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Get your website live

The ordered path from a fresh HaulHQ account to a working website that takes bookings, end to end.

This is the whole path, in order. Each step links to the detail. If you are handing this to a web developer, send them Working with a web developer first.

In HaulHQ

  1. 1Finish onboarding. It ends when your public site is live, which is the point at which the rest of this works. A new account may be asked to book a free 30-minute setup call before its page can be published -- the wizard tells you if that applies to yours.
  2. 2Set your service area. The wizard offers to fill it in from your own zip code and how far you drive -- use that rather than typing, and untick anywhere you will not go. Add cities and zips: cities are what your public pages are gated on, so zips alone will leave you dark, and county names count as neither. See Service area.
  3. 3Add what you sell. Dumpster rental: add each container size on the Equipment screen, with its number of units, which creates the bookable units -- see Equipment & units. Junk removal: add your services on the same screen and put a price range on your load sizes under Settings > Pricing > Load Tiers -- see Load tiers & capacity.
  4. 4Set your hours and scheduling, then set booking capacity. These are two different screens and this trips up nearly everyone -- see Scheduling & business hours.
  5. 5Connect Stripe if you want to take payment online.

After you are live, the dashboard says what is still worth doing

A short card appears on the dashboard home listing settings most operators fill in next -- your Google review link, a lead that arrived from outside your service area. It only lists things that are actually unset, it disappears when there is nothing left, and each row links straight to the screen that fixes it. Card payments are prompted separately, and they are an invitation, not a requirement: plenty of operators do not need card payments through HaulHQ at all, and answering We take cash or other payments -- on that prompt or on the Connect Stripe for payments row of your setup checklist -- clears it for good.

Stop here and decide: do you need WordPress at all?

The steps above are enough. When you finish them your HaulHQ page at yourname.haulhq.app is live and taking bookings, and for a good number of operators that is the whole website. Everything below this line is the WordPress route, and it is worth thirty seconds deciding whether you want it before you start.

Read this before installing anything

Which website should I use? lays out the three options honestly -- what the free page does, what it cannot do, and when WordPress genuinely earns its keep. Start on the free page and move up when you have a reason is the right answer for most people.

On your own WordPress site

Not on WordPress?

These steps are the WordPress route. If you are on something else, or have no website at all, you can stop after the HaulHQ section above -- your HaulHQ page already is a website, it takes bookings on its own, and you can link to it from anywhere. If you run a site that accepts raw HTML, you can also paste the quote form into it; see Paste HaulHQ into a site you already run.

  1. 1Install the WordPress plugin and connect it. See Install the WordPress plugin.
  2. 2Work out which shortcodes you need and which page each goes on. See Which shortcodes, and where.
  3. 3Paste them in and publish.
  4. 4Test a real booking or quote from your phone, on the live site, not a preview. If you start a dumpster checkout and stop before paying, the booking shows as Awaiting payment and releases itself after two hours -- that is the abandoned-checkout rule working, not a fault.

Then, once jobs are running

Your crew taking photos on jobs is what fills the gallery on your website, once you feature the pairs you want shown. Nothing has to be uploaded separately, but you do have to know it works that way -- see Photos & your gallery.

The most common reason a site looks broken

An empty Equipment screen or a service area with no cities. Both produce pages that render but show nothing, which reads as a plugin problem and is not one.

Live is not the finish line

A live site does not get found on its own. Of the HaulHQ operators with a live, priced page, the ones getting work are the ones who put the link where their customers already were -- and that part is yours to do, not something the software does for you. HaulHQ turns people who are already looking for you into booked jobs; it does not conjure them.

Which link you promote depends on which website you ended up with, and getting it backwards wastes the effort:

  1. 1No website of your own? Your HaulHQ page at yourname.haulhq.app is your website. Promote that link.
  2. 2On WordPress, or any other site? Promote your own site, not your HaulHQ page -- and install the plugin or paste the embed first, so the quote form is actually on the page you are sending people to. Sending traffic to a second page competing with your own is worse than doing nothing.

Where to put the link

The dashboard carries this as a tickable list with the link one tap away, under Settings > General and on the dashboard home until your first lead comes in. In order:

  1. 1Your Facebook page -- the website field, and a post. People who already follow you are the easiest first bookings.
  2. 2Your Google Business Profile. If you have one, put the link in its website field; if you do not, create or claim the listing first. It is free, and for a local hauler with no website it is the single highest-value thing on this list -- it is what someone searching your town taps.
  3. 3Your social media, wherever you already post. One post with the link beats a profile that mentions you have a website.
  4. 4Google Ads, if you want to pay for traffic. Set up an account yourself and point the ads at your quote page. It is last because the three above are free and this one is not -- HaulHQ does not run ads for you and does not advise on budget.
  5. 5Text the customers you have already done work for. The best of the lot: someone who has paid you once is far more likely to book than a stranger.

Not for me is a real answer

Each row on that list can be ticked off or marked Not for me. If you do not use Facebook, say so and the row clears. We cannot see whether you posted anywhere, so the list is your own record, not a check we are running on you.