Your hotel or restaurant website after summer: what to fix before next season

In August there's no time to touch anything and by May it's too late. The real window to fix a hospitality website in Mallorca is the winter months, and this is the list in order of what pays back most.

There's a conversation we have every September with hospitality clients and it always opens the same way: “we should have fixed this back in March.” In August nobody can stop to rebuild a website, and by May, when there's finally a moment, the season is arriving and touching anything feels risky. The real window is these months, between occupancy dropping and starting to climb again. If you're only going to do one thing this winter, do it with some judgement. Here's the list, in order of what pays back most.

1. Direct bookings: the biggest money mover

First, and by far the biggest money mover: direct bookings. Every booking that arrives through an OTA carries a commission you never get back, and the only way to claw some of that back is for your own website to make booking just as easy. You don't need to compete with Booking on catalogue; you need the people who already searched for you by name — far more of them than you'd think — not to end up booking elsewhere because your form is a chore.

To see where you stand, walk through it yourself on a phone. Count the steps from the homepage to a confirmed booking. Check whether the booking button is visible without scrolling, whether the system shows real availability and prices or sends you to a form someone answers hours later, and whether the whole process is in your guests' languages. For a restaurant, the same applies to tables: booking shouldn't mean phoning in the middle of service. If there's friction there, that's where to start; our online booking page explains how we approach an own booking engine, and web design for hotels shows how it fits into the rest of the site.

2. Mobile speed, in real conditions

Second is mobile speed, and Mallorca has a quirk here that gets ignored far too often: a good share of your visitors open your site on a phone, standing in the street, on patchy coverage and sometimes on roaming data. A site that takes five seconds to load in your office on fibre can be unusable out there. That's the real usage scenario and almost nobody tests it.

Test it the way a guest would: step outside, turn off the WiFi and open your site on mobile data. Pay attention to how long it takes for something useful to appear, not the whole page. In hospitality the usual culprits are photos uploaded straight from the camera, image carousels on the homepage, header videos and third-party add-ons — social feeds, review widgets, chat boxes — all loading at once. Almost all of it can be fixed without rebuilding the site, and in this post on slow websites we cover what to look at first.

3. Languages on every page, not just the homepage

Third is languages, and not just the homepage. It's common to find hotels with a translated front page while the rooms page, the services page or the directions are Spanish-only. The German visitor who gets that far and hits a wall leaves — and that visit already cost you, either in advertising or in ranking.

The way to find those walls is to go through the full journey in each language: homepage, rooms or menu, prices, directions, cancellation policy, form and confirmation email. The moment a page switches language without warning, you've found the gap. Take particular care with text where a mistake is costly, such as allergens or cancellation terms, which shouldn't come out of a machine translator. Our post on multilingual websites also explains how to make each version rank on its own.

4. The menu, out of the PDF

Fourth is the menu, if you run a restaurant. The PDF hanging off your website is heavy, unreadable on a phone and has to be re-uploaded every time a price changes. That's why we built TapMallorca: an NFC chip on the table that the customer taps with their phone to see the current menu, leave you a Google review or join the WiFi. No more reprinting QR codes every season.

Even if you don't use NFC, the menu should live on your website as text rather than an image or PDF: that way it reads well on any phone, translates properly and Google understands what kind of food you serve, which is exactly what someone typing “seafood restaurant by the harbour” is looking for. And use the winter to review what goes stale as soon as the season changes: opening hours, set menus, photos of dishes you no longer serve. Web design for restaurants shows how we handle it.

5. Reviews: the habit that changes most

And fifth, which isn't the website but shapes everything else: reviews. In hospitality your Google listing drives more visits than any redesign, and reviews don't arrive on their own — they arrive when somebody asks at the right moment. If you're only going to change one habit this winter, make it that one.

The right moment is when the customer is happy and still close by: when paying the bill, at check-out or in an email the next day, never weeks later. Ask naturally, make it easy with a direct link, and reply to every review — the good ones briefly, the bad ones calmly — in the language the guest wrote in. How to get more Google reviews walks you through it step by step.

What can wait for another winter

Knowing what not to touch yet matters as much as knowing what to fix. Changing colours because a competitor did, adding a chat nobody will answer, starting a blog you won't write or rebuilding the whole site out of boredom all sound urgent and almost never are. If the website already brings in visits and bookings, the sensible move is to fix what's holding those bookings back first and leave the cosmetic changes until the urgent ones are done.

The other classic mistake is about timing: deciding in October, not starting until February and publishing changes right as you reopen. A calmer split is to measure and decide in autumn, do the work in the depths of winter and keep the last weeks before the season for testing calmly, fixing and checking that bookings come through properly in every language.

Where to start

We've worked with very different hotels and venues across the island — Es Petit Hotel Valldemossa, Mon Hotels, Hostal Villaverde, Café Barbera — and the order above repeats fairly reliably. If you don't know where your own starting point is, audit your site for free: in thirty seconds you'll have speed, SEO and visibility measured, and this winter's list writes itself.