A hotel or restaurant website needs to make the next step obvious: rooms or menus near the top, a direct link to your booking system, enquiry forms that reach the right inbox, current reviews, and a way to promote events and offers without a developer. In 2025 I built and fixed a run of UK hospitality sites through a London agency, including Crowne Plaza London Kingston, Warren House, Ravens Ait, Cyprianis and Raasa. These are the features that mattered on every one.
What should a hotel homepage show first?
Rooms and proof. Visitors arrive to check whether the place is right and available, so get them to rooms quickly.
- Rooms high on the page. On the Warren House homepage I placed rooms first in the page order so the booking path is immediate. Before, they were buried below marketing content.
- Each room links to booking. Crowne Plaza London Kingston has a grid of eight rooms with hover amenity icons, each linking to IHG booking in a new tab.
- Reviews that stay current. Warren House fetches reviews from Google, so social proof updates without anyone pasting quotes.
- Amenities people search for. Crowne Plaza highlights the gym, EV charging, river views, the restaurant, IHG One Rewards and parking.
- A hero that sells the setting. A full-width video hero works, as long as the page is usable before the video loads.
Should a hospitality website have its own booking system?
Match the booking method to what is being booked.
| What is booked | Approach | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Hotel rooms | Link to the existing reservation system | Crowne Plaza rooms link to IHG |
| Meeting rooms | Enquiry form tagged with the venue | Crowne Plaza meeting rooms grid with venue-specific dropdown forms |
| Weddings and private events | Enquiry form that feeds the CRM | Ravens Ait enquiry forms sync to HubSpot through Google Tag Manager |
| Ticketed events and packages | Payment on the page | Ravens Ait Wimbledon, Christmas and Dinner and Dance pages with Stripe |
| Takeaway and delivery | Online ordering store | Whitfield Service Station on WooCommerce |
| Private dining at a restaurant | Event template with an enquiry path | Cyprianis private dining page |
Do not rebuild a booking engine you already pay for. Linking rooms to IHG kept the Crowne Plaza site honest about where availability lives.
For ticketed offers, a light setup works. The Wimbledon Tennis on the Island page on Ravens Ait has a date picker, per-date packages, Stripe payment through Forminator, customer and admin emails, past dates disabled and a daily booking summary email.
What does a restaurant website need?
- The menu, easy to find on a phone. On Cyprianis I integrated the menu so diners can see what is on before they book. Ravens Ait's Christmas page uses a PDF flipbook menu.
- Opening hours in the footer of every page, as on Raasa.
- A map and contact details.
- The story. Raasa's page carries the head chef's biography.
- Email sign-up, to build a list before and after opening.
- Events and private dining. Cyprianis has an events listing and a single event template, so a supper club or seasonal evening is announced without a new build.
- Online ordering, if you deliver. For Whitfield Service Station, three food brands take orders through one checkout, orders print automatically in the kitchen, delivery stops at a set radius, and the owner can close the store from the admin. More in my WooCommerce store checklist.
How do you promote events and seasonal offers?
Templates. Ravens Ait has nine event pages, including Asian and European wedding sub-pages, and eleven seasonal pages from Holi to Boxing Day. All come from one Bricks template with one SEO heading structure: a single H1, H2s for venue settings, catering and entertainment, then FAQs, testimonials and the enquiry form. A new occasion is a content task.
Popups, used with restraint.
- Crowne Plaza has promo popups the hotel can switch on for seasonal offers.
- Warren House has a Wedding Fair popup that appears after five seconds.
- Ravens Ait has an exit-intent popup limited to once per 12 hours, with a scroll-triggered version on mobile, so it catches leaving visitors without nagging.
Fix broken popups. On Warren House, a legacy popup's close button did not work, quietly frustrating visitors, and a HubSpot popup the marketing team relied on was not firing. Both were fixed.
How do you make sure enquiries actually arrive?
This is where hospitality sites lose the most money without knowing it.
- Route each form to the right inbox. Crowne Plaza's enquiry forms go to the hotel inbox, and meeting enquiries arrive already tagged with the right space.
- Make the key fields mandatory, as on Ravens Ait, so leads arrive complete.
- Test after every change. On Crowne Plaza and a sister site, a GoDaddy cache layer was swallowing form submissions. It looked like a form bug, but it was the host's optimisation layer, fixed by upgrading PHP from 8.0 to 8.3. When submissions vanish, check the hosting layer before the plugin.
What pages build trust and keep you compliant?
| Page or feature | Why |
|---|---|
| Privacy and cookie pages | Required, and the old Crowne Plaza site was missing them |
| FAQ | Answers parking, access and dietary questions before they become calls |
| Food hygiene rating | Whitfield shows it on the site |
| Age confirmation | Whitfield confirms 18+ for alcohol |
| Accessible contrast | Part of the Ravens Ait brief, alongside a mobile-first layout |
| A blog | Crowne Plaza and Warren House both gained a blog in 2025 for news and offers |
How fast does a hospitality website need to be?
Fast on a phone, because that is where people decide where to eat or stay. Hospitality sites are photo-heavy, so the work is mostly images and scripts. On Crowne Plaza I removed the heavy loader and smooth-scroll scripts. On Magpie Retreat, I re-exported the photos at the right size and compression and rebuilt the header so it works on phones. Ravens Ait, full of video and photography, has a reported PageSpeed score of 94 or higher.
Where should you start?
If your site exists, start with the homepage order, the booking links and a test of every form. You may not need a rebuild: Cyprianis and Warren House both got new homepages inside their existing sites. If you are starting fresh, or adding ticketed events, I build these through my booking and event landing pages and WordPress websites services. Send me your current site and I will reply with what I would change first.
