A website is a required digital marketing channel to work as an online shop front for the hotel to reach customers. Ensuring the essentials below makes it easier for your hotel website to work effectively and attract much traffic, thereby increasing conversions and revenue as a result.

What features should a professional hotel website have?

Here are some essentials of a hotel website that you can refer to.

Clear and balanced layout

The website layout is one of the important features. It requires a good balance of text and visual elements in order to provide an easy read. Hotel website builders must invest in visual elements such as images and videos to make it attractive and represent the hotel style.

You should optimize the size of the high-quality images to not affect the loading speed of the website. There are some easy-to-use image optimization tools for non-designers such as Paint or Canva, or Photoshop, Illustrators for professional editing if you have some design knowledge and skills. In addition, the colors of images or patterns and website layout need to be aligned with the hotel’s brand identity such as logo, fonts and style.

Easy to navigate

Another important feature is navigation. You should pay attention to the primary navigation like the main menu bar for the most critical and interesting information, or the secondary navigation for less important information such as the links ‘About Us’, ‘Terms of conditions’, ‘Sitemap’, etc. Websites having a clear navigation display will direct users to the information they need quickly, and significantly reduce the bounce rate.

Responsive web design – Fast-loading speed

Your customers will use many different devices such as computers, laptops, tablets, phones, etc to access your website. Therefore, you need to make the site responsive to multi-devices. If you choose a WordPress theme, you should choose one which supports the responsive feature.

Some themes support responsiveness and fast loading speeds such as Hotel Booking, Hotel Zante and Hotel Link template website with more than 40 modern template designs to give you a diverse range of options. Moreover, you should frequently check the website speed to make sure that it takes less than 3 seconds to load everything. Remember to optimize the uploaded photos and videos to ensure a fast loading speed.

Quality content

Content connects websites and customers. Quality content is a “must” to drive more users to your site and keep them interested. When working on building content, you should pay attention to the following criteria:

1. Add value: the content must deliver practical information to the viewers and answer their implicit concerns on search terms. In addition to introducing services provided by the hotels, you should also provide useful travel news, must-know tips, industry trends… to attract more traffic to the site and those who have real booking needs.

2. Not too lengthy: Long articles will bore customers, causing them to exit the site before they finish reading the content on the page. The content needs to be accurate and informative. For instance, the main pages such as room type pages, general introductions… should be short in text, about 200-400 words, or the length could be 500-1000 words or more for blog posts. Since visitors tend not to spend time reading the content carefully but only skimming, the information should be concise, arranged in a logical layout and prominent for readers to easily capture.

Having a call to action

Besides the beautiful content, don’t forget to add call-to-action messages or buttons to increase conversions. On the pages of rooms information, it is good to display some call-to-action elements like:

1. The best badge rate: this is to confirm that your website offers a better price for the bookers than any other site.

2. The number of remaining rooms: when seeing that only 1 or 2 rooms are left, the potential bookers may be motivated to book now and confirm the reservation.

3. Discount on early booking: let users know that the promotions are limited regarding voucher quantity and time to take action.

Full of basic functions (booking, payment, contact, etc.)

A hotel website needs to have sufficient functions such as clear displays of room types with facilities, cancellation policies, rates, ability to search for availability, make a booking, make a payment and contact details for inquiries.

If you are still looking for a hotel website builder, contact us for a free consultation.