HI·06.4 · How to · 8 min
A website worth booking on
The payment link from guide one proved people will book you directly. This is the upgrade: a small, fast site that a stranger will happily hand £800 to.
A quick word before you spend anything: the right time for this job is after your first couple of direct bookings, not before. Those early bookings prove the demand is real, and they teach you what guests actually ask about, which is worth more than any web designer’s opinion. If you haven’t had one yet, start with HI·06.1 and come back.
The booking engine does the heavy lifting
The difference between a brochure site and a booking site is a calendar with a price and a working payment step. That part comes from a booking engine, and it’s the one decision worth taking slowly. Tools like Lodgify give you the site and engine together; OwnerRez gives you more power for more homework; Boostly builds it on WordPress so you own the whole thing. I’ve kept an honest comparison on the Tools page, including who each one isn’t for.
Whichever you pick, the test stays the same as it was in guide one: your own phone, mobile data, private tab, found-it to paid-for in under five minutes.
The five pages that matter
You don’t need thirty pages. You need these five, done properly:
- Home. One good photo, one sentence saying what and where you are, and a visible “check availability” button. Resist the temptation to write your life story above the booking button.
- Availability and prices. Live calendar, honest prices, no “enquire for rates”. Every extra step loses a percentage of guests.
- The property. Photos, the practical details people email you about anyway (parking, dogs, cot, wi-fi speed), and the things nearby worth coming for.
- About you. A face and a couple of paragraphs. It sounds soft, but this page does serious work: people are far happier paying a person than a website.
- Reviews. Pull your Google reviews in (guide HI·06.2 gets those flowing) and quote the best OTA ones with the guest’s first name. You earned them; use them.
Photos: the honest shortcut
If the budget allows one luxury, make it photography; it lifts everything else the site does. If it doesn’t, a modern phone on a £15 tripod in the hour after sunrise will get you 80% of the way. Tidy ruthlessly, turn every light on, shoot from corners at chest height, and take ten times more than you need. Whatever you do, don’t reuse the OTA’s watermarked copies of your own pictures.
Trust signals, because strangers are rightly cautious
A guest paying your website directly is doing something slightly brave, so make the reassurance visible: a real address and phone number in the footer, card payments through a recognisable checkout (Stripe’s is the one most people know without realising it), your cancellation policy in plain English, and the Champion Badge near the booking button linking to an independent explanation of why booking direct is safe.
Small technical things that pay their way
- The domain: your property’s name, kept boring. It should match the name on your Google Business Profile exactly, because matching names is how guests confirm they’ve found the real you.
- Speed: most guests arrive on a phone with patchy signal. Compress your images (most booking platforms do this for you; check) and skip the autoplaying video header, however lovely the drone footage.
- One email address on your own domain. bookings@yourproperty.co.uk looks the part and survives you changing booking engine later.
What not to spend on
A £20,000 agency build, a monthly “maintenance retainer”, or a blog you already know you won’t write. A tidy template with good photos and a working calendar beats a beautiful site with a broken one, every single time.
Site live? Point your Business Profile at it, and then guide HI·06.5 covers the part that worries most hosts: taking bookings without a platform standing behind you.