Hotel website design: what a small hotel needs

GuestJourney editorial team, edited by Alon Shkuri

Published 1 November 2026 · Updated 2 November 2026 · 11 min read

Wes sits on a laptop keyboard and waves at the empty screen

Good hotel website design for a small hotel starts on the first screen of a phone: what you are, one real photo, and a Book button with a word on it. We checked 20 small independent hotel sites on 1 November 2026. 16 had that button, and on 14 no banner hid it: on the other 2, a cookie banner sat on top of it.

Eleven minutes at a bus stop

Laura stayed at Hotel Kadeloft in the spring and wants to come back. Her bus is eleven minutes away, so she opens the site on her phone, with one hand free. The photo of the quay loads. Then a cookie banner slides up over the bottom half of the screen, and the Book button is somewhere under it.

Two buttons and four lines of small print. She locks her phone. That evening she finds the hotel on Booking.com, where she already has an account, and Anna pays €16.50 a night for a guest who had been on her own site that morning.

Hotel Kadeloft, Anna and Laura are made up. The banner is not, as the next block shows.

8 of the 20

hotel sites had a cookie banner over at least a quarter of the first screen on a phone.

Our own measurement, 1 November 2026: twenty small hotels we looked up ourselves, not a market figure. On 2 of those 8, the banner lay right on the Book button.

What we measured on 20 hotel sites

We looked at the homepages of 20 small independent hotels in the Netherlands, Belgium and the UK, about 30 rooms or fewer, on a phone-sized screen and on a laptop, and checked every first screen by eye. It is a small sample from search lists, which favour hotels that are already visible, so read it as what we saw and not as a market figure. We measured from outside the EU, so some cookie banners may not have shown: the banner numbers are a minimum. One of the 20 showed a temporary holding page that day.

20 small independent hotels, homepage on a phone, 1 November 2026
What we looked for	Hotels
Book button with a readable word in the first screen	16 of 20
Of those, with no banner on top of it	14 of 20
Only a calendar icon, no word	2 of 20
Button only in the menu or further down	2 of 20
Book button leads to a booking engine, not an OTA	20 of 20
Any cookie banner on screen	10 of 20
Cookie banner covers a quarter or more of the first screen	8 of 20
A way to call or email in the first screen	2 of 20
A room price on the homepage	0 of 20
More than one language offered	12 of 20
Structured hotel data on the homepage	7 of 20
Page wider than the phone, so it slides sideways	0 of 20

The good news is in the fifth row. Not one of these hotels sends its own button to an OTA, so the basic direct route exists. The last row is good news too. What we would work on is the first few seconds around that button.

Four things belong on the first screen

This is our view, from what we saw on these sites. It is not a study.

The name and the place, in plain words. "Twelve rooms on the canal in Haarlem" says more than "Your home away from home".
One real photo of a room or your street, not a slideshow.
A Book button with a word on it. An icon saves space and costs clarity: on two of the hotels we checked, a calendar symbol was all there was on the first screen.
A cookie banner that leaves that button free. On 8 of the 20 hotels the banner took a quarter or more of the screen. More on that below.

We saw no winning word for that button. Among the 16 it was Book, Book now, Book a stay, Boek hier, Kamer boeken, and a few that said check availability. Pick one and use it on every page, in the language of the page.

A cookie banner can be small

Half of the 20 showed a cookie banner when we measured, and because we were outside the EU, the true figure may be higher. Two of those ten stayed small, at 11% and 17% of the first screen. Eight took a quarter or more. So small ones exist, on hotels like yours.

Size does not appear in what the Dutch regulator asks. Its nine rules of thumb are about the choice: say what you use cookies for, tick no boxes in advance, use plain words on the buttons, put accept and refuse on the same layer, and make refusing take no extra clicks. None of the nine mentions how big the banner is. So a small bar at the bottom can do the same legal job, if it is built properly. That is our reading of Dutch guidance and no legal advice. Belgium and the UK have their own regulators.

Do this for Laura, not for Google. Google's page on intrusive dialogs does suggest "banners that take up only a small fraction of the screen", but it is written about promotional pop-ups, never mentions cookie banners, and makes an exception for what is legally mandatory.

Ask whoever runs your site three things:

Which cookies do we set, and do we still need all of them? What has to be in a banner depends on how you use cookies, the regulator says, so we would expect fewer tools to mean a shorter banner.
Can the banner sit in a strip at the bottom, with the Book button above it?
Does that still work on the oldest phone at the desk?

What should the rest of the page answer?

A guest comparing you with the listing on an OTA wants the facts that listing shows, and a reason to stay on your page. In order:

Your rooms, with a photo per type and how many people fit.
A "from" price, or at least a clear route to one. None of the 20 hotels showed a room price on the homepage on a phone, so a simple "rooms from €95" stands out, as long as you keep it true.
Breakfast, parking, late check-in, pets, step-free access: the questions we would expect most. Say it the way Kadeloft does: dogs €15 a night, not in the breakfast room. See what a website chat should answer, because the same list works here.
How to get there, from the station and by car. If you have charging points, say where: two on the quay is a whole answer.
A phone number and email that are easy to find. Only 2 of 20 offered a way to call or email on the first screen, and neither showed the number or address; further down is fine, hidden behind a contact form is not.
Your own story in two sentences. Who runs it, and since when. An OTA listing can hold some of this; your own page can tell it your way.

Your booking engine lives elsewhere, and that is fine

All 20 used an outside booking engine, under ten different names. You do not need to build your own. See how to choose one. Check three things on a phone: that the step from your site to the engine does not feel like leaving, that the price there matches the one on your site, and that it opens with your dates already filled in if a guest chose them on your page.

That engine may also feed your own link on Google. Google says a hotel with a reservation system may already be connected through its provider, and that the landing page and the accuracy of your prices count towards where a free booking link shows. So that same step, from button to engine, does double work.

Wes pulls a blank card from a wooden card box

Speed: 2.5 seconds is the line

Google's web.dev says: "A good LCP value is 2.5 seconds or less." LCP is the moment the largest thing on the screen has appeared. In our single load per site, 12 of the 19 hotels we could measure made that line, the middle one took 1.7 seconds, and the slowest took almost 16. It was one load, on our own connection, so it is no speed test. Your own guest may be at a bus stop.

Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights on the mobile setting. If it is slow, we would look first at the size of the first photo, then at a video or a slideshow, then at the number of outside scripts.

What can you skip?

Again our view, not a study.

A full-screen video behind the first screen. It pushes the facts down and costs loading time on a phone.
A separate mobile site or an app.
Pop-ups. One hotel we checked opened a marketing pop-up as well as its cookie banner. It left the Book button free, and it was still one more thing on a small screen.
Ten languages. Pick the ones your guests really speak: 12 of the 20 offered more than one, and the median was 2.
A design award. We could not find a study that shows a redesign alone brings in bookings, so fix the first screen first.

Can guests and search engines read it?

A few plain things. The text should be real text, not words inside images. The page should fit a phone without sliding sideways. Check-in times and prices must match Google and your booking engine. Only 7 of the 20 hotels had structured hotel data on their homepage. Google says it is not required for AI search and helps with being eligible for rich results; we know of no evidence that it lifts a small hotel by itself. So it is a small job, not the first one.

In 10 of the 12 guest searches we ran, Google put its own hotel block above the first ordinary result. So being found next to the big sites starts with Google's profile and booking links, see hotel SEO: read Google Hotel Ads and free booking links, and the bigger picture in how a small hotel gets more direct bookings. Run a bed and breakfast? Read what a B&B website needs.

One legal point for hotels in the EU. Since 28 June 2025 the European Accessibility Act, through national law, covers e-commerce services, which it defines as services through websites "with a view to concluding a consumer contract". We read that as including a page where guests book a room. Microenterprises providing services are exempt: fewer than 10 people, and no more than €2 million in turnover or on the balance sheet. Kadeloft's €481,800 is under that limit, so Anna's question is how many people she employs. Ask your adviser; we are not lawyers.

A site is only right until something changes

Breakfast moves to seven. The dog charge goes up. A second charging point goes in. Each of those has to land in four places: your site, your Google profile, your Booking.com listing and your booking engine. A guest who reads half past seven on one and seven on another will ask at the desk, on a morning when you have two people on it.

Keep a short list of what changes: check-in, breakfast, parking, dogs, charging. Compare it everywhere once a season. For the Google side, see what a hotel can put on its profile.

A five-minute test

Open your own homepage on your phone, on mobile data, in a private window.
Can you read what you are and where within three seconds?
Is there a Book button with a word on it, without closing or scrolling anything?
Tap it. Are you where you expected, at the right price?
Find the answer to "can I park?". How many taps was that?

If you only have an hour

Take this order. Each step gives you something on its own, so you can stop at any line. The minutes are our estimate for a site you can already edit, or for someone who answers your messages.

Five minutes: do the test above and write down where it went wrong.
Fifteen minutes: the banner. Get it off the button, and ask the three questions.
Ten minutes: the first line. Swap the slogan for your name, your place and the number of rooms.
Ten minutes: the button. One word, on the first screen, pointed at your booking engine. Tap it with dates chosen.
Ten minutes: the questions. One plain line each for parking, late arrival, dogs and breakfast.
Ten minutes: the facts elsewhere. Compare check-in and breakfast times on your site with Google.