Your website has less than 10 seconds to win over a new visitor. That’s it. Mere seconds to convince a casual visitor to stick around and consider becoming a customer.
If you run a farm that sells directly to consumers, your website is your most powerful sales tool. It’s where customers discover your story, browse your products, and decide whether to trust your products. But without the right farm website design, a visitor won’t stick around long enough to learn all that valuable information.
Here’s the good news: You don't need to hire expensive designers to create an incredible farm website design. With the right tools and these 10 best practices, you can create a professional farm website that brings in new customers and keeps the old ones coming back.
Let's break down exactly what makes a farm website work.
Farm websites have different needs than other retailers. If you’ve tried to build a website on a standard e-commerce platform, you’ve probably run into problems.
Tools designed for selling t-shirts and phone cases don’t have all the features you need to sell variable weight products or manage CSA shares.
Before we dive into our best practices for farm website design, let’s explore some of the unique problems your farm website needs to solve for your business:
Our number-one tip for building an incredible farm website is to use a farm-specific website platform. A tool like GrazeCart includes weight-based pricing, subscription management, delivery scheduling, and an easy-to-use website builder, so you have everything you need to create a site that doesn’t just look good, but actually performs.
With this context in mind, let’s explore our 10 best practices for farm website design.
Over 70% of all online shopping in the last year happened on mobile devices. Your farm customers aren’t always ordering from their desktop computer. Instead, they’re browsing your site while waiting in line to pick up their kids from school or walking through a farmers market, comparing prices.
If your website doesn’t work smoothly on a phone, you’re losing sales every day. If you’re finding customers are abandoning their carts or bouncing off your site before even starting a purchase, a clunky mobile experience might be the main culprit.
Test your site on various devices to ensure buttons are easy to tap, text is readable without requiring zooming, and checkout flows smoothly.
Related Read: Farm E-Commerce 101: 5 Tips To Sell Farm Goods Online
Your website needs more than just a splashy homepage — it needs key pages that turn casual visitors into customers. You’re not a standard retailer, and you’ll need industry-specific pages in addition to the standard e-commerce site:
After you have these crucial pages, get creative! Include a blog with farming updates, or a recipe section where you share seasonal recipes and cooking tips. Anything that keeps customers coming back to your website increases your chances of making additional sales.
SEO (search engine optimization) is a must for any business website — but the critical consideration for farm stores is local SEO. Why? Most of your target customers search for terms like “grass-fed beef near [CITY]” or “organic produce delivery [CITY].” Local SEO practices help ensure that when customers search for these terms, your site appears in the results.
Start by claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile with accurate hours, location, and photos. Throughout your website, naturally include location-based keywords in your content to help improve your rankings in search results for those terms.
Next, create location-specific content that targets your ideal customers. Things like farmers market schedules or articles about local food events are a great fit for these efforts. When you crush your local SEO, you’ll boost website traffic and bring in more customers who are ready to buy.
If customers can’t find what they need or get confused during the checkout process, they’ll leave. This means you need to make shopping as intuitive as possible to capture the most customers.
Start with simple navigation. Your homepage should only have a few options. Links to your Shop, About, and Contact pages should also be accessible from every single page on your website.
When you’re organizing your store, follow a logical listing structure. You can:
Remember: Transparency matters, especially for weight-based products. Show clear pricing, display delivery zones, and let customers know exactly what’s available, how much it costs, and their options for getting that product from your farm.
Photo quality is one of the simplest ways to take your farm website design to the next level. Our advice is to skip the generic stock photos and use images of your actual farm. Show your animals, your crops, and the people behind it all.
But don’t just snap a few photos with your cell phone camera and throw them onto your site. Instead, invest in professional photography. Capture crops and animals in natural light and stage your products to look as appealing and natural as possible.
When you’re designing non-photograph visuals, choose a natural color palette that reflects your farm's brand. Greens and browns tend to work well for farms, but choose something that makes sense for your business. Your homepage banner and farm logo need to be striking and memorable, immediately communicating quality and tone to your potential customers.
Next, think about the text on your website. Don’t settle for generic descriptions or phrasing — instead, focus on what makes your farm unique and consider how you can highlight those unique selling points (USPs) in your website copy.
Your product descriptions should do more than just list the basics. Use this space to tell customers exactly why your products are worth buying, and focus on the benefits they’ll get from investing in high-quality, natural products.
Finally, be sure to include customer testimonials and reviews on your site. Social proof is one of the surest ways to win customer trust off the bat, so ask your happiest customers for video testimonials or online reviews whenever possible.
Related Read: How To Write a Product Description for Your Farm Website
As we mentioned at the beginning of this post, using generic e-commerce and website-building tools can create major headaches for farms. Instead, use a platform that handles the nuances of farm-to-fork sales out of the box.
Related Read: Shopify for Farms: 5 Critical Features You're Missing
Here are some key features to explore:
Generic tools won’t offer these features, or will require expensive add-ons to take advantage of them, so look for a farm-specific e-commerce and POS solution like GrazeCart.
A slow website costs you sales. Customers expect pages to load in seconds, and they'll leave if your site drags. Take the time to optimize your image file sizes and implement features like lazy loading to prevent your photos from slowing down the entire experience.
Just be sure you don’t sacrifice security for speed. Include SSL certificates to encrypt customer data during the checkout process, and regularly update and maintain your site to keep things running smoothly.
Here's the good news: You don't need to be a tech expert to handle this. All-in-one platforms manage the technical details automatically — all you have to do is invest in the right website builder to keep things easy for yourself.
Brand consistency is critical for every business, and your farm is no exception. Ensure your farm’s branding is consistent across all website pages and platforms. Use the same logos, fonts, and colors throughout your site so customers know instinctively when a page or image is from your farm.
Keep your tone and messaging consistent, too. If your About Us page sounds warm and conversational, your product descriptions should reflect that same tone. If you use social media or paid ads to promote your farm, ensure consistency across all those pages and accounts.
If updating your website requires calling a developer every time, you're asking for trouble (and headaches). Instead, invest in a website builder platform that lets you update your site yourself on the fly.
The right platform gives you full control with drag-and-drop editors that make updates simple and straightforward. You should be able to easily add new products, adjust pricing, update availability, or publish a recipe.
This also matters for your budget. Bespoke website design services can cost thousands upfront, plus ongoing fees for every little change. User-friendly platforms let you manage everything yourself for a fraction of the cost.
These 10 best practices work together to help you create a farm website design that builds trust, makes things easy for your customers, and helps you sell more products and grow your business.
And we get it: Implementing all 10 practices at once can seem overwhelming — but when you invest in the right tools, all the puzzle pieces snap into place without extra effort.
All-in-one platforms like GrazeCart are built specifically for farmers, butchers, and fresh food retailers. You get drag-and-drop editing, farm-specific features, and everything you need to create a professional site that follows all these best practices.
Ready to build a high-converting farm website? Check out our free guide, How To Build a High-Converting Farm Store Website, today.
Because your farm deserves a website that works as hard as you do.