How to Improve your Hotel Website Page Load Speed

Let’s talk about your hotel website page load speed.

Or more specifically – why your page load speed could be your own worst enemy and how to avoid it.

While increasing your hotel website page load speed comes under our series of improving conversion rates, it is also essential for increasing hotel website traffic, so we highly recommend checking out that article once you’ve finished this one.

Now let’s take a look at why website page load speed is so important.

Visitors on your hotel website

Unless your hotel has an incredibly specific clientele, your visitors are coming from all walks of life, and from multiple stages along the customer journey. These could be:

• Businesses looking to host international guests
• Honeymooners searching for their dream stay
• Customers searching for holiday inspiration
• Previous customers looking to return

From top-of-the-funnel curious lookers, to bottom-of-the-funnel bookers, your hotel website needs to apply to as many of them as possible.

Hotel Website Page Load Speed Issues

It seems a minor thing doesn’t it?

Surely a beautiful website will take a little more time, and be well worth the wait for a potential guest. Better to be slower and better, than quicker and not as convincing?

Well, actually no.

If your webpage is slow-loading and unresponsive you could lose an incredible amount of potential guests. Especially if your visitors are on their mobile phones – which is highly probable in our era of mobile technology.

Studies actually show that around 53% of mobile users go elsewhere if a page takes over three seconds to load. That’s over half of your potential guests! And this only applies to the first page that a customer clicks on. 

Even in the best case scenario – a customer waits to load a single page. They then repeat this cycle of delays while they navigate throughout your website. They are repeatedly put off from making a direct booking with every single click.

It’s exhausting and off-putting for potential guests who want an easy, hassle-free booking. You may as well put a sign up telling them not to bother at all.

Tricks to improve your hotel website page load speed.

Declutter

Mind-blowing we know.

Review your webpage – especially in its mobile format. Sometimes less is more, and there are simply items on your page that you do not need. Visuals that are not necessary simply take up space and increase loading-times, increasing the probability of customers navigating elsewhere.

Strip it down, and remember the KISS method. Keep It Simple, Silly!

Compress

It takes time to build a beautiful hotel website, so take a little longer and ensure that all of your text and images are compressed.

There comes a point when increased picture quality does absolutely nothing for improving your conversion rates. So keep your stunning visuals, but compress them as much as you can. 

Obviously we don’t want blurry and pixelated, but every little compression means you improve your hotel website page load speed.

Videos

Videos are a luxury when it comes to hotel websites.

They are not often a necessity, especially when it comes to loading your homepage (which is where most potential guests will arrive first!) So unless it’s critical – get rid of it! 

Or at the very least consider hosting video content on an external site such as Vimeo or Youtube. In this case you can simply embed the video in your webpage rather than taking up precious bandwidth and reducing loading speed.

Lazy loading

If you must use videos and pictures in abundance, then there is one option available for your website – lazy loading.

Lazy loading is a way to streamline the customer’s viewing experience, and provide a balance between load page optimisation and user-fulfillment. Essentially it only loads the necessary parts of your webpage to begin with.

Far quicker than bulk loading the entire page at once, lazy loading replaces images and videos with a placeholder that is only then loaded when the customer reaches that part of the page. This allows quick loading time in the beginning and minimises the risk of guests navigating away from the page because of impatience. 

With WordPress tools such as Infinite Scroll, you can give your hotel website the chance to make that visit count.

After all, you only ever get one chance at a good first impression.

Caching for next time

It won’t help you on your first impression, but it will certainly help a returning looker.

With the miracle of technology, you can cache your website information on a visitor’s phone. When a potential guest returns to your site, perhaps looking for a bit more inspiration, or curious about prices – your hotel website page load speed becomes far quicker than ever before.

Hosting Provider

We saved this one for last because it’s the big one.

No amount of compressing, reducing clutter, deleting plugins or using special tools will help you if your hosting provider is not decent. Even the clearest, well-planned and optimised website can take over 10 seconds to load if you haven’t made the right choice when it comes to hosting.

You need a provider that delivers high-quality storage arrays, strong security, the latest speed technologies and most importantly – excellent customer support. Check out our friends at GreenGeeks^® who not only provide best-in-class service, they are 300% green-powered too!

If you don’t know where to start – get in contact with us! We have our select favourites to recommend to all businesses. Now get your web page optimised, and start raking in those guests – they are waiting for you!