Clean and Effective Hotel Website Design: Tips and Best Practices

Guestroom Genie have complied a list of our top 9 factors that we feel are essential to include or consider when creating a user-friendly hotel website:

1. Clear and Intuitive Navigation: Your website should be easy to navigate, and the menus should be clear and concise, making it straightforward for visitors to find the information they need.  The most important pages, such as rooms and rates, should be prominently displayed.
2. Simple and Attractive Design: Your website should be visually appealing with a simple and clean design that makes it easy to read and understand.  Focus on the essentials to avoid cluttered pages and consider limiting your colour palette.  The design of the website should be consistent throughout, with the same fonts, colours, and styles used on every page. This helps visitors feel comfortable and familiar with your website.
3. Mobile Responsive: Optimising websites for mobile devices is critical as more people are using smartphones to access the internet than ever before.  A mobile-responsive design automatically adjusts the layout of your website to fit the screen size of the device being used. This makes it easy for users to navigate and read your website on their mobile devices.  In March 2021, Google switched to mobile-first indexing for all websites in its search index. This means that Google now crawls and indexes the mobile version of websites first and uses that information to determine their ranking in search results.  Therefore, it is essential that your website is optimised for mobile devices, with a responsive design, to ensure that it performs well in search rankings.
4. Fast Loading Speed: The website should load quickly even on mobile devices with a slow connection, to ensure visitors do not get frustrated waiting for the page to load. Businesswire report 73% of people polled would abandon a slow running website, and try a competitor, and 80% report a slow running website is more frustrating than a website that is down.
5. Booking Engine: Your website should have an easy-to-use booking engine that allows visitors to book a room quickly and securely.
6. High-Quality Images: Professional photography of your hotel rooms, communal areas, amenities, and surroundings should be displayed on your website to give visitors an accurate representation of the hotel. High-quality visuals are important to really showcase your hotel.
7. Useful and Up to Date Information: The website should provide current, useful information such as room rates, access times, amenities, location, local attractions, and anything else your guests need to know before their stay.
8. Call-to-Action Buttons: The website should include clear calls-to-action that encourage visitors to book a room, sign up for email newsletters, or follow the hotel on social media.
9. Reviews and Testimonials: Reviews and testimonials from previous guests should be displayed on the website to provide social proof and build trust.

By incorporating these features, your hotel website can be made more user-friendly, which can lead to increased bookings and guest satisfaction.