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HVAC Website Design Guide for AC Companies (2024 Update)


The foundation of an HVAC company’s online presence is HVAC website design. A healthy website facilitates search engine optimization, brings legitimacy to your brand, and helps convert traffic into leads.

Digital marketing concepts like SEO, PPC, and content marketing increase online visibility, but your website’s quality converts that exposure into sales.

Many factors dictate a website’s design quality. Still, as a heating & cooling contractor, the ultimate goal is to grow your business online and capture leads and sales within your local service area.

In 2024, anybody can build a website. With DIY and AI website builders like Wix, Weebly, & Squarespace and an abundance of templates for content management systems like WordPress, it’s never been easier to publish a functional webpage.

However, design is not always about the front-end visual display of a website. The codebase is a significant consideration in air conditioning website design, especially regarding SEO and marketing.

The back end of a website also requires creativity, and it is as important, if not more so, than the visual presentation.


HVAC Website Design Guide Cover


What is HVAC Website Design?

HVAC website design is the intentional configuration of a heating and cooling website, including layout, user interface, and aesthetic imagery.

Experienced HVAC web designers focus on user experience and conversion rate optimization to maximize traffic impact from SEO, PPC, and other sources.

While other platforms can help promote your HVAC brand (Social Media, Google Business Profile, etc.), you can’t maximize them without a business website.

Since HVAC contractors aim to increase sales, the direct correlation between web design and sales conversions should be enough to invest your resources.


HVAC Website Design Example 2

Consumers trust companies that showcase professionalism with an official business website.


SEO is the most effective method to route consumers to your website. However, any internet marketing method is only as valuable as its final result. As a result, AC company web design is integral to a successful HVAC SEO campaign.

Aside from converting traffic, web design can also influence your larger web presence and brand recognition.

For example, inbound links from Facebook, Google Business Profile, and even Yelp all lead to your official website. Digital footprints leading back to a primary domain increase your brand’s authority and legitimacy.



Website Presentation

Most users notice a website’s front end immediately. Since most consumers don’t have experience with HTML, CSS, or any other coding language, they only consider the end result.

Factors like colors, white space, aesthetics, and overall user experience influence how they perceive your site and business.

Many of these factors work subconsciously, and the user may not pinpoint their reason for gravitating to a website.

However, their on-site behavior is the ultimate measure, as users who submit their contact information find your site useful and convenient.

In 2024, presentation is more dynamic than ever before. Consumers visit websites on various mobile, tablet, and desktop devices, with thousands of iterations each.

A website should appear optimally on each machine, which is attainable through responsive design principles.

When a website is responsive, it adapts to the user’s device without creating an entirely new website for each one.

Google has gone as far as to recommend responsive design principles to professional heating and air web designers.


Color

Palettes are critical in modern design. They inform the visitor’s experience but create cohesion between brand and platform.

The diversity of a palette stems mainly from an HVAC company’s logo. Creating or updating your company logo is of great importance.

A logo with lots of colors will distract the average user, but a logo with only one color will bore them. Having 2 or 3 colors, a primary and 1 or 2 secondary, is ideal in modern website design.


White Space

A funny anecdote about white space is that it is not always white. The phrase refers to empty spaces between images, text, and blocks of content.

The modern consumer prefers digestible information since they can become overwhelmed by excess.

The function of white space is to foster a feeling of organization and conciseness. Both can improve the visitor’s experience and influence behavior metrics like bounce rate, pages per site, duration on site, etc.


Aesthetics

If you’ve ever heard a visitor discuss the “feel” of a website, aesthetics are at play. Defined as the “appreciation of beauty,” aesthetics might not be something HVAC contractors think about for their business.

But make no mistake; everyone considers aesthetics in website design. That includes your prospective customers who are reading about heating & cooling services.

Don’t assume that the subject matter disqualifies any website from aesthetic appeal.


On Page Aesthetics Example

A visually appealing website can benefit any type of business, including HVAC.


Website Functionality

A website’s look and feel appeal greatly, but its functionality can make or break its effectiveness. Let’s say a user enters your HVAC website and likes what they see.

Imagine now that as they are attempting to navigate to other sections of the site via a smartphone browser, they can’t seem to scroll down or click the desired page links properly.

Once something like this occurs, the visual appeal becomes mostly irrelevant. Users will leave a website for functional reasons instantly (literally) and never return, regardless of the site’s visual impression.

Navigation is one element of usability but is not the only one. Consider site speed (loading time), URL structure, menu links, and user interface as some of the other most prominent factors.

Responsive design is equally essential since usability should translate to all kinds of devices, from mobile to desktop to tablet, including the endless variations of each device category (iPhone, Android, MacBook Pro, HP, etc.).

The user must be able to use your website at their convenience because they will move on to the next search result, which does it better.


Navigation

Nine times out of 10, the most frustrating part of a poorly designed website is its navigation. If the user cannot scroll properly and easily get to other website sections, they will become discouraged and exit the site.

Mobile websites are typically the most complicated to navigate, so designers should pay closer attention to mobile design.


Example of Scroll Bar Navigation

Since the screen is smaller than a tablet or desktop monitor, it should be incredibly convenient for users to find their way around the site and all of its elements, scrolling primarily with their thumb and index finger.


Site Speed

Over half of internet users will exit a website that does not load within 3 seconds. That puts HVAC websites on the clock immediately after users click on their results. If we’re honest with ourselves, that 3-second number will likely have lowered even more in recent months.

In 2024, that number is more than likely closer to 1 second. The attention spans of users have shortened, and designers must take notice.


Google Page Speed Insights Screenshot

You can check your existing website speed using Google PageSpeed Insights, giving suggestions for correcting errors.


URL Structure

A website URL hierarchy is integral to a site’s functionality for users. If you have pages for each service, the URLs should be both logical and hierarchical.

Let’s say you provide both residential and commercial HVAC services. If so, a page for residential ac repair should be categorized as a child page underneath the parent page, residential HVAC services.


Parent Child Page Structure Example

A sound hierarchy closely relates to your HVAC SEO efforts and helps the user navigate your site.


Menu Links

Useful HVAC websites link every critical page from the homepage menu. When converting traffic into customers, you want them to see all the services you offer and easily access the one that intrigues them.

In alignment with URL structure, menu links should have main categories (parent pages) and subcategories (child pages).

You should also have a Contact Us page and an About Us page to help connect with the visitors.


Menu Links Screenshot

User Interface (UI)

User interface, often shortened as UI, hones in on the user’s projected need from your website from a functionality standpoint. 

According to Usability.gov, UI combines interaction design, visual design, and information architecture.

They break down UI elements into four sections: input controls, navigational components, informational components, and containers.

They stress simplicity, consistency, and purpose as the driving principles of an effective user interface design.


Website Coding

Most visitors judge a website based on its front-end presentation, not realizing that back-end coding is often a necessary factor, not only in why the site appears as it does but in how the user accessed it initially.

Coding is complicated and foreign to most, making the source code of a webpage unreadable to the average visitor.

Still, the designers’ heavy lifting takes place in that same code and ultimately determines its success or failure. Codebase is a primary factor with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Schema Markup, and more.

Code is not used only for website design but for any web or software development.

Each of these has a codebase that informs its presentation, functionality, or usability. Coders are often the most technically sound webmasters in the room and can implement the average person’s elements.

Although website builders have turned everyone into amateur designers, they have not familiarized everyone with coding, which still separates them from legitimate professionals.


HTML

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the actual code used to write every website. HTML annotates text with tags, suggesting a browser display it as the designer intends.

The language uses a series of tags that range from very basic to very complex.

For example, text surrounded by a <strong> tag on the back end is bolded on the front end.

HTML is closely associated with SEO since header, title, and meta tags are all part of the HTML language.

A CMS like WordPress makes HTML alterations simpler from an SEO perspective, but the design itself still requires in-depth knowledge of the coding language.


HTML Code

AI tools like ChatGPT can help programmers expedite the HTML coding process.


CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is code that instructs a browser on how to display HTML. While HTML tags suggest things like bolded text, the CSS code instructs the browser on what that will look like on the website’s front end.

CSS references what designers call rules. A CSS rule contains three parts: a selector, a property, and a value.

More advanced CSS mechanisms like inline link CSS and internal CSS always play a role aside from CSS rules. The simplest way to describe the codebase is the stylization of HTML tags.


CSS Code

CSS is very much related to the display presentation of a website, which impacts conversion.


JavaScript


JavaScript is a code language that provides interactivity to websites. When combined, HTML and CSS can formulate a custom webpage, but without JavaScript, it will remain static (it won’t move).

The code of JavaScript makes a webpage respond to user events like hovering, clicks, or commands. Much like CSS, JavaScript has inline, internal, and also external protocols.

JavaScript can be an asset to website design and hinder it if misused. Bloated JavaScript is known to slow down websites and negatively influence site speed.

For this reason, an expert coder should perform the implementation.


JavaScript Code

JavaScript should be tactfully implemented to prevent issues with website loading speed.


Schema Markup

Schema.org or Schema Markup is a vocabulary of semantically related tags inserted into HTML to help Google interpret the page.

Microdata tags from Schema.org help search engines like Google better categorize pages and promote them on search results.

Schema is fundamental to SEO and is perhaps the most critical optimization element of a website’s codebase.


Schema.Org Screenshot

Since schema comes from search engines’ instructions, we know that Google considers it when pages are crawled, indexed, and ranked.


Mobile Design 

The increased mobile usage of the average American has made mobile design more critical than ever before.

Researchers estimate that over half of all HVAC website visitors will access the site through a smartphone.

Because phones are accessible 24 hours per day, seven days per week, there is an infinite window of opportunity for contractors to reach their most extensive consumer base.

SEO can drive traffic to your website and other web entities (Google Maps, Facebook, etc.), but a sales conversion remains unlikely without a simple website to use on mobile. 

Several design elements will be embellished or adapted to narrow the target in promoting services to mobile users.

One such example of this is a call to action. A CTA on a website for desktops might list an HVAC contractor’s phone number.

On mobile design, it should have a clickable number to connect to your phone line directly. Because conversions are the goal of websites, CTA’s are crucial.

Strategic CTA placement has never been more pertinent than in 2024, when mobile usage increases daily.


Mobile Layout

Screen size matters, and smartphones have less space for users to operate. Pair that with low-attention users, and you have yourselves one of the primary challenges of modern design.

How can you, as a web developer, intrigue the mobile user through your website? You have limited time and space and must make the most of it.

A layout should be instructive and straightforward while creating urgency for the visitor. A clear call to action with a clickable phone number is ideal.

Other layout factors to consider include height, width, image and logo placement, and space.


Mobile Layout Example

The user wants to immediately see the important information from your website on their mobile screen.


Mobile Speed

Websites should load quickly regardless of device, but it is even more crucial on mobile. Sites that don’t load within 3 seconds will lose more than half of their visitors, a timeframe that has likely already decreased and will continue with each passing day.


Test Your Mobile Site Speed Screenshot

Google provides recommendations for speeding up your mobile website in 2024.


Mobile Call to Action

Web developers must tailor calls to action to the mobile user. The best example of this is a clickable phone number that can be a stylized button or text.

The goal is to create urgency for the mobile user, so accompanying the phone number with a statement like a call now for a free consultation is something every contractor should consider.


Mobile Call To Action Example

There’s a fine line between creating urgency and becoming overly sales-driven, and the most successful websites can navigate that terrain to generate high-quality leads.


Custom Design 

Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace help the average person create nice-looking websites. If they have a disadvantage, it is their lack of customization.

Certain limitations come with using website builders that don’t exist when investing in a professional designer.

While not every Wix site will look identical in presentation, the back-end codebase will be similar and less customizable.

Site builders can hinder SEO efforts needed for a website to get traffic. As we’ve stated, website design cannot exist exclusively from SEO if increasing sales is the goal.

Besides custom codebase being a superior SEO protocol, customization is part of every design aspect.

From the placement of a logo on the page’s layout to the palette color scheme on the CSS style sheet, customization can go a long way toward increasing conversion rates and satisfying users’ needs and attention spans.

It’s not to say that website creators cannot work under any circumstances, but to highlight why custom design is so useful. It becomes the HVAC company’s choice based on its digital marketing goals.


Custom Codebase

Tools like Wix provide options for display. Website makers can choose their layout, buttons, and even color schemes. While this might differentiate one website from another, the code will remain similar.

You see, even with a change in the color scheme, which alters the existing CSS code, the skeleton of the style sheet stays identical.

Google can identify Wix websites based on their internal codebase. It doesn’t make it a wrong choice, but it can make SEO a more complicated process to execute and ultimately discourage your coveted sales growth.


Custom Codebase Example

Your website’s sourcecode is what Google crawls for its index.


Complete Control

Tired of your website’s footer saying something like “designed with Weebly?” If so, custom design may be for you. With custom design, you control what appears on your website and where it appears.

There are no mandatory insertions of code. Instead, you can add your logos, awards, and badges of honor to your header and footer. Customization = control for HVAC contractors.


Home Advisor Badge Example From HVAC Website

Consider something as simple as your logo width, which could be limited in Wix.


Company Branding

With genuinely custom web design, you can brand your HVAC company in a manner not replicable through website builders.

A unique codebase, layout, and color scheme can differentiate your website from others in the same industry and service area.

You may find the differences between a template website and a custom one to be minimal at first glance, but Google sees it differently.

Perhaps most importantly, users growing accustomed to your brand through website design can only help expand awareness and foster a long-term, sustainable online presence.


Branded Website Example

A website should reflect your brand and convey expertise, experience, authority, and trust.


Responsive Design 

We’ve noted that most visitors will access HVAC websites through mobile smartphones, but the highest conversion websites cannot ignore any of their users.

That includes those who access the website on a desktop, tablet, or another 3rd party device that is not a smartphone.

Since designing a site for each device, brand, and model is not plausible, the best solution is a responsive web design, sometimes shortened as RWD.


Comparison Between Viewport Sizes

RWD’s primary advantage is optimizing display and functionality for a website on any device efficiently and reaching all possible customers.


Mashable named 2013 the year of responsive design; six years later, it is now considered the norm for websites that perform well on Google.

The search engine has gone as far as to recommend its usage to web developers and has even offered RWD tutorials on its Web Fundamentals platform.

RWD fixes would-be problems that designers would once dread. For example, an image displayed on a mobile site might appear too small on a desktop, but responsive design incorporates flexibility and resizes the image to its optimal display.


Viewport

The area immediately visible to users is known as the viewport. As you might imagine, viewports vary by device, so an iPhone 11 viewport won’t compare to a Dell PC monitor.

Before mobile’s emergence, designs often focused on desktop viewing, which created viewport distortion on mobile.

If you remember older mobile phones, you also remember some of the worst-looking websites of all time. Imagine booking a phone call with your local HVAC contractor using that display.


Mobile Viewport

The mobile viewport directly impacts user experience and, ultimately, sales.


Breakpoint

Breakpoints are browser measurements that change the display based on a specified range. In responsive design, breakpoints usually adjust to the width of the screen.

Sometimes, a breakpoint might shift the viewport from displaying two to four.

Designers should focus on breakpoints by device rather than the model. In other words, smartphones should be a category, but Apple iPhone 11 should not be.

Breakpoints’ significance also varies. Some of them can be quite obvious, while others are more subtle. Use tactfully.


Responsive Breakpoint Screenshot

Properly implemented breakpoints will enhance user experience on all devices.

Mobile Breakpoint Screenshot

Breakpoints will alter the view of the mobile user compared to the desktop or tablet user in a way that enhances their visual experience.


Graphic Design (UX)

A website’s graphics are part of its visual presentation but can be considered an entirely different skill altogether from a designer’s standpoint. Graphics can be everything from logos to interactive buttons and everything in between.

Graphics are often tied into a site’s color scheme but are not the color scheme itself. Most color palettes work from the starting point of the logo.

If your HVAC company has an existing logo with brand recognition, you should maintain or enhance it.

Brand new contractors might be looking for an original logo from a professional designer.

Logos are likely an essential graphic for a company but certainly not the only one needed on your website. As we said, graphic design is a skill that transcends air conditioning web design.

While websites use code and tags, visual artists use digital art studios such as Adobe Suite. 

Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop can all help create graphics for your website and other marketing materials.

Graphics can also be published in print materials, such as business cards and newsletters. Contractors can also print graphics on t-shirts, truck wraps, and other marketing materials.


Logo Design

An effective heating & cooling logo is both simple and memorable. Striking that balance isn’t the easiest thing to accomplish. Still, the companies that thrive are the ones that find a balance.

Focus on solid colors that are easy on the eyes. 

99 Designs outlines what each color evokes from the perspective of the typical consumer. For instance, blue is one color that people often associate with trust and professionalism, making sense when you understand why it’s on at least half of all logos.


HVAC Logo Example

Think about your logo for a moment; what characteristics does it evoke?


Buttons

Its graphical outline often enhances a call to action. In other words, a phone number button might appeal more to the user than merely the number itself.

Why? Because consumers love to be visually inspired. Since the goal of every CTA is to create urgency and prompt action, enhancing its graphical nature can help reach that destination.

Enhancement assumes the graphic is skillfully designed, of course. Keep in mind that poorly designed graphics can harm a user’s behavior. CTA buttons are important when merging illustration and web design.


Infographics

What is the information distributed on infographics? It can be anything and everything as long it stays within the context of your web pages and the content published on them.

If CTA buttons merge graphic and web design, infographics unify content marketing, graphic, and web design. It’s a way of threading everything the user consumes together in one cohesive construct.

Like logos and buttons, an infographic can range from extremely helpful to discouraging. Some infographics have become so popular that they earn inbound links to the image address, which helps SEO.


HVAC Infographic

Source: https://www.oliverheatcool.com


User Experience (UX)

We spoke about UI or user interface, but the most crucial part of a website is UX or user experience. Although it is less quantifiable, UX encompasses the overall experience of the website visitor.

A visitor’s experience relates to everything previously discussed on this page, from aesthetics and visual presentation to navigation and website functionality.

Of course, codebase remains the foundation of UX since it ultimately dictates it, even if the users themselves don’t realize it on a fundamental level. While a single metric cannot measure UX, groups of data can paint a general picture of its performance, such as bounce rate, pages per session, etc.

Google understands website visitors’ behavior better than ever before and uses that information to inform its rankings.

The highest sites keep users actively engaged, which is reflected in behavioral metrics.

Whether it’s visiting multiple pages on a website or engaging with content elements on the homepage, users make their feelings apparent to Google in more ways than one.

The goal of every HVAC website is to generate HVAC leads, and there’s no safer way to accomplish this than through enhancing the user’s experience and inspiring them to complete a call to action.


Behavioral Metrics

We can best understand UX through user metrics like bounce rate and pages per session.

Although we can all subjectively visit an HVAC website and form an opinion on it, actions demonstrate our most accurate conclusions.

Any local service website that can keep users engaged and encourage participation in sales funnels and calls to action will benefit through metrics.


Google Analytics Screenshot

The best way to track user behavior is through Google Analytics, a free tracking tool.

Website Feedback

Aside from measuring user behavior, asking them outright for feedback can also be helpful.

While it doesn’t provide the raw data that Google values, it informs heating & cooling businesses about their site’s strengths and weaknesses, explained from a visitor’s perspective.

You might even get criticism so harsh that you wonder if they’re intentionally combative in hopes of weakening your will as a contractor.


Survey Monkey Survey Example

Sometimes, people will hold back on criticisms, but if you include an anonymous survey directly on your website, there’s little for them to hold back.


Source: Survey Monkey


Repeat Visitors

Separate from the user’s behavior when first visiting your website, a telling piece of information can be the ratio by which visitors return.

Sometimes, brand notoriety can influence visitors to return to a site repeatedly, something that should make itself apparent by the percentage of traffic reaching the site through a branded search or a direct visit.

Other times, more than brand recognition, it is about the site’s design and its UX quality. All the design elements discussed in this post can influence repeat visitations.


HVAC Website Design Company

For an HVAC SEO company you can trust to design a high-quality website, choose HVAC Webmasters. Each website constructed by expert webmasters is custom-made and tailored to the client’s needs and brand.

With a team of designers on staff (website & graphics), we can produce a high-conversion online marketing channel for your heating & cooling business.

A website serves as the foundation for your digital marketing strategy. It influences SEO, Google Maps, and conversion rate optimization.

As a company focusing on online marketing for HVAC companies, we are uniquely qualified to construct a website that checks all your boxes in 2024.


HVAC Webmasters Web Design Screenshot

Our design team has over ten years of experience crafting custom websites for HVAC professionals.


Affordability is always a marketing consideration, but ROI or return on investment is the most important. A website template might cost less upfront, but how much money will it bring in?

If you don’t know the answer to that question, you should opt for a free SEO audit that quantifies your rank position based on call volume.

A lack of calls on your site means you’re not ranking on either Google Organic or Google Maps. If that’s the case, even the nominal investment you’ve made in a website template is a negative ROI.

Remember that our services are incredibly affordable for agency-level website design, so we are happy to discuss the details further with you at your convenience. 


Custom Websites for HVAC Contractors

Are you tired of template websites that hinder your SEO efforts? Invest in a custom website from HVAC Webmasters.

Our design team implements your logo and color scheme within a custom codebase, creating a conversion machine. Every design technique incorporates SEO and lead generation.

You’ll no longer worry whether blocks of code get crawled by Google. We have the data and protocol to ensure that Google indexes your site and prefers it.


HVAC Website Design Example (Custom)

Each of our website designs includes custom branding, coding, conceptual design, and color schemes.


Branded Websites for HVAC Companies

We don’t just build a website; we help create a brand for HVAC companies. Because the internet is more significant than any single website, it is vital to integrate your brand onto other web entries like social media networks and local business directories.

Brand synergy is incredibly useful when these properties link back to your website and vice versa. That’s why we include social media icons on your homepage so that visitors can find you on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

We believe that digital marketing ventures should target a complete web presence.


Website Lead Generation for Heating & Cooling Contractors

A custom-branded website can generate leads with the right calls to action.

Each website designed by HVAC Webmasters aims to connect relevant consumers to your office line.

By integrating your contact information into our codebase, we can input clickable phone numbers in multiple areas throughout your site.

Click-to-call functionality encourages users to take an additional step in the sales conversion process.

We facilitate a connection between users who need HVAC services in your local area and yourself as contractors or companies in their general radius.