Website for garden centres: what it costs and what to build

en 2026-09-19 6 min read

A garden centre website is a step 02 mini-site at EUR 900 to EUR 1.500, or a step 03 business website at EUR 1.500 to EUR 3.500. Which of the two you need depends on how much of the site you want to change yourself through the year, not on how big your range is.

Everything else follows from one fact: a garden centre sells from a physical site. The website is not the shop. It is the thing that decides whether someone with a free Saturday and a dead hedge gets in the car.

Opening hours outrank the catalogue

Four questions decide that drive.

• Are you open now, and until when?
• Where are you, and can I park?
• Have you got the thing I am coming for?
• Is there a reason to bring everyone, a cafe, a playground, an event?

A full product catalogue answers only the third, and it answers it badly, because the moment your stock moves the page is wrong. Hours, address, and a short honest note about what is in the yard this month answer all four, and they can be changed without a developer.

So the running order on the home page is hours, then address with a map link, then a seasonal block, then the reasons to come. If you want a catalogue at all, it sits under that and stays deliberately short: the categories you are known for, not every line you stock.

The seasonal block is the whole argument for a CMS

Your range turns over with the calendar. Bedding, then summer stock, then bulbs and bare root, then Christmas, then seed and early sowing. Each of those is a different reason to visit and a different set of words on the home page, and none of them is worth a developer ticket.

That is what moves a site from step 02 to step 03. Not more design. More pages that someone behind the counter can edit, plus proper pages for the parts of the business that are not plants: a planting or delivery service, garden design, the cafe, the events you run.

What each step buys a garden centre

Click and collect, gift cards, and anything else that takes money sit in step 04. That is not an upsell. Taking a payment brings refunds, delivery rules, tax handling and a support load with it, and quoting that inside a step 03 number would be dishonest about what you are buying. The same goes for reading live stock out of your till system: that is an API integration, and it belongs in step 04.

If you want the ladder without the garden centre framing, it is all on packages.

Local search, and what actually helps it

You compete inside a driving radius, against other centres and against the sheds. Two pieces of work help, and they are priced separately from the build.

SEO foundation is EUR 450 to EUR 750, one-off. Search Console and analytics connected, indexation checked, technical hygiene, titles, internal links, and a plan covering the next three to six months. When it is done it is done. It does not repeat and it does not become a monthly line.

SEO growth is EUR 500 to EUR 800 a month, and it is the ongoing version: technical and on-page work, service and location pages, internal links, reporting. Buy it when you have decided that search is a channel you want worked on continuously, and only after the foundation exists.

Process and timeline

We scope first: pages, who edits what, whether anything needs to talk to your till or your booking system. A fixed quote always follows scoping, so the number you approve is the number you pay.

Then build, in the week ranges in the table above. A mini-site runs 2 to 3 weeks, a business website 3 to 6 weeks, and anything with a login or an integration 6 to 12 weeks. Design and engineering happen together rather than in a relay, which is the part we explain on design and engineering.

The part that waits on you is content. Your hours including the seasonal exceptions, decent photographs of the site rather than supplier stock images, and a plain description of each service. Nothing goes live around that, so the sooner it lands the sooner the site does.

When to spend less

If your hours, your address, a set of good photographs and a form are genuinely the whole job, buy step 01 at EUR 600 to EUR 900 and stop. A one page site that loads fast and says when you are open beats a seven page site nobody maintains.

Do not buy a CMS you will not open. If you would rather send us the new hours than log in, step 01 or step 02 plus a care plan is the cheaper arrangement.

Do not buy step 04 before you have decided you want to sell online. That decision changes your staffing, your packing and your returns handling long before it changes your website, and it is cheaper to add later to a site that was built cleanly than to pay for it now and leave it switched off.

Care is EUR 100 to EUR 300 a month: updates, monitoring, backups, small fixes. It is not a redesign and it is not new features. If your site genuinely never changes, you can skip it and pay for work when you need it.

Questions garden centres ask

Do we need an online shop?

Only if you want to pack and ship, or run click and collect properly. An online shop is step 04 at EUR 3.500 to EUR 7.500 because payments, order handling and stock all come with it. A centre that fills its car park on a Saturday may be better served by a site that gets people through the gate and a phone number that gets answered.

Who changes the opening hours at Christmas?

You do, if we build the hours as an editable block, which is included from step 02 upwards. If you would rather not touch it, a care plan at EUR 100 to EUR 300 a month covers small changes like that along with updates, monitoring and backups.

Can the site show live stock from our till system?

Technically yes, if your system exposes an API. That is step 04 work at EUR 3.500 to EUR 7.500 and it needs scoping against your actual system before anyone quotes it. It is worth asking first whether live stock levels are what your customers want, or whether a short monthly note about what has just come in does the same job.

Do we own the site when it is finished?

Yes. The code, the repository and the database are yours. Hosting is agreed per project, so that gets decided with you during scoping rather than assumed.

How long until it is live?

1 to 2 weeks for a single page, 2 to 3 weeks for a mini-site, 3 to 6 weeks for a business website, 6 to 12 weeks if there is a login or an integration. Content is the variable, not the code. We build on Next.js, and if you care how that is put together we have written about it as a Next.js development agency in Amsterdam.

Tell us your hours, your pages, and whether anyone at the centre wants to edit it themselves, and we will scope it and come back with a fixed quote. Start here.