When’s the last time your checked your hotel website speed? If you haven’t checked it recently, it’s a good idea to move this to the top of your to do list. If your pages load too slowly, customers will go elsewhere to book a room. Over time, this can have a major negative impact on your business.
Slow Hotel Website Speed Will Cause Mobile Users to Leave
It’s important to understand that the notion of slow website speed hurting your business isn’t just based on speculation. On the contrary, research confirms it has a negative effect on the user experience to a substantial degree. This is particularly true of users visiting your site on mobile devices. According to Google, approximately 40% of mobile users will leave a page if it takes more than three seconds to load. That’s obviously bad for business.
Imagine a user is visiting your site. They decide to book a room. But, instead of moving to the booking page, the page is stuck loading. They might decide they’d rather head over to an online travel agency and book through them instead. As a result, you wouldn’t make as much money off that customer as you could due to the high commission fees OTAs charge.
Luckily, there are a few steps you can take to ensure your site loads faster. They include:
Reduce CSS
CSS files can play important roles in websites. Unfortunately, their lines of code often tend to be long. Developers like CSS because it’s easy to work with. However, excess code will slow your pages down. That’s why it’s a good idea to let developers work with CSS, but remove the unnecessary extra code as a final step before a page is actually published on your site.
Defer JavaScript
Deferring JavaScript loading simply means developing your pages so that large JavaScript files don’t load until other files have loaded first. This is an effective way to improve page speed, and is also easy to implement if you use WordPress; plugins such as WP Rocket allow you to simply check a box that specifies you want to defer JavaScript loading before publishing a page.
Use Browser Caching
With browser caching, instead of reloading files every single time someone visits your site, local versions of files will load instead. This is a particularly good way to make the right impression on repeat visitors.
Reduce Image Size
Some people make the mistake of assuming they should remove images from their pages in order to improve loading speed. That’s an understandable assumption to make, but it goes against SEO best practices. Images simply make content more dynamic. On a hotel website, they also play an essential role, displaying your properties in vivid and engaging ways. You want to make sure you include them often.
What you should do, however, is compress images as much as possible without sacrificing quality.
Have questions? You can also coordinate with experts. They’ll use best practices to boost your site speed so that you’re far more likely to convert guests. That’s key to ensuring OTAs don’t steal more of your business.
