Website development for van and car hire
Van hire is decided in minutes and booked in seconds, or it is lost. Someone halfway through a house move wants to know one thing: is a Luton free on Saturday, what does it cost all in, and what do they have to bring. If your website answers those three questions, the booking happens there. If it shows a phone number and a rate card, the customer rings two competitors instead, and half of them never ring back at all. Trade customers behave differently again: they hire by the month, want the van delivered to site, need three named drivers, and want one invoice at the end of it.
Most independent hire firms run a good yard and a bad website. Pages were written years ago for a fleet that has changed twice since, the van classes are not explained so people cannot tell a SWB from a Luton, deposit and insurance rules are buried in a PDF, and nothing on the site says whether anything is actually free. So the searches go to the national chains, whose prices are higher but whose availability is visible. Making your own availability and your all-in price visible is the whole game, and that is what the demo below does.
- From £395
- Typically 2–4 weeks
- Fixed quote before work starts
What customers want
This is what a van hire website needs to do.
People visit a van hire website to get something done. If your site makes that quick, you get the enquiry. These are the tasks every page is designed around.
- 01“Check whether the van I need is free on the day I need it”
- 02“Work out the total price, miles included, before I commit”
- 03“Find out which van is big enough for a three-bedroom house move”
- 04“Understand the deposit and the insurance excess before I pay”
- 05“Check I am old enough and licensed to drive a Luton”
- 06“Get a monthly rate and delivery to site for the business”
Features
Every feature is chosen for how van & car hire win work.
Live availability by date and van class
The visitor picks a collection and return date and sees what is actually on the yard that day, class by class, with the next free date shown when something is out. Availability is the first question in this trade, so it belongs on the first screen rather than behind a phone call.
Four-step booking with the price built up as they go
Dates, then van, then driver and licence, then confirmation with a booking reference. The hire charge, extras, mileage allowance and refundable deposit are each shown in pounds before anything is confirmed, so nobody reaches a card page with a surprise waiting on it.
Licence and age checker
Age, how long the licence has been held, endorsements and licence type, answered in one panel that says which classes the driver can take and what to bring. It is the question that silently kills online hire bookings, and answering it openly increases them.
Load guide: what actually fits
Load length, volume, payload and pallet count for every class, plus a plain comparison: a studio flat, a one-bed, a three-bed with white goods. People hire the wrong van and turn up angry, so the site should size the job for them and upsell honestly when they need more room.
Deposit, excess and mileage in plain numbers
The deposit hold and when it is released, the insurance excess, the cost of reducing it, the miles included per day and the pence per mile after that, plus what a late return costs. Hire disputes are almost always about money that was never stated up front.
Long-term and business hire quotes
A separate route for customers hiring by the week or month: how long, which classes, delivery to site, monthly mileage, multiple named drivers and who gets the invoice. Trade accounts are the steadiest revenue in van hire and they are won with a rate rather than a booking button.
Your competition
Why van & car hire come to WebCheap
instead of a website builder.
What van hire websites look like today
The national chains own the generic searches and the price comparison sites, and they win on visible availability rather than on price. Local independents often have the better yard and the worse website: a Facebook page, an old rate card, no way to check a date, and a mobile number that rings out during a delivery. The independents taking that trade back have three things in common, an availability view a customer can read without calling, all-in prices that match the invoice, and long-term rates published for business customers who would rather not haggle every month.
How customers find you on Google
Van hire splits into three search patterns. One-day and weekend hires like 'van hire [town]' and 'luton van hire [town]' are map results, ranked on distance, reviews and opening hours, and they convert on visible availability and a price the visitor can see in the listing. Business searches like 'van hire monthly [town]' and 'long term van hire' want rates and invoicing, so they need their own page rather than a line in a footer. The third pattern is by use, 'van hire for house move' or '7.5 tonne hire', which rewards a genuine load guide. Delivery and collection areas each get a page with the charge stated, because 'do you deliver to me' is asked before every booking.
Rules and regulations we cover
Minimum driving age and how long a licence must have been held are set by the insurer, not by the firm, so they are shown against each class with the Luton requirements separate. Drivers generate a DVLA check code before collection so endorsements can be verified, and the site explains how to get one. Hire charges, the mileage allowance, extras, the deposit hold and the insurance excess are all stated in pounds before payment, because charges revealed later breach the unfair commercial practices rules in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act and cost you the review. VAT is shown separately with a VAT receipt offered, since business customers claim it back.
Fits your setup
Your new site works with the tools van & car hire already use.
- Fleet and rental software (Tranman, Jaama, FleetCheck)
- DVLA driving licence check service
- Card pre-authorisation for deposits (Stripe, Worldpay, Barclaycard)
- Monthly account invoicing (Xero, Sage)
- Google Business Profile with review capture
- Out-of-hours key safe and depot access
Written in your trade’s language
- Luton
- A box van with a tail lift, named after the town. Searched by name and hired for house moves, so it gets its own page rather than a row in a table.
- tail lift
- The powered platform at the back. Stated wherever a van has one, because a move with white goods needs it and a bad back does not care about your price.
- DVLA check code
- The code a driver generates so the firm can see their endorsements. Asked for before collection, explained on the site so it does not feel like a hurdle.
- BVRLA
- The rental trade body and its code of conduct. Membership is a trust signal for customers who have been burned by a back-street hire before.
Live demo
Try a working van hire website before you spend anything.
Camber Van & Car Hire is a working van hire website for a made-up business, with the features above. Two minutes clicking through it shows you more than a forty-minute sales call.
It is an example of our quality, not a template. Your site is designed from scratch around your own brand, tone and style.
Questions
Here are answers to what van & car hire ask before starting.
Either works. The site can take the whole booking with a card payment and the deposit pre-authorised at the same time, or it can hold the van for a short window and take payment at the counter. Most independent yards start with reserved online and paid at collection, then move to card payment once the availability feed is trusted.
The licence checker asks age, how long the licence has been held, licence type and endorsements, and only offers the classes the insurer will cover. The driver then supplies a DVLA check code before collection, which is verified against the licence at the counter. The rules and the deposit hold are stated in writing before anyone pays.
If your rental software has an API, the site reads from it and the availability view updates itself. Where it does not, we build a simple daily availability screen your staff update in under a minute each morning, and the site is honest about what is held rather than promising a van that has already gone out.
Yes. People search 'luton van hire', 'crew van hire' and 'small van hire' as different jobs, and each one has different questions about load size, licence and price. One page listing the fleet competes for none of those searches, while six honest class pages with load guides and rates compete for all of them.
It has its own quote route: how long, which classes, delivery to site, monthly mileage, named drivers and invoicing details. Rates for a month or more come back from you, and repeat business customers can be given an account page that keeps their rates and their invoice history in one place.
From £395 for four pages, which covers the fleet, the booking flow and the depot details. Extra pages are £25 each, so van classes, delivery areas and long-term hire can each have their own. Changes afterwards are £25 a batch, or £95 a month for ongoing work.
Two to four weeks, depending on how much of the booking you want automated. The content comes from one session: your classes with load sizes and rates, your deposit and excess rules, opening hours, delivery charges and the photos of your own vans. Your fleet photos beat any stock image on the internet.
We also build websites for these related trades.
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