Patio Construction: A Service Page That Compares Materials

The private garden is the strongest client segment in landscape gardening: in 2025 it accounted for approximately 57 percent of the sector’s total revenue (BGL), which came to 6.32 billion euros (BGL). Part of this work concerns areas right next to the house, and for many customers the patio is the most visible part of the whole garden. Even so, many businesses list patio construction only as a keyword under “paving” or “garden design”. Anyone searching online for “have a patio built” or “porcelain patio” finds no answer there and contacts the next provider. How customers phrase their searches is covered in the article on search terms in landscaping.

A dedicated page for patio construction does three jobs. It carries the search terms that homeowners use for exactly this service. It answers the questions that would otherwise come up in the first phone call: Which surface suits us, what needs looking after, what lies beneath the surface? And it pre-sorts the enquiry, because the form at the end asks for the information a quote needs. The page sits as a subpage below the website for private garden businesses and, where the base and slope come up, links to an explainer page instead of repeating the same paragraphs.

The page does not have to crown a winner. There is no surface that suits every garden. A townhouse garden with children and a dog makes different demands than a seating area under old trees or a patio on a slope. What helps is a comparison that lays out the differences, leaves the decision with the customer and makes clear that advice at the site visit is part of the service. That attitude is what separates a service page from a brochure: it does not sell a surface, it sells the business that installs the right surface properly.

With timber, the question of how long it lasts comes up most often and is the hardest to answer. A good basis is the planning guide for outdoor timber decking on dataholz.eu, which is based on a user guide from Holzforschung Austria and the Institut für Holztechnologie Dresden. It expresses resistance to wood-destroying fungi in five classes, from DC 1 for very durable to DC 5 for not durable (dataholz.eu). The rating applies to the heartwood. Sapwood is generally rated as not durable, timber with a sapwood share of up to 5 percent can be rated like heartwood (dataholz.eu).

For the website, this leads to a clear rule: no number of years as a promise. The planning guide states explicitly that a service life cannot be derived directly from the durability class, even if literature and company brochures give such figures. The opposite direction is useful: for an intended service life of up to 15 years it calls for at least class DC 3, for up to 30 years at least DC 2; timber of class DC 3 and the heartwood of larch and Douglas fir only qualify there if all requirements for construction and maintenance are met (dataholz.eu). Where a range such as DC 3–4 is given, the lower rating should be assumed.

What the customer needs to know about appearance fits into one sentence: untreated timber turns gray. The planning guide describes graying as a purely visual criterion with no influence on the technical properties or the service life of the decking (dataholz.eu). Anyone who wants to keep the color needs regular care with cleaning and oil. That is a good starting point for a maintenance contract, which the service page can offer right away. What matters is that the page puts both options side by side honestly: timber that is allowed to turn gray, and timber whose color is maintained.

Patio slabs made of porcelain stoneware appeal to many customers because they combine the look of natural stone, concrete or timber with little care. The technical reason lies in water absorption: at no more than 0.5 percent, porcelain stoneware tiles absorb practically no water (Bundesverband Keramische Fliesen). Classic wall tiles made of earthenware absorb more than 10 percent and are therefore unsuitable outdoors (Bundesverband Keramische Fliesen). Whether a slab may be described as frost-resistant is decided by a test under ISO 10545-12, in which the water-saturated tile goes through 100 freeze-thaw cycles (Bundesverband Keramische Fliesen).

With ceramic, the weak point is therefore rarely the slab itself but the installation. The dense underside places high demands on adhesive bond and laying materials, and no water may collect beneath the surface and freeze in winter (Bundesverband Keramische Fliesen). That is why the ceramic section of the service page needs a sentence on the construction method: in a grit bed, in drainage mortar or on pedestals, each with drainage across the surface and in the base. This is where a landscaping business shows its expertise, because the customer can buy the slab themselves, but not the frost-proof build-up underneath.

Customers ask in years: “How long will it last?” The honest answer for every surface is that it depends on material, build-up, use and care. On websites this quickly turns into a sentence like “lasts a lifetime” or “maintenance-free for decades”. Such sentences are statements of fact that may have to be backed up if challenged, and for timber they contradict the technical literature, which explicitly does not derive a service life from the durability class. Anyone advertising with numbers of years they cannot back up creates expectations they will later be measured against.

What can be verified carries more weight: the durability class of the timber species, the water absorption and frost test of the ceramic, the quality mark and the wood content of WPC, the rock type of natural stone. Added to this is what the business itself owes, and that is more than an advertising promise. A patio with a load-bearing base is normally a structure (Bauwerk), and defect claims for a structure become time-barred after five years (Section 634a BGB). How a job is classified depends on the individual case; what this means for quote and acceptance is covered in the article on warranty in landscaping.

For the wording on the page, the same applies as for environmental claims: specific rather than general. “European larch, heartwood only, durability class 3 to 4” says more than “long-lasting natural wood”. “Porcelain stoneware, frost resistance tested, laid on pedestals” says more than “low-maintenance premium patio”. The customer does not have to understand every detail. But they can see that the business knows what it installs, and they can compare the details with a second quote.

With patios, the question of the price per square meter usually comes very early. A fixed figure is still rarely reliable, because excavation, access, existing surface, height and surface shift the amount more than the area does. On top of that comes the price trend in construction: prices for new conventionally built residential buildings in August 2026 were 5.5 percent above the same month of the previous year (Destatis), for earthworks the figure was 6.1 percent, for carpentry and timber construction work 7.2 percent (Destatis). These figures apply to residential new builds, not to gardens. But they show how quickly a price on a website goes out of date.

Anyone who shows prices anyway shows a range per surface with the month it applies to, describes what is included and states total prices including VAT, because total prices must be given to consumers (Section 3(1) PAngV). A range without a date may no longer be accurate after just a year without anyone noticing. The alternative is to do without figures and instead name the factors that determine the price. Both approaches are better than a “from” price that only applies to the simplest area. How to build ranges cleanly is shown in the article on showing prices on your website.

Patios are rarely built on impulse. Many homeowners think about the project in fall and winter, collect quotes and want to start in spring once the ground has dried out. For the website this means the patio page should be online before the turn of the year and clearly visible in the navigation. A business that receives complete enquiries with photos in January can bundle site visits, prepare samples and plan the season instead of phoning around for missing details in April.

We build service pages like this for landscaping businesses that plan and build patios: with a comparison of their own materials, a cross-section of the base, a form with photo upload from the phone and wording that names properties instead of superlatives. The content comes from your business, your projects and your suppliers’ documents. The framework is the website for private garden businesses, and for businesses focused on paved areas the website for paving and path builders; what additional service pages cost is shown under pricing.