Have you ever had your credit card in front of you, wanting to make a travel reservation, but the website is painfully slow to load, or worse – it never loads at all? In the age of abundant options, most of us simply make that reservation on a competing website.<\/p>\n
Within a few minutes, one hotel can lose a booking while a competing hotel takes the booking – even if the price is higher<\/em>! Our lives are becoming busier and businesses around the globe are setting the bar higher and higher for website performance.<\/p>\n Nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and will abandon a site that isn\u2019t loaded within 3 seconds. It is generally accepted that a 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. This may not sound like a great deal, but consider some hotel websites are taking 10, 20, 30 or more seconds to load. This is no doubt a huge contributor to the low (or no)\u00a0conversion rate that many hotel websites see<\/a>.<\/p>\n In this post you’ll discover why your hotel’s website needs to be fast – not just when you<\/em> browse it, but when your guests from all around the world<\/em> try to load it too.<\/p>\n I’ll run through the data we’ve collected in the independent and boutique hotel industry, and show you some (free) tools you can use to test your hotel’s website.<\/p>\n We’ll also take a look at some of the easier methods for improving your hotel’s website performance, which someone in your marketing or web team can check out. Of course, if you need help at any time, reach out!<\/p>\n