Is your website losing bookings by making some common user experience mistakes? Plenty of seemingly modern hotel websites have subtle flaws that might not be obvious at first glance, but consistently end up hurting conversion rates.
Clunky navigation, a poorly optimized call-to-action button, and slow loading times can all have a negative impact on booking revenue. In the following post, we’ll point out 7 common UX mistakes that your hotel website might be making.
1. Hamburger menus on desktop websites
Hamburger menus, “hidden” menus represented by three dashes in the corner of a website, have become popular recently for their generally clean and aesthetically pleasing look over traditional navigation. This has been especially great for mobile sites, where screen space is limited.
But how about on desktop sites? Although hamburger menus may look slick on such sites, it can actually end up being bad for business. One study found that using a normal navigation bar resulted in users finding a Contact page 42% faster than with a hamburger menu! Quite a few other usability studies have found similar results.
When it comes to e-commerce, speed and convenience are of the essence—you don’t want your users having to guess where to click next. With plenty of screen room, your desktop site should be optimized to ensure users can find things easily. A horizontal navigation bar at the top of the page should suffice.
2. Not putting the 3 most popular pages first on your navigation
Speaking of good navigation, it’s important that hotels list their most popular pages first. On most hotel websites, data shows that the first three pages that people visit (after the homepage) are “Rooms,” “Special Offers,” and “Gallery”—and usually in that order.
To make these pages super-easy to find, make sure they’re always clearly visible in your website’s navigation bar, listed in priority from left to right (in languages that read left to right). If users are forced to search for the content they’re most interested in, you could quickly lose their interest and a potential booking in the process.
