Hotel Website Redesign Tips to Increase Bookings In 2023
The start of a new year is a great opportunity for a new beginning. How about the quality of your hotel’s online presence then? Changes in the digital world occur rapidly. Conventional wisdom is that hotels should update their websites every two to three years (on top of minor annual updates). Changes to search engine optimization, functionality, and industry standards may have a significant effect on the number of bookings you get via your website. You want more reservations, right? It may be time for a hotel website makeover.
How to redesign your hotel website to increase bookings:
Achieve Industry Standards for Web Design:
If you want your hotel’s website to seem up to date, you should talk to your web designer about the newest best web design practices and hotel web design trends. You may save time by beginning with a preexisting template instead than creating everything from scratch.
Optimize for Google:
Core Web Vitals is an algorithm developed by Google that evaluates websites based on performance metrics including how quickly they load pages, how interactive they are, and how stable their visuals are. All of these things contribute to a satisfying interaction for the user. If your website doesn’t meet those standards, it will drop in the search engine results. Building a brand-new site with optimized image sizes and no unnecessary code on the backend will guarantee that your site loads quickly.
Optimize For Search Engines:
When you redesign, you’re giving your site’s search engine optimization a clean slate. Start with making sure all of your photos have alt tags and your meta descriptions have your keywords in them. Alt tags for images should be descriptive and relevant to the picture and page content for both SEO and screen reader usage (for people who need a visual aid). Enhance the current media with fresh visuals, while making sure their size won’t slow down your site. How and where a picture is displayed on your hotel’s website will determine its optimal dimensions and quality.
Personalize It:
The future of web design is highly invested in user customization. To ensure that your website’s visitors always get the most relevant material, you should have your designer suggest certain programs that can use predictive analytics to do so. If that’s too involved or beyond your remit, focus on how to provide useful material to your most loyal customers instead.
You may, for instance, target a certain demographic with tailored package deals. Create a questionnaire that tailors package and lodging recommendations to the visitor’s preferences by asking about their preferred activities or the reason they’re in town. It’s a cheap method to differentiate your hotel from the competition, and more significantly, it will make your customers happy.
Marketing With Images And Storytelling:
while updating your hotel’s website, don’t stray too far from your established tone and voice. Distractions like “new this” and “flashy that” make it hard to focus on the real goal, which is, of course, to fill hotel rooms. Maintaining a recognizable brand identity across all touchpoints (including website color scheme, imagery, copywriting, and narrative) is an effective way to win over new visitors and retain the loyalty of established customers. Redesigning your hotel’s website should include images, consistent brand language, and prominent calls to action that all work together to tell your brand’s narrative and encourage guests to book their stay.
Each element of your hotel’s online presence should further reassure potential visitors that they’ve made the right choice. Don’t forget that reviews are also a chance for customers to tell the tale of their experience at your hotel. Use testimonials as an unbiased strategy to get reservations on your website.
Add an FAQ:
Although you should try to foresee queries from visitors and address them in the text of your website, you shouldn’t forget about your hotel’s frequently asked questions page. In addition to helping site visitors easily discover the information they need, this kind of content is also great for search engine optimization.
Compete with OTAs:
This is a major one. Commission reservations are less thrilling than direct bookings, yet OTAs are necessary for expanding a hotel’s reach. It’s best if visitors can reserve a room with you. Investment in search engine optimization (SEO) and site design/performance will undoubtedly lead to an increase in direct bookings. Your online booking engine must be optimized for maximum conversions. If you do not provide a seamless online booking experience that takes use of real-time availability and pricing from your property management system (PMS) and is geared for mobile devices, you risk losing visitors to the competition.
New Web Tech
We’d be negligent if we didn’t also highlight some new website technology to think about or keep in mind for your future website makeover, in addition to the fundamentals we covered above. Some fascinating uses of AI include chatbots that act as personal assistants, augmented reality tours of potential homes, and heat maps that reveal users’ click patterns so you can figure out what parts of your site are successful and which ones may need some tweaking.
We recommend finding a web designer with expertise in the hospitality industry who is also currently on the standards and tools necessary to revamp your hotel’s website. Don’t wait for a drop in online reservations to make adjustments; instead, include web design in your yearly maintenance plan to maintain your site functioning.