, fleet, paperwork, enquiry form, messengers | Owner-operator, 1–5 vehicles, leads from ads |
| Corporate website | from £3,500 | Route and service pages, calculator, order statuses, SEO structure, admin panel | 5–30 vehicles, both B2B and B2C, plans to grow organically |
| Client-portal platform | from £6,000 | Client accounts, tracking, document flow, CRM/accounting/GPS integrations | A logistics operator with a steady order flow |
Budget on top: a typical integration (CRM, SMS gateway, payments) runs £200–500; complex ones such as GPS telematics or accounting sync run £1,000–3,000; support is £200/month or £40/hour. For a full breakdown of what drives the price, see what a custom website costs in 2026.
On a tight budget, the sensible sequence is: first a landing page with a calculator for one segment — it starts producing leads from ads straight away. Then, once the economics work, a corporate site with route pages for SEO. The client-portal platform is step three, once there is someone to put in those portals.
Examples from our practice
Honestly: we do not yet have a logistics case study in the portfolio, and we are not going to invent one. But the mechanics a freight site relies on are ones we have shipped repeatedly in adjacent niches:
- Raul Avto — automotive: a catalogue with complex filters and a structure built for commercial queries. The same approach powers route and cargo-type pages.
- Right Cars — car rental: booking forms that price the job from its parameters. That is exactly the freight-calculator logic.
- Rich Tour — tours and destinations: many landing pages for different routes feeding one enquiry form — the pattern from the SEO section above.
The same segment-page-form mechanic is dissected in our piece on auto repair shop websites: different niche, identical inbound-lead logic.
