What makes the perfect homepage? // Hospitality Edition
On average, 80% of customers visit a restaurant’s website prior to dining there for the first time.
This shows the importance of building a strong digital presence for your brand, starting with an impactful website.
On average, you have around 30 seconds to entice visitors when they land on the homepage of a website. Within this time, it is essential to get customers to engage and interact with your site to maximise your conversions.
We’ve put together our hospitality homepage essentials for 2017…
1. A Responsive Website
Having a responsive website means it will function on any device, no matter the shape or size. With increasing numbers of traffic coming from mobile devices, it is essential to have a user-friendly site to retain visitors and to increase the average session duration. Also, if your website is responsive, it will be recognised by Google, increasing its search ranking and visibility.
2. A Clear Navigation
A clear navigation is the basis of a good homepage. This is particularly important for hospitality sites which usually include menu and booking pages. There are two different navigation types that can be used on a homepage.
- A full bleed navigation, spreading across the top of a homepage, clearly showing the different pages within the website. It’s a good idea to make this type of navigation ‘sticky’ so it follows the visitor throughout the site, allowing them to select between different pages.
- A hamburger navigation (side menu). This type of navigation is perfect for mobile responsive sites as it looks clean and takes up little space. This type of navigation expands to show a full navigation menu.
3.Strong CTA’s
Call to Action buttons allow users to take the direct action you want them to follow. CTA’s can include book and sign-up buttons and can also navigate users to other pages. It’s important CTA’s stand out to entice visitors, creating conversions rather than website bounces.
4. Data Capture (CRM)
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) involves capturing and analysing customer data to build relationships and create a loyal customer base. From this, businesses can create engaging and specific content to send to their database, driving sales. It is important to include a data-capture form on the homepage of a website. This can include a promotional incentive such as a discount voucher to prompt sign-ups, constantly increasing the total database.
5.Integrated Social Feed
Integrating social media onto the homepage of a website not only looks great but can be used as a sales tool to drive bookings. Around 66% of customers view a restaurant’s social media page before dining there. Integrated social feeds can also act as an image gallery. This is particularly useful as it means the images are constantly updated as and when a new post is added to the social media platform.
And last but not least…
6. Keep it updated
Finally, it’s important to regularly update homepage content to keep the website looking fresh and current. Also, Google recognises regularly updated sites as highly relevant, boosting their search ranking. So make sure you’re regularly making updates!
- https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/learn-from-restaurant marketing
- http://www.bighospitality.co.uk/Hot-Topics/Digital/Social-media-restaurants-not-just-for-young-Millennials-says-poll