A sparkling car is a point of pride, and car owners may be more picky than you think when choosing a professional car wash service. A great car wash website should make this decision a no-brainer, but how? While I've found that visual appeal is important, service details, clear pricing, location, and availability are equally essential.
Features that really help to sell the service, however, are added conveniences such as an online booking system, information about the quality of cleaning products, and customer reviews. Our car wash AI website builder can help you get the ball rolling and will create a website tailored to your business, complete with content, in less than a minute.
Zarla checks that sites meet basic web standards for mobile and desktop. We also use Google's PageSpeed Insights, and WAVE, a service that evaluates accessibility for individuals with disabilities. PageSpeed scores and accessibility are important factors for search engine rankings. PageSpeed scores may not match user experience and can vary substantially.
Precott Valley, Arizona, U.S.
Ocean Blue Car Wash describes itself as one of the premier car wash services in Arizona, which it attributes to the technologically advanced products used, value pricing, speed of service, and highly trained staff. At first glance, the home page appeared to provide most answers right there or with a link.
After taking a closer look, I thought the "See What Makes Ocean Blue Different" video did not quite meet my expectations as it showcased the car wash well but did not highlight the key elements that make it different with text or audio. Aside from one low-quality image, the site's visual content is crisp and compelling, doing an excellent job of promoting the brand and service.
I liked that I could find all the essential information, such as service details, pricing, locations, contact details, and opening hours, without any effort on the home page. The inclusion of customer reviews helps to build trust, while the prominent CTA encouraging visitors to get their free car wash provides a compelling reason for users to engage.
There is one low-quality image on the home page that really stands out. accessScan deemed the site only semi-compliant with assistive technology. WAVE flagged more than a dozen linked images missing alternative text on the home page, along with several elements with low contrast across the site's pages.
The hero video on the home page works very well to sell a premium car wash experience, but the top-quality feel is diluted by the low quality of the image beneath the video content, which is really noticeable on a larger desktop screen. While the site has an "About" page, this is not as easy to find, with its link only featured in the bottom page menu.
With regard to loading speed, our real-world experience was decent and reflected in Google's PageSpeed Insights test's score of 79/100 for performance on the home page.
The lower-quality image on the home page is not as noticeable on a smaller, mobile screen, but I also felt that the hero video has a less gripping effect. While the stacked display of the car wash packages feels a bit bulky, I like that the details weren't omitted. However, the section with the locations should be adjusted on the mobile version to allow for an easier overview instead of scrolling down one by one.
I would have liked to see the "GET YOUR FREE CAR WASH" CTA button as a sticky feature at the top of the page rather than hidden behind the hamburger menu. On Google's PageSpeed Insights, the mobile site's home page performance score was 32/100.
Glasgow, Scotland, U.K.
Kingston Car Spa is a car wash business with a premium positioning that emphasizes its commitment to quality vehicle care, upholding the highest standards, and using the finest chemicals. I thought the website reflected this sense of prestige very well with its sophisticated dark color scheme and minimalistic approach to content.
The very concise text sections made for a rather quick browsing experience, but I thought it felt refreshingly honest and to the point, not trying to oversell its services or inundate me with aggressive and repetitive marketing messages. The site does not list pricing, and I thought the FAQ section could cover a few more common questions.
The site has unique branding for a car wash site and conveys its premium positioning well. I appreciated its concise content that was easy to digest, with customer reviews providing an all-important trust element. Overall, the site did well on WAVE, although it did flag a number of low-contrast issues across the site's pages.
The site mentions that they offer great prices and value for money but pricing details are not listed, and an indication of pricing or the pricing model could at least be addressed in the site's FAQs. While I enjoyed the short and direct nature of the content, grammar, and spelling errors gave me pause.
While very dark, I thought the large monochromatic background images worked very well on a large desktop screen to create a sense of prestige and refinement, enhanced by the parallax scrolling effect which made the scrolling experience feel sleek and elegant. On Google's PageSpeed Insights, the desktop site's home page scored a very good 96/100 for performance.
Being cropped instead of resized to fit smaller screens, the effect of the background images on the mobile version's home page was lost on me. I also missed the sleek effect of the parallax scrolling feature but was pleased to see that it maintained the small slide-in animations of content elements, which complement the site's overall debonair appeal. On Google's PageSpeed Insights, the mobile site's home page attained a performance score of 68/100.
West Hollywood, California, U.S.
Santa Palm Car Wash identifies itself as the “Car Wash of the Stars" and uses a high-contrast font often associated with Tinseltown and a hero image reminiscent of a classic Hollywood movie scene to create a retro, Hollywood-inspired feel on its website. While a good start to portraying this specific brand image, I felt that other creative choices on the website, including a photo of washed-out signage and little image variation, water it down.
I liked that the site lists prices and plan details but missed customer reviews, which are essential for a service business. However, I thought listing location, contact information, and opening hours at the top and the bottom of the website was a clever move to ensure that these are not easily missed.
It was easy for me to find key information about the business, and there is a convenient map integration. The site's retro aesthetic makes it stand out from competitors. The mobile and desktop sites' home pages both scored an excellent 100/100 for best practices on Google's PageSpeed Insights.
The photo of the washed-out outdoor sign stands out starkly, and the site is missing trust symbols. The site's content is rather limited, and I would have liked to see a blog and more attractive visual branding and images that reflect the Hollywood theme. WAVE flagged some errors on several pages, indicating accessibility issues.
Visiting the desktop site started out promising, with a skyline hero image and a cheesy, Hollywood-themed logo and tagline. However, this impression did not last, as scrolling down the home page the inconsistently applied theme becomes increasingly apparent through a mixed bag of visuals and noncomplementary fonts, which really stand out in a larger format on the desktop site.
I thought that the brown of the top banner, which clashes with the main colors of the website, is even more noticeable on the mobile site, due to the stacked and rather cramped look of the information it contains. While I could see the full hero image, unlike its desktop counterpart, its smaller scaling compared to the next element's heading renders it less captivating.
The shortlist of the service's top selling points is given too much space for my liking and should be clickable with more details available if deemed so important that they require such prominence, which is not as great on the desktop site. While the home page on the desktop site had a moderate performance score on Google's PageSpeed Insights, the mobile home page score was lower at 45/100.
New Britain, Connecticut, U.S.
Kingz Kar Wash offers car cleaning and detailing services and boasts Connecticut's longest car wash tunnel. Instead of the more common blue tones used by businesses in this niche, Kingz Kar Wash stands out with a bright green accent color in its branding, giving it a very distinct look.
Beyond this unusual choice, the website features mostly grayscale images that revert to their full-color version upon hovering, which I thought was another intriguing element. The hero video on the home page is a little too dark for my liking, making it come across more as visual background noise rather than selling me on the business's services.
The site has all the key features, such as service information, pricing, opening hours, and unique branding, that I consider essential for a good car wash website, along with a prominent CTA in the bottom banner encouraging users to download their mobile app.
Despite the bright green accents across the site, I felt it had a rather gloomy feel, and the full-color versions of images could be more vibrant. WAVE flagged a few accessibility issues across several of the site's pages.
The first thing I noticed about the desktop website is that the logo and tagline overlaying the hero image on the home page are not fully visible above the fold, and scrolling for them to be in view cuts off the hero video at the top. While I liked the idea of grayscale images coming to life with color upon hovering, I thought the full-color versions still looked a little dull and should be brighter for a more striking effect.
I was pleasantly surprised by the mobile site's home page, as the logo and tagline overlaying the hero video are fully visible upon opening the page. The grayscale-to-color effect does not have the same intriguing quality as on the desktop version, as I would either view the image or click on it on a mobile, with the latter briefly changing the image to color before taking me to a different page.
However, the full-color images did appear more vibrant to me on the mobile site, enhancing its appeal. The mobile site's home page achieved an impressive score of 100/100 for best practices and SEO on Google's PageSpeed Insights test but did less well in the performance category, where it scored 56/100.
Perth, Western Australia, Australia
Silver Sponge is a hand car wash business established in 2007 that has since grown to 24 sites across the Perth Metro region. The site has a modern, engaging design with images of the team adding a more personal touch. Customer testimonials add a welcome trust symbol.
While service details and pricing are provided, I thought the short introductory sentence in the service descriptions is particularly thoughtful, giving me an estimate of how long each service takes. A page featuring current offers and an online booking feature strengthens the site's user-centric appeal.
Custom photos and a clean, modern design make the site visually appealing, with customer testimonials lending it credibility and an online booking function offering users added convenience. Engaging elements, such as an image with a before-and-after slider, make the site fun to explore.
I don't have many complaints about this website aside from the occasional slow loading times experienced during our real-world tests. WAVE, on the other hand, noted multiple accessibility issues and low contrast between text and background colors across several of the site's pages.
At first glance, I thought the desktop site looked rather busy with its large top banner packed with CTAs to either side of the large logo and underlined by a full menu bar, but on second thought I found it was not too much to appear overwhelming. Perusing the page's content is made more pleasant by the top banner minimizing slightly upon scrolling, giving more space to the home page's content.
On the mobile site, I thought the hero image would be more impactful as the plan options do not overlap with those on the desktop version. I found it unusual that the hamburger menu on the mobile site is located toward the top-right of the page, but the sidebar menu that it opens slides in from the left. Consistent with our real-world experience of rather slow loading times, Google's PageSpeed Insights tests scored the mobile home page's performance at a low 36/100.
You can have a look at the list of car wash website examples we curated to highlight what makes a good car wash website. Our favorites include Silver Sponge and Ocean Blue Car Wash.
Kingston Car Spa is an example of a luxury car wash website. It blends minimalism and sophistication to portray its positioning as a premium car wash.
There are sites, such as HTML Codex, that offer free downloadable website templates, including industry-specific options. However, you may find it easier to use an AI website builder, such as Zarla, to generate a website complete with content tailored to your business for free, with a small fee applicable to launch and host your website.
Determining the best car wash websites is a very subjective task. We searched the web for a few great examples, which we also reviewed to highlight what these sites excel at and where they can be improved. Silver Sponge and Ocean Blue Car Wash stood out as top favorites.
