A seaside resort website: beach, restaurant, bookings

A seaside resort sells several things at once: rooms, a day at the beach or the pool, dinner at the restaurant, a wedding. Its website has to give each guest their own path to a booking without losing them in a long list of everything on offer. Our rule: every important thing gets its own place, and the contact button is always in view.

Three guests, three paths

On any given day, a resort's website gets visitors who want different things:

• the overnight guest wants the rooms or suites, the photos, what's included, open dates;
• the guest for one evening wants the menu, the restaurant's hours and a table;
• the planner is organizing a getaway for two, a birthday or a wedding, and wants to know what can be arranged.

If the homepage puts all of that in one stream of equal sections, everyone has to hunt. It's better to give them three clear entry points at the top, each leading to its own page or section with the right booking button.

Packages, not tables

A boutique hotel with suites, a restaurant, a pool and a private beach has a lot to show. On an ordinary site, all of that gets lost in a long list.

Lay it out like a brochure: the suites, the beach and the restaurant each get their own place. The packages (a romantic getaway, events, weddings) become clear cards, presented as offers rather than rows in a table. On phones they read one at a time. The gallery swipes like a feed, and guest reviews and booking come at the end. The type, colors and photos should have the same feel as the front desk, so guests recognize the place when they arrive.

Direct booking, always visible

When booking is direct, with no platform commission, guests book with the hotel. Put a WhatsApp button next to it, always visible on phones, for anyone who wants to ask something first.

For a resort, that means two practical things. The booking form asks for little (dates, number of guests, a contact) and says clearly what happens after it's sent. And each package has its own button, so a wedding inquiry doesn't land in the same pile as room bookings.

If your booking system is connected to Google, you can also appear with free booking links in hotel results: unpaid links that go straight to your booking page, with the rate for the chosen dates. We wrote about what guests look for on the first screen in our article on hotel websites.

A big gallery without a slow site

A resort has lots of good photos, and it's tempting to put all of them on the homepage. The problem is speed on phones, often on mobile data, sometimes right there on the beach.

The technical fix has two parts. Photos further down the page load only when the visitor reaches them (the loading="lazy" attribute, which browsers handle on their own). But the first photo, the one visible on arrival, shouldn't load that way: web.dev says plainly not to lazy-load images likely to be visible when the page loads, especially the largest one on screen. The rest is common sense: compressed photos sized for the screen, and a separate gallery for anyone who wants to see everything.

What you tell Google

In the page code you can describe the place with schema.org. There's a Resort type, "a place used for relaxation or recreation, attracting visitors for holidays or vacations," which is a kind of LodgingBusiness, like Hotel. It inherits properties such as check-in and check-out times, number of rooms and whether pets are allowed. It's the same information you write for guests, stated once more for search engines.

Our services page shows what we do for hotels and resorts.