How to make a freight broker website that shippers take seriously

TL;DR: How to make a freight broker website

This guide is written for a small brokerage, the kind with an MC number, a bond and one to ten people. It covers the domain, a starting template, and the pages a freight broker needs, which split into a shippers page about coverage and a carriers page about pay terms and the setup packet. It also covers naming your services the way the industry names them, full truckload, LTL, reefer, flatbed and expedited, and why there is no rate to publish. Yola website builder gives you ready-made Services, Testimonials and contact form blocks, so you build the site yourself between calls.

The second half is where the freight comes from. You add a rate request form asking for origin, destination, equipment, commodity, weight and pickup date, put your MC number, USDOT number, bond filing and insurance where a shipper can verify them in seconds, and keep a lanes and capacity page current by hand. Then you claim a Google Business Profile under "Freight forwarding service" and write lane and commodity pages for searches like "truckload broker near [city]". Work through the ten steps and a shipper who lost a carrier this week can check you out and send a rate request without calling first.

What to include

Top features of a freight broker website

How to make a freight broker
website in 10 steps

Your domain is the name a traffic manager types after somebody mentions you on a call, so use the name you answer the phone with rather than a slogan. If your legal name and your dba are different, put the legal name in the footer as well, because anybody cross-checking you against the FMCSA record wants the two to line up. Take the .com. Freight runs on forwarded emails and names typed from memory, and .com is still what people assume they are typing.

Leave out hyphens and numbers. A dispatcher reads your name off an email signature and says it to somebody else, and both of those get dropped on the way. A city in the name is usually a mistake for a brokerage, since you may start in one metro and be covering lanes in six states a year later.

Register once and use the same spelling everywhere: your Google Business Profile, your email signature, your rate confirmations and your carrier agreement. You can search for and register the name inside the Yola website builder while you put the site together, and annual plans include a free domain for the first year.

None of this needs code, which matters more for a brokerage of one to ten people than it sounds. There is no marketing budget at this stage and no IT department to raise a ticket with, so the person editing the site is you, between calls. Yola lets you change text, swap photos and move sections around the way you would edit a document.

Answer a few questions about the lanes you cover and who you haul for, and Yola's AI Website Builder hands back a first draft to work from. The free plan has basic AI and the full set of AI tools sits on the paid plans, so treat the draft as a starting point and check every line about your authority, your coverage and your insurance against what is actually on file today. A draft will happily write "nationwide coverage" for a broker running two lanes, and that is the one claim in this trade a customer can disprove in a minute. Hosting, an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups come with the site.

Start from a template

Freight broker website templates

Six pages carry a brokerage site, and two people who want opposite things will open them. A shipper wants coverage, references and some reason to believe you will not leave a load sitting on a dock. A carrier wants to know how fast you pay and whether you have freight where their trucks already are. One page written for both persuades neither, which is why Shippers and Carriers are separate here.

Keep the set tight. Your lanes and coverage page comes later, in step eight, because it changes weekly and needs a routine of its own rather than a slot in the menu you build today.

Build these first, then add the rest once the site is live:

A shipper scanning this page is checking one thing, which is whether you handle their mode. Name each service the way the industry names it, with the shorthand people actually type: full truckload as FTL, less than truckload as LTL, refrigerated as reefer. Somebody sourcing a broker for temperature-controlled produce searches reefer, not climate-controlled transport.

Pricing works differently here than in most trades. A rate is a lane, a date, a market and a commodity all at once, so there is no starting figure to publish and nobody expects one. What you can publish is how you price: whether you quote spot, take contract lanes or both, which accessorials you bill for, your detention and layover terms, and how fast a quote comes back. A promise to quote within the hour on lanes you cover is more useful to a traffic manager than a number, and it is one you can actually keep.

Where a service carries search demand of its own, give it a page rather than a line in a list. Reefer and flatbed both do. Yola's ready-made Services and Pricing blocks put the name, a short description and your terms together, so a change to your detention policy is an edit you make in a couple of minutes.

There is nothing photogenic about brokering freight. The work happens on a phone and in a TMS, and what you sell is that a truck showed up where it was supposed to. So this is not a portfolio, it is evidence, and most of the evidence is not a photograph.

The strongest item on the page is a lane map with a coverage list under it, naming origin and destination markets and the equipment you cover in each. After that come references. A traffic manager at a named company, with their permission on file, saying you covered a lane at short notice is worth more than anything else you can put up. Case notes do the same job when a customer will not let you use their name: the lane, the equipment, what went wrong, what you did and how it landed. Yola's ready-made Testimonials block holds the quotes, and the longer write-ups sit fine as ordinary page text underneath.

Numbers belong here as well, if you track them. On-time pickup and delivery, tender acceptance, average time to cover, all pulled out of your own system and dated. Publish only what you actually measure. A traffic manager who has been burned by a broker before will ask how you calculate the figure, and there is no good answer to that if you made it up.

Photographs still earn a place, but only real ones: a coil load secured on a flatbed you arranged, a reefer on a dock, the equipment types you cover shown plainly. Stock photos of a clean truck at sunset persuade nobody in freight, because everyone in it has seen the same three images on forty broker sites. Name your files for what is in them, flatbed-coil-houston-to-laredo.jpg rather than IMG_2213.jpg, and repeat that wording in the alt text so the images can turn up in a search. Yola's Galleries block holds the set, and on a paid plan the Custom code block lets you lay out something of your own, with 10M premium stock images and 1M premium icons there to fill gaps until you have your own shots. Ask the carrier and the customer before a photo of somebody's freight goes up in public.

The rate request form is what the rest of the site exists to feed. A shipper who just lost a carrier mid-season needs somebody who can cover a lane this week, and they are filling in two or three broker forms on a Tuesday afternoon. The freight usually goes to whoever comes back first with a real number, which means your form has to collect enough for you to quote without a phone call in between.

Seven fields do it. Origin and destination, city and state or ZIP. Equipment type, offered as dry van, reefer, flatbed and step deck rather than a blank box. Commodity and weight. Pickup date, and whether the date can move. Whether this is a one-off or a contract lane, which changes how you price it and tells you whether you are looking at a load or a customer. Any accessorials: liftgate, inside delivery, driver assist, appointment windows. Then name, company, phone and email at the bottom, and nothing else, because every extra box costs you submissions from people filling this in between meetings.

You choose those fields yourself, since Yola's contact form is customizable rather than pre-made, and the Forms block help article walks through building one. Yola sends an automatic confirmation the moment somebody submits, so they know it landed. Write that confirmation like a broker: say when the rate will come back, and give a number somebody can call if the truck is needed tomorrow morning.

Say plainly on the page what a submission is. It is a rate request, not a booked load. Nothing is covered until you have confirmed capacity and sent a rate confirmation, and a shipper who reads that on the form is not surprised by it later. Yola has no native booking, which suits this business anyway, since no broker wants a stranger taking a lane out of their week at eleven at night before anybody has looked at capacity.

Build a second, shorter form for carriers and keep it off the shipper pages. MC number, equipment, home base, the lanes they run and how many trucks. That is a setup request rather than a rate request, and pouring both into one inbox is how a carrier packet ends up buried under quotes on a Monday morning. Then answer both inside the day. In freight the reply window is most of the product.

Credentials are the unusual part of a brokerage site, because in freight they are all public. Anybody can pull your MC number on the FMCSA site and see whether your authority is active, whether a bond is on file and when it was granted. So the job here is not to claim anything. It is to put what you hold where a shipper can find it in ten seconds, so they verify you and move on to the rate instead of quietly calling somebody else.

The MC and USDOT numbers belong in the footer of every page and again on the home page beside the rate request button. A traffic manager checking out a broker they have not used does it while they are still on the page, and making them hunt is how a first load goes to whoever was easier to check.

Show only what is on file today. A new brokerage is usually mid-application on part of this list, and that is fine. A page showing an active authority and a filed bond, with nothing invented around them, reads better than one claiming coverage a customer can disprove in a minute. FMCSA requires a broker to keep a $75,000 surety bond or trust fund on file, filed as a BMC-84 or a BMC-85, so where yours is filed, name the surety or trustee rather than restating the federal requirement as though it were an achievement of yours. Every authorized broker has one. Where you have filed a BOC-3 and designated process agents, say so, since that is on the same record a shipper is already looking at.

Insurance is where brokers actually differ, so spell it out. Where you carry contingent cargo and general liability cover, give the limits and offer the certificate on request. Then say what you require from your carriers, the primary cargo and auto liability minimums you hold them to and how you verify them, because a shipper with high value freight asks that next and most broker sites never answer it. Keep those lines beside the rate request form rather than on an About page. That is where the person who needs them is standing.

This is the page both of your audiences open, and the one that goes stale fastest. A shipper wants to know whether you run their lane. A carrier wants to know whether you have freight out of the market their trucks are sitting in this week. One page answers both, as long as somebody keeps it current.

Give it four sections. The lanes you are moving now, written as origin market to destination market with the equipment beside each. Seasonal capacity, because freight runs on a calendar: produce coming out of the valleys in spring and summer, retail building into the fourth quarter, and whatever your own region does on its own schedule. Equipment you have available this week. And the markets where you are actively looking for carriers, which is the section that brings you setup packets without a single cold call.

Yola has no events or calendar block, so this is an ordinary page you edit by hand, and for a brokerage that is the honest shape anyway. Your lane list is a snapshot rather than a schedule, and it moves when a customer adds a lane or a carrier drops off. Once the first few rows are laid out, updating one means copying a row and changing four words. The discipline is the day you do it. Pick one, Monday morning being the usual choice, and hold to it, because a lane list from March tells a shipper in September that nobody is minding the business.

Keep the lanes you have covered before, even the ones not running now. A list of markets you have genuinely moved freight in and out of is the closest thing a young brokerage has to a track record, and it is what a shipper reads before deciding whether you are worth a rate request.

A brokerage searches oddly. You may work out of one office and cover half the country, so two kinds of search matter and they need different pages. One is local, somebody in your city looking for a broker they can meet. The other is lane and commodity based, typed by a shipper anywhere who needs somebody that knows their freight. Yola's SEO Optimized Website capability handles the technical side of your pages. The wording and the Google work are yours.

Open the site on a phone before you tell anybody it exists, because a dispatcher checking you out is doing it from a cab or a dock. Tap the number and check it dials. Send yourself a rate request and read the confirmation that comes back. Time how long it takes to find your MC number from the home page, and if that is more than one screen, move it up.

Yola sites are mobile optimized and responsive, so the layout adapts between a phone and a laptop on its own, and every site gets an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups. Check page speed on the pages doing the work, which are home, shippers and the lanes page. A lane map saved at full size is usually what slows those down, so resize it before it goes up.

After launch the upkeep is small and regular. The lane page gets its weekly pass. A reference goes up the week a customer agrees to be named. Your bond renewal, your insurance limits and anything that changes on your authority get corrected the day they change, because those are the lines a shipper reads against the FMCSA record. Twenty minutes a week covers most of it, and a site that keeps moving holds its search position better than one untouched since the week your authority was granted.

Common freight broker website mistakes to avoid

The same few things go wrong on brokerage sites, and each one costs you either a shipper or the carriers you need to serve one.

How much does a freight broker website cost?

On Yola the site starts free, and a paid plan is $9.95/mo once you want your own domain, more pages and the full AI tools. Annual plans include a free domain for the first year. Against what it costs to open a brokerage, that is the smallest line on the list.

Paying somebody else to build a comparable site often runs from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, and changes afterwards usually carry a fee of their own. That second part is what hurts a new broker, because a brokerage site is never finished at launch. Lanes change, references arrive one at a time, and your credential lines change as filings go through.

Be honest with yourself about where the money actually goes in year one. The bond premium, your contingent cargo and liability cover, a TMS and the load board subscriptions are the real cost of opening a brokerage, and every one of them bills you whether you cover a load or not. The website is the item on that list that is free to start and stays yours. Building it yourself also means that the day a customer agrees to be named as a reference, the reference goes up that day, instead of sitting in an email to somebody else's queue.