What a hotel website actually needs
The parts of a hotel website that change revenue, and the parts that only look busy. A practical checklist for property owners and managers.
Most hotel websites are judged on how they look. That is the wrong test. The right test is whether a person who lands on the page at 11pm, on a phone, with patchy signal, ends up staying with you instead of closing the tab.
Here is what actually matters, in the order it matters.
Speed, before anything else
A guest will not wait. If the page takes more than about three seconds on a mobile connection, a large share of visitors leave before they see anything at all. Speed is not a technical detail that sits below design. It is the first design decision.
The usual culprits are large unoptimised photographs, a pile of third party scripts, and page builders that ship far more code than the page needs. A hotel site should be measured on a throttled mobile connection, not on the office wifi.
Photography that answers questions
Guests are not browsing for pleasure. They are trying to answer specific questions. Is the room big enough for three people? What does the bathroom look like? How far is the beach, really?
Galleries that cycle slowly through wide marketing shots answer none of that. Room pages with honest photographs of the actual room, the actual bathroom, and the actual view do.
Rates and availability that are not a dead end
If your website shows a room and the next step is an email address, you have lost most of the people who were ready to act. Whatever booking system you use, the path from interest to reservation has to be short and obvious, and it must work on a phone.
Content your team can change
The offer changes. The seasonal rate changes. The restaurant closes for two weeks. If every change requires a developer, the site goes stale within a year. A hotel site needs a content system that a manager can update in five minutes without fear of breaking the layout.
The boring things that quietly earn money
- Every page should tell search engines what it is, so that people searching for your area and your kind of property can find you.
- Contact details and directions should be one tap away on a phone.
- The site should work for people using screen readers, which is both the right thing to do and increasingly a legal expectation.
- Somebody should look at the numbers monthly. Which pages do people leave from? Where do enquiries come from?
What we would ask before building
Before writing any code for a property, the questions worth answering are: where do your bookings come from today, what does your team update most often, what do guests ask you repeatedly by email, and what does your current site make hard? The answers usually change the plan more than any design preference does.
If you want a second opinion on your current site, we are happy to look at it and tell you honestly whether it needs rebuilding or just fixing.