Hotel website design is a huge influence on the booking behaviour of travellers and should be a priority for your hotel. Travellers need a website to reflect their desires and expectations; if they aren’t excited by the way the website looks, it’s very unlikely they’ll go ahead and book a room.
The only way for hotels to function today is to have a professional, attractive, and fully-integrated online presence.
Your guests won’t settle for second best during their research so neither should you. Considering the fact that hotel website design best practices change frequently, it’s necessary to evaluate your website on a regular basis and determine if anything is lacking from the overall design.
One of the best ways to do this is to compare your hotel website design with others. This allows you to discover hotel website design inspiration and decide what will work best for your property.
Many properties spend a lot of time and money trying to build their own website, or hiring designers to do it for them. Neither situation is ideal.
Attempting to build your own without the necessary skill or qualifications will result in a subpar website, while engaging a designer will take a long time and expenditure initially – something that is ongoing every time an update is required.
This blog will give you all the hotel website design advice you need.
Hotel web design best practices
It’s very important that potential guests are able to navigate your website easily and quickly understand the content that’s most relevant to them.
What are some of the best practices for hotel web design?
- Implement an effective pattern into your hotel website design
The F Pattern and the Z Pattern are two of the most common patterns that travellers follow when they are booking rooms on a hotel property’s website.
The F Pattern includes headings and subheadings that grab the attention of the target audience and encourage them to continue to scroll down the page. It can be a text-heavy pattern which can drive traffic away from the site if you do not capture the audience’s attention quick enough.
The Z Pattern is typically followed on a page with lots of visual elements. The reader goes from the headlines to the visual elements and back to the sub-headings.
- Always include a call-to-action on the page – especially ‘book now’
There are various wordings that you can use for a call-to-action, and you also can incorporate the latest packages and promotions that you have available. The most important component, however, is the “Book Now” button which encourages travellers to finalise their reservations.
Luxury hotel website design: Why load time is so important
The optimisation of your hotel website load time is the first vital step in your mission to secure direct bookings.
Visitors to your page will be expecting a fast and seamless user experience. It doesn’t matter how amazing your website is to look at or how luxurious your property is – if it takes too long to load no one will ever see it.
This is especially relevant on mobile devices, with more than 70% of users saying they’ve encountered a website they considered too slow to load. On the web, around 50% expect a website to load within two seconds for them to be satisfied.
Not only will a slow load time frustrate travellers viewing your website but it will lower your search engine ranking, a crucial element of attracting direct bookings. If your site isn’t appearing on the first page of search results, the direct traffic you garner will be minimal.
There are many components of a website that can affect load time. Fortunately most of them can be solved by making specific alterations to the configuration of your website manually, or if you invest in a simple, intuitive website builder.
Here are 6 areas you can optimise to improve your hotel website load time:
1. Hosting
If your website is running on a shared hosting service, this will be less flexible and slower because as your site grows in usage and content it won’t have the necessary resources available to maintain an optimum speed. Consider moving to Virtual Server Hosting (VPS) or dedicated sharing.
2. HTTP requests
Most sites encounter load time issues from HTTP requests, which occurs when the web browser retrieves a file from the server. You can eliminate these by cutting down on external scripts such as commenting systems, icon boxes, pop-ups etc.
3. Images
The size of your images have a significant impact on the size, and ultimately speed, of your hotel website as a whole. The larger your images or other media files, the slower your site will be. Approximately 60% of site weight is attributed to images. While you definitely need beautiful, high-resolution images to show off your property, try to optimise them before you upload so the file size is as small as possible.
4. Caching
Caching is a process that stores static responses, significantly speeding up your website. When someone visits a page, the cached version will be served, unless a change has been made since the last time it was cached, meaning less requests have to be made to your server.
5. CSS and JS files
A Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) helps keep your website information in its desired display format. It controls font, size, colour, spacing etc. JS relates to JavaScript and may contain all the necessary HTML information. Removing as much whitespace, comments, redundant grammar, and reducing hex (colour) codes will help optimise these.
6. Plugins
Plugins are features that can bring new and exciting functionality to your website but the more you have, the slower your website so be sure if you’re installing them that they’re adding value to your site. Be sure to audit them regularly for any that are out of date or not being used.
Given just a one second delay in page response can result in a significant decrease in website conversions, hotel website load time should be a priority for hotels who want to maximise their direct bookings.
To optimise your website you would likely need to hire a web developer every time you want to make alterations, a costly and time-consuming process in the long run.
Luckily, technology exists to make this much easier. A simple, attractive, and instinctive website builder will do all the work for you. You need only upload your content and customise the available templates as you please, as often as you like.
Hotel website design templates
‘Hotel web design template’ may be too much of a rudimentary phrase to describe the type of product offered by companies that deal in website builders, but the templates provided within website builder tools can be extremely effective – while remaining simple to use.
