Today, nearly 80% of hotel bookings occur online, either through the brand website or through online travel agencies (OTAs). Hotels need a cutting-edge, but user-friendly website design to convert visitors into customers. However, what’s the point if you can lead customers to your doorstep, but you can’t get them in. This is where website load time assumes paramount importance. Your hotel’s site failing to appeal to the travelling desires of your patrons is the last thing you want for your hotel e-commerce.
 

Why is website load time so crucial for hotel e-commerce?

Load time is one of the most significant elements in hotel e-commerce. Optimising load time for your hotel website is key to securing the base for direct bookings. No matter how glamorous and sophisticated your website looks, if it takes too long to load, you will end up losing the interest of your potential customers.

 

According to studies online, with the proliferation of smartphones and the advent of new wireless communication technologies, nearly 90% of the global internet population uses smartphones to access the internet. Therefore, your hotel website should be compatible with every electronic device, whether it be desktops, mobiles or tablets. Research has shown that 40% of your viewers lose interest if pages take more than three seconds to load. Here, we introduce another term called a website's bounce rate.

 

Bounce rate is a metric for analysing visitor engagement on your website. It is defined as the percentage of visitors who visit your webpage and then leave immediately without any further action. A high bounce rate is detrimental to your website. A fast load time, engaging content, and better flow & connectivity to other sites are what influence the bounce rate. Lower the bounce rate, better the conversion.

 

Imagine, if a customer wants to book a hotel, but the booking engine hangs and payment becomes a hassle. Chances are that you will not only lose the current but also future bookings and end up with dissatisfied buyers. Thus, it is of the utmost importance that your website has a fast load time applicable to all electronic media.

 

The Google factor

Did you know that Google keeps a record of fast-loading website pages? The crawler’s algorithm fetches and guides viewers to the faster loading hotel websites. This ultimately affects your search engine ranking, which is the list of results displayed on Google when a user enters a search query.

 

The Simplotel advantage

At Simplotel, we do a zillion things to boost your website load time. A few of these are:

• optimising the website’s load sequence

• dynamic image and video compression

• high server capacity

• optimisation and minimization of website code

• making copies of your website assets on servers across the globe

Simplotel believes that your website is a reflection of your brand. Our websites are designed to drive conversions and simplify the user experience. The good news is that all the above factors influencing the load time are completely automated, making the overall website experience hassle-free. In fact, there is an inside joke at Simplotel which goes, ‘you can easily spot a Simplotel-made website by its load time!’ (Read how Bamboo Saa's direct bookings grew to 35% of overall biz)

So, let the booking games begin!