As a B&B owner, you likely take a lot of pride in the experience that you provide your guests. You should offer an intimate, authentic space where guests can gather, relax and connect with one another. You provide the hospitality of an innkeeper, treating your guests more like family than like customers.
Knowing how important it is to make a good impression when your guests arrive to greet you, you also need to recognise the importance of making a good impression when a visitor arrives on your website. Your online visitors need to experience the same level of hospitality and convenience while researching as they will enjoy once they’re staying at your B&B.
Why do you need a user-friendly website?
For most of your guests, their first impression of your brand began long before they arrived for their stay. Many travellers will visit a website to learn more about the property they are considering, and this is when they first begin developing an opinion of your B&B.
Travellers are searching for websites that load fast, offer valuable visuals and insightful information, and that give them the opportunity to book quickly and easily online.
Without a user-friendly website, you are not going to be able to compete in the global travel market.
How you can improve your website functionality
Here are three tips to make your website more user friendly:
- Create a website filled with valuable content
First and foremost, you need to offer content that is going to engage your guests and keep them interested in your website. Your website should include information about the history of your property, the rooms that are available, the amenities you offer and the attractions in the local area. Your content also plays a key role in your search engine optimisation strategy, as the most powerful search engines seek to promote pages that offer fresh and accurate content.
- Make sure your site speeds are up to par
If you bog down your site with extra-large images or videos that take too long to load, you are going to lose an endless number of site visitors who don’t have the patience to wait. Your site should load within three seconds, at most.
- Optimise your website for mobile use
Every year, the number of travellers who book their arrangements on mobile devices rises exponentially. Your website not only needs to be easy to navigate on any type of mobile device, but it also needs to accept mobile bookings. The best way to do all of this is to create a B&B website with a responsive web design.
The website functionality of your B&B website will have a direct impact on the number of bookings that you receive at your property. Today’s travellers are heavily dependent upon technology when it comes to planning and booking their upcoming trips. In order to create a user-friendly website for your B&B, you will want to partner with an all-in-one business solution that offers website building tools for B&Bs.
The post Why B&Bs need a user friendly website and how to create one appeared first on Front Desk & Reservation System for Small Hotels – Little Hotelier.
