How to make a farm website that sells direct to your neighbours

TL;DR: How to make a farm website

This guide covers everything a working farm website needs, starting with a domain and a template. You'll then add the four pages people look at most: what you grow, your farm shop, how to find you and how to get in touch. Yola's website builder includes ready-made Services and Pricing blocks for farm shop sales, meat boxes and veg box subscriptions, plus a Galleries block to show your fields, your animals and a box packed and ready to go. The tricky part of a farm website is that what's available changes every few weeks, so most of this guide focuses on setting up pages you can update in ten minutes.

The second half gets you found and gets the order in. You add a customizable order and inquiry form, show the certifications you genuinely hold, keep one page listing shop days, the markets you are standing at and any open day or farm tour, and set your Google Business Profile category to "Farm" so a search for a farm shop near your town turns you up. Work through the ten steps and somebody who wants to buy direct this week can see what you have, find the turning off the road and place the order without phoning you.

What to include

Top features of a farm website

How to make a farm
website in 10 steps

Most farms have the name settled already, because it is painted on the gate and printed on the egg boxes. Register that, spelled the way the sign spells it, and take the .com while it is there. Where the name is a common one, and there is a Hill Farm in most counties, put the town or the valley on the end rather than a word nobody would say out loud.

Leave out hyphens and numbers. Somebody reads your name off a market banner from six feet away and repeats it in the car afterwards, and both get dropped every time. Use the same spelling on your Google Business Profile, on the farmers market vendor list and on the label that goes on a veg box, so all three read as one business.

Yola website builder lets you search for and register a domain in the same flow you build the site in, and annual plans include a free domain for the first year.

Nothing on this site needs code. Yola lets you edit text, swap photos and move sections yourself, the same way you would edit a document, and that matters more on a farm site than on most. What you have changes every few weeks. A page you have to email somebody else about is a page that will still say strawberries in October.

Answer a few questions about what you farm and who you sell to, 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 produce and your prices against what is actually on the counter. Hosting, an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups come with the site. Starting from a template that already has a gallery, a services layout and a contact form means you are editing a page rather than designing one.

Start from a template

Farm website templates

Six pages carry nearly all of it. Two sorts of people land on a farm site: somebody who wants to buy food from you this week and needs to know what you have and where to collect it, and somebody deciding whether to bring the family out on Sunday or put your name on a restaurant menu.

Keep the set small on purpose. Every extra page is another thing quietly going out of date while you are lambing or cutting, and the six below are the ones people open.

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

Name things the way the person buying them names them. Somebody types "half lamb" or "quarter beef", not "box scheme unit", and nobody has ever searched for seasonal produce solutions. List only what you can genuinely supply, because a line you have not had since spring turns into a phone call you have to apologize through.

Price what is fixed and quote what is not. A weekly veg box, a 10 lb meat box and a dozen eggs each carry a plain figure, and that figure saves you the whole conversation. Half and whole animals depend on hanging weight and on what comes back from the butcher, so explain how you calculate it, give a typical range from the last few animals, and be clear about the cut sheet and the collection date. Wholesale to restaurants is priced per chef and per volume, so that one stays a conversation rather than a number on a page.

Yola's ready-made Services and Pricing blocks put a name, a short description and a figure together, editable the morning a box price moves. Yola also has an online store, and that is what takes the actual order, because a meat box is a product in a way that a farm tour is not. Keep the two apart in your head: the store sells the box, and the form in the next step handles the questions, the wholesale inquiries and anything that needs an answer from you before money changes hands.

A standing weekly box is the one thing to be straight about. Charging the same card every Friday is a recurring payment on a schedule, which Yola does not ship, so a real subscription runs either through a third-party tool you integrate or through a sign-up form and an invoice you send yourself. Plenty of box schemes have run the second way for years, taking the sign-up on the site and settling up monthly. Customers are fine with it as long as the page says plainly how they will be billed and how they pause for a holiday.

This is the one page where stock photography actively costs you money. Somebody looking for a farm to buy from is trying to get away from anonymous food, and a picture of a model holding a wicker basket in a field that is not yours tells them they are in the wrong place. Yola does include premium stock images and a library of icons on the paid plans, and they earn their keep as background and page furniture. The food and the animals have to be yours.

Four photographs do most of the work. The ground you are farming, shot in the season you are actually in. The animals, close and calm, out on grass rather than a herd seen from two hundred yards. The shop counter with produce on it, taken straight on in daylight from the doorway, because that is the picture that tells somebody what they will walk into. And a box packed and ready with the lid off and everything visible, which sells more veg boxes than any description of one ever has.

A phone camera is fine. Morning or late afternoon light, back to the sun, no flash, and wipe the lens first because on a farm there is always something on it. Retake the field shots each season instead of running the same August photograph through February. Name the files for what is in them, angus-heifers-on-pasture-september.jpg rather than IMG_2216.jpg, and use the same wording in the alt text so the photos can turn up in a local image search.

Yola's ready-made Galleries block holds the set, and on a paid plan you can build a custom gallery with the Custom code block if you want the boxes and the livestock laid out separately. Video is not something Yola hosts, so a walk round the field or a minute of lambing goes on your usual video platform and gets embedded on the page. Ask before anybody else's children end up in a photograph from an open day.

Not everything a farm sells can go through a checkout. A half lamb nobody has weighed yet, a wholesale account for a restaurant, a school group of thirty, somebody asking whether you will have turkeys at Christmas: those are conversations first. The form catches them, and it catches the shopper who will not phone, who on a farm site is most of them.

Keep it to the fields that let you answer in one reply. A name and a phone number, what they are after, roughly how much, and whether they are collecting from the shop, meeting you at a market or hoping for delivery. Add a date, because the collection day is the thing you will otherwise email about twice. One open box at the bottom takes the rest: the cut sheet notes, the allergy, the fact that they want the liver. Every extra field costs you submissions from somebody filling it in on a phone in a parking lot.

You choose those fields yourself, since Yola's contact form is customizable rather than pre-made, and the Forms block help article walks through setting one up. Yola sends an automatic confirmation the moment somebody submits, so they know it landed. Write that confirmation properly: say when you will come back to them, and give the phone number for anyone who needs an answer before Saturday.

Be plain that a submission is a request rather than a completed order. Nothing is set aside until you have replied, and for a half animal not until the butcher has a date. Then answer inside a day. Somebody who has decided to buy direct this week is looking at two or three farms at once, and the one that replies on Tuesday gets the order.

Farm paperwork is expensive and almost nobody holds all of it, so this part of the site is about showing what you have and saying nothing at all about what you do not. Organic is the one to handle carefully. Certified organic is a regulated term in the US, and a farm that grows without sprays but has not been through certification cannot use it. Where you are certified, name the certifying agent and the certificate number, because a shopper who cares about it will check. Where you are not, describe how you actually farm, in your own words, and let that stand on its own.

The rest depends on what you sell and which state you sell it in. Meat sold to the public generally has to be cut under USDA or state inspection, and naming the plant answers a question more people are asking every year. Where your state issues a meat handler or retail food license for the farm shop, give the number as the state words it. If you have passed a produce safety audit, or your livestock are under a welfare program such as Certified Humane or Animal Welfare Approved, those are worth naming with the year. Being an approved vendor at a farmers market counts too, since it is a check somebody else has already run on you.

Put the short version on the home page beside the shop hours rather than on an About page nobody opens. The longer version belongs with the story of the land, because on a farm the years are a credential in themselves. Fourth generation on the same ground says something no certificate does, and writing it down costs nothing.

A farm's week is never the same twice, and one page carrying all of it saves a great deal of repeating yourself. Farm shop days and hours, which markets you are standing at and where your stall is, when pick-your-own opens and what is ready to pick, lambing weekends, harvest open days, farm tours and school visits all belong in one place. People check this page more often than anything else on the site, usually on a Friday night.

Every entry needs the date, the hours, where exactly on the farm it happens, what it costs if anything, and how to reserve a place, which points back at the form from the previous step. Yola has no events or calendar block, so this is an ordinary page you keep current by hand. Once the first few lines are laid out, adding one means copying a line and changing a few words. That suits a farm, because the page needs changing weekly anyway, and waiting on somebody else to do it is how it ends up three markets behind.

Leave the past dates up under their own heading. A run of open days and harvest weekends that actually happened is what a school booking a trip in March reads before getting in touch, and it shows the farm does this properly rather than once. The one thing to be strict about is taking a date down the moment it changes. A family who drives forty minutes to a pick-your-own that closed last week does not come back.

Hardly anyone searches for your farm by name, because they have not heard of it yet. They search for a farm shop near the town they live in, and the map pack, those three listings with the little pins at the top, is where they pick one. Yola's SEO Optimized Website capability covers the technical side of your pages. The wording and the work on Google are yours.

Before you tell anybody the site is live, go through it on a phone, outdoors, the way a customer will. Tap the number and check it dials. Send yourself an order through the form and read the confirmation that comes back. Then follow your own directions in from the main road, because that is the one thing you cannot test from the kitchen table.

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, what we grow, the shop and visit. A gallery full of photographs straight off a phone at full size is usually what slows a farm site down.

After that the whole job is keeping it true, and on a farm that is a weekly habit rather than an annual one. What is ready changes, the markets change, the shop closes early on a show day, the beef comes back from the butcher. Give it ten minutes on the same day each week, Sunday evening or before you go out on Monday, and put the date you last edited it at the top of the what we grow page. A site that keeps moving holds its ranking better than one last touched at the end of the previous season.

Common farm website mistakes to avoid

The same handful of things go wrong on farm sites, and most of them send somebody to the supermarket instead.

How much does a farm website cost?

On Yola the site starts free, and a paid plan is $9.95/mo once you want your own name as a domain, more than a couple of pages and the full AI tools. Annual plans include a free domain for the first year. Set against the margin on a few veg boxes, it is not a figure that needs thinking about for long.

Paying somebody else to build a comparable site often runs from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, depending on how much design and photography goes into it, and changes afterwards usually carry a fee of their own.

That second cost is the one that matters on a farm. Your site goes out of date every three weeks by its nature: the beans finish, a market moves its date, the shop opens late because you are cutting silage. If each of those is an email to somebody else, you either pay every time or you stop asking, and a site nobody has corrected since June is worse than no site at all. Doing it yourself means the page says beans on the week there are beans.