It’s all well and good enduring that your holiday park’s website looks and performs great on a desktop or laptop computer, but it can be all too easy to forget to consider how well it runs and looks on mobile. Not only is this a common mistake, but it can be a costly one too, because now more than ever, it’s crucial that any website not only considers mobile devices but actively prioritises them.
Up until recently, customers (or guests, in the case of a holiday park), generally preferred to make transactions on their desktop computers, whether because they found it easier, or had concerns about the safety of making payments from their phones.
However, that’s all changed now. We’ve known for a while now that people generally tend to research holiday parks on their mobile devices, before usually switching to the PC or picking up the phone to make a booking.
But now, more and more people are actually using their phones and tablets to book their stays, with all the stats backing this up. According to research from Smart Insights, mobile has long since overtaken desktop browsing and even has as many as four times as many users in certain countries.
As mobile phones and tablets become more advanced and more affordable, they’re becoming bigger and bigger parts of our day to day lives, so it’s really no surprise to see more people browsing and booking through them.
And it’s not just us that feel you should be putting mobile first. Last year, Google started to roll out its mobile-first search engine indexing, which basically means that they will consider the mobile pages of your site before the desktop ones when ranking your site in their search results, which is a big shift.
While you’re not expected to have an in-depth knowledge of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and the inner workings of how Google ranks your site, this is a clear indication from the search engine giant that you need to be putting your mobile site first, and if you don’t you’ll slowly start to see your site slip down the rankings.
So, what do you need to do for your holiday park’s website? Essentially, whether you have a mobile site that’s completely separate from your desktop one, or you have a responsive site, you need to make sure that mobile site performs as well as it possibly can.
This means optimising the site to make sure that it’s easy for guests to use and find what they’re looking for in as few steps as possible, which can be easier said than done on a small screen. Your content will also need to be optimised for mobile, so in addition to being helpful and useful to readers, it also needs to be succinct, to take into account the small screen size.
Finally, your booking system needs to work as well as possible on a mobile device too, as this is where lots of otherwise mobile-friendly sites fall down. Your booking system should allow you to easily check prices, see current availability, make and amend bookings and easily enter credit card details.
If your guests can’t achieve all of this easily on mobile, it may be time to think about upgrading your booking system.
If so, why not consider trying a demo of our EliteParks system, which can highlight how mobile friendliness is within your grasp during 2019.
