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Quick Guide To Create A Website For Your Small Hotel Or Any Rental Property In 30 Minutes

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Create a website for your small hotel, B&B, motels or a rental apartment to make your online presence felt.It’s a great way to attract more audience and win more customers.

In this article, I will show you how you can create a website for your small hotel on your own, and in just 30 minutes.

We’ll also discuss a few mistakes that you should avoid and a few tips that can help your website (and ultimately your hotel business) grow significantly.

Such websites may or may not have the feature of online booking, but they surely help you grow your business.

So follow the steps below to get yourself a hotel website created:

  1. WordPress for your hotel business website
  2. The domain name and hosting for your hotel’s website
  3. Choosing the WordPress template
  4. Personalizing your website
  5. Displaying features, room, and services
  6. Allowing booking services
  7. Maintaining your site
  8. SEO tips for your WordPress hotel website

There’s a video as well of this entire process, at the end of this guide.

1. WordPress for your hotel business website

WordPress is one of the most popular CMS and it can be used for creating a website of almost any niche.

WordPress for small hotel website
There are many reasons why you should use WordPress for your online hotel booking sites.

  • There are so many plugins that let you turn your WordPress setup into a fully functional booking software
  • WordPress is easy to use and comes with intuitive back-end options to manage your website
  • The availability of different themes with different features gives you the freedom of choice. You can pick up from among thousands of different hotel WordPress themes.
  • Many of the hosting service providers provide Specialized and optimized hosting service for WordPress
  • WordPress is free and there are a few free WordPress themes that you can try.
  • Other plugins and add-ons to add features and enhance the features of your website

These were the few of many advantages of using WordPress for your hotel booking and reservation system. So we’ll go with WordPress to create our hotel website. If you are creating a website that allows online hotel booking, you should have a look at these examples of best booking websites to get some ideas from.

2. The domain name and hosting for your hotel’s website

To start off with your website, the pre-requirements are – A domain name and the hosting. There are so many companies out there that let you subscribe to hosting and offer domain names too.

I’d highly recommend BlueHost. Read: Why BlueHost is best for small business website hosting?

For our hotel business websites, there are many reasons to prefer Bluehost. Because it provides WordPress optimized hosting for WordPress.Their pricing packages are great too.

You can choose the basic package for your small hotel website or WordPress travel websites.

Bluehost

Bluehost also lets you pick up a free domain name. So first you have to choose the package plan, (the standard package) and then type in the domain name.

If the domain name is available, you can proceed further. If not, you can try for an alternate name.

When you finally find a domain name that suits your business needs, you can check out and your hosting providers will provide you with credentials to log into your server space (where your website’s files will reside).

domain name

3. Choosing the WordPress template for online booking that suits your needs

As I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of WordPress hotel themes available on the internet or you can use multipurpose themes like Avada or Salient. However, we recommend using niche themes as it makes your task of building a hotel website easier. Different WordPress theme providers, provide different themes with different features and design at different prices.

  • Choose a responsive theme, check how the design appears on mobile devices
  • Pick a theme that is customizable and flexible
  • The theme that is simple to use and implement

So you can choose the theme you like from among the thousands of options available. For this article, we’ll go for the Villa Rental WordPress theme.

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I’m going to show in this walkthrough are pretty much common with most of the theme. So regardless of what theme you choose, the procedure shown below applies to all.

Take a look at our WordPress hotel theme’s collection. You’ll probably find a perfect fit for your website.

When you find the perfect WordPress theme, you can download it. After that, log in with the credentials provided by your hosting company.

Then you can follow the procedure specified by your host to install the CMS. These procedures are usually very simple.

Moreover, if you’ve selected the BlueHost WordPress hosting, you will be able to install WordPress with just one click.

4. Personalizing your website

At this stage, you’ll have your theme installed and ready to use. With the Templatic themes, you can install sample data with just one click. This will make your WordPress website look like our demo.

However, no size fits all. You don’t have to compromise with the design of your website just because you are not a designer.

Our WordPress themes come with the options to let you make your website just the way you want. You don’t need to compromise with the design of your website.

Updating the logo/site title

The first thing you would want to do for your website is to take care of the branding. Updating the logo is the first thing you should do.

The Villa Rental theme lets you use the WordPress live customizer to customize your website.

updating the logo

If you don’t have a logo, you can opt for the site title and tagline instead. Your header will still look elegant with your hotel name.

Changing the colors of your hotel website

You can change the colors of various sections of your website with this WordPress theme. For your convenience, the color scheme of our themes is divided into groups.

This helps you maintain consistency for the color scheme of your hotel website.

color customization options

You can choose the colors you like and set it for the various sections of your website. Make sure you choose a color that complements the theme of your website.

Organizing the page designs

Okay, now is the time to restructure your website. When you are ready to create your own website, you must have some imaginary design in your mind, don’t you? Now is the time when you organize the elements on your web page and make it look exactly how you want.

Change the position of your screen elements by simply rearranging the widgets. Wondering how it works?? Read on.

The pages you see on your website are all divided into widget areas. And the content you see in each section is nothing but the widgets configured to show appropriate data.

For example, The image below shows a glimpse of some of the widget areas.

widget placement

To change what element appears in a particular section of your website, you can look into the widgets placed in the section.

For instance – You want to show a contact form, a list of important links, and an advertisement in the sidebar. So all you need to do is reach for the widget section, add the required widgets in the sidebar widget area. Configure the widgets to show the information you want, which is quite easy. Once the widgets are configured, click save and your sidebar will start showing the required information.

You can remove the existing widgets, reconfigure it to show some other information, or add some new widget from the widget section.

5. Displaying features, room, and services of your hotel

The main intention of your website is to tell your prospective customers about your rooms, services, and show the testimonials of your happy customers.

So now we will update our site with all the information we want to show on our site.

To do so, we’ll first make a list of all the things we want to mention. For instance, we will mention the rooms. If you have 3 types of rooms, and you can make a page to describe the room features with images and text content of each room. You can create a variety of content and promote it to attract audience.

Similarly, you can create different pages to describe different services and their pricing plans.

You can even use the slider of the villa rental theme to showcase the room and directly link to the page showing the details and feature of that room.

Once you decide upon all the information you want to show, you can draw out the titles you want for the menu. The important links will go to the menu. The sub-important links can be attached to sub-menu titles.

Linking the pages to the site menu

Once all the pages are prepared, you can list them out in the order of priority. With WordPress, you can create as many pages as you want.

Set the important links as menu and submenu items. Make sure that the links to all the important pages on your website are shown on the homepage itself. adding the menus

Here’s a guide on how to setup menus on your WordPress website. Once your menu setup is done, Double-check to ensure that no important link has been missing.

6. Allowing booking services on your rental website

You can allow booking on your hotel website. If you wish to do so, there are several WordPress booking themes that provide the online booking feature on the site.

These online booking systems typically include the following services.

  • Allow the visitors to choose the room and check for its availability
  • Allow the users to register on the site and book the available rooms
  • Allow them to pay online and send them a confirmation message against their booking
  • Disallow booking when the block they’re already booked
  • Create custom blocks and set customized rates for specific dates
  • Set seasonal rates and block reservation dates
  • Allow cancellation of the booked blocks

These are the basic services that you get with an online hotel booking theme. However, you can choose not to include these services in your website.

Creating a hotel website without booking features can serve as your online identity. It can help you promote your business. You can advertise your services, rooms and announce the latest news and happenings through your site. If you are looking for a way to earn some passive income through your website, you can invest in building an online directory.

booking management

You can go for a simple hotel or rental property website without any of these services. Your website can still be a great help for the online presence of your small hotel business.

7. Maintaining Your Hotel Website

Once you create your website, you have to make sure that you keep it updated. Website maintenance is one of the most important tasks.

Now you must be wondering what kind of maintenance you should do:

  • Regularly update your website with fresh content
  • Displaying the current deals and discount offers
  • Adding new pages/features as and when required
  • Backing up your website
  • Addressing performance issues and optimizing your website
  • Keeping the software, themes, and plugins updated
  • Removing unnecessary and irrelevant information over time
  • Regular security audits to make sure your website is secure

Besides, there can be many minor tasks for maintaining your site. Proper maintenance and updating ensure that your website retains the ranks and its position in the search engine.

8. A few tips to ensure that your website reaches your targeted audience

There’s certainly no use in a website that does not reach the targeted audience. Your website should show up when your prospective customers try to search for a place to stay in your area. You should focus on your hotel website promotions to make sure people are aware of it.

This can be done by optimizing your website for Search engines. Search Engine Optimization is a very deep (and interesting) subject. you can get to know the basic search engine tactics just by a little bit of research.

Go for the websites like moz.com. You can take help from their blogs or use the tools provided by them to enhance the SEO of your small hotel websites.

However, there are many ways to help the visibility of your site through SEO. The following are a few things you can do to make sure your website ranks well enough to survive the competition.

1. Use an SEO friendly theme

Always choose an SEO-friendly theme. An SEO-friendly theme is one that is coded with SEO rules in mind. A theme programmed with SEO standard will automatically boost the visibility of your website.SEO optimization

When you choose an SEO-friendly theme, you can focus on curating the content for your pages.

2. Keep the keywords in mind while updating the content

Even though keyword research is a detailed subject of SEO, you don’t have to be an SEO expert to implement it. Always try including generalized keywords or synonyms of your topics at relevant places in your content.

For example – If your hotel is in Hawaii, you can include keywords like “Hawaii accommodation”, “hotel in Hawaii”, “best stay Hawaii”, “hotels near Hawaii”, “Best Hawaii food”, etc.

Moreover, there are several tools that can help you find the keywords. For instance – You can use the Google keyword planner tool and the WordPress add-ons(more on this later) that help you optimize the content of your website and make it SEO friendly.

3. Optimize the titles, URLs, etc

The title and the URL of your website play an important role in the SEO of your website. Here are a few tips on how you can optimize the title as well as URLs of your site.

Page/Blog Title optimization

  • Keep the title relevant and meaningful
  • Medium length title, not too short not too long. Ideally 50-60 characters
  • Include your main keywords
  • Sound convincing, try making your titles persuasive and click-worthy

Optimizing the URLs of your small hotel websites

  • Keep it short and simple
  • Include the keywords
  • Go fo a name that is easy to remember (ideally, the name of your hotel, b&b, etc)
  • Avoid using the default URLs with numbers, dates, etc.
  • Avoid using stop words like to, and, that, on, etc.

However, using the WordPress plugin for SEO will give you insightful guidance on titles and URLs. But it is a good practice to pay special attention to your URLs and Titles right when you create the page.

4. Regular blogging

Blogs are the best way to keep your website updated with fresh and unique content. Again, they are a great way to keep your visitors updated with the latest updates. You can even establish a separate blog redirecting to your hotel website using one of these news/magazine themes.

You can use this feature on your hotel website to launch new services or introduce new rooms and services. You can also blog to announce new schemes, discount offers, etc.

News blog on your website

With such blogs, you can alert your users about

  • Share the latest updates about your hotel
  • Launch of a new service at your hotel
  • The addition of new food menu, new rooms, new facilities, etc.
  • Offers, schemes and special discount periods

Basically, blogs on your website can act as a medium through which you can keep your visitors updated. Blogs are great for content marketing, where useful and targetted content will ultimately help your business performance.

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5. Use the WordPress plugins

One of the many advantages of using WordPress for your small hotel website is its flexibility. There are so many plugins designed for different niches.

To enhance the Search engine visibility of your small hotel website, you can use various SEO plugins. The best ones are Yoast SEO or ALL in one SEO pack.

The main features of these plugins are:

  • Help you generate SEO friendly content
  • Improve the readability of your site
  • Alert you about the content that is not good for SEO

For an SEO-friendly theme, you can use such plugins to optimize the content you add to the pages from your side.

They will help you generated focused and user-friendly content that is helpful to your end-users.

As promised in the beginning, here’s a video overview on how you can create hotel website with WordPress in just minutes.

Time to take action

Creating a website is now no longer a domain of technically skilled people.

Even if you are not a programmer or a designer, you can create enticing websites without writing a line of code.

The tools like WordPress and these Hotel WordPress themes make the task of creating a website, enjoyable. And in the end, you get a fully functional, beautiful, and self-personalized website. Isn’t that great??

So start with the fun work right away!! Good luck :)