In this modern age, the average household has around 10 active, internet-ready devices. Of these, computers, smartphones and tablets are the most popular, and the vacation rental industry expects website visitors to move between these different devices depending on what stage of the booking process they are in. To ensure your vacation rental website site looks flawless on all devices, you should be using responsive web design. We look at what this means and why it’s so important for your vacation rental.
What is responsive web design?
To put it simply, responsive web design is a configuration that automatically adapts your site’s content to the device in use – no matter whether it’s the latest Apple gadget or your desktop PC from 2002.
Responsive web design is the most comfortable choice if you want to minimize any indexation or technical and analytical issues (any of the hard work, basically!). It’s highly recommended by search engines, so that’s why all Lodgify templates are already optimized for handheld devices.
Why is responsive web design so important?
Considering eMarketer’s prediction that 51.8% of travelers who book trips in 2016 will do so using mobile devices, responsive web design is definitely up there on the list of must-haves for your vacation rental site. This trend doesn’t seem to be declining any time soon – just take a look at the graph below.
Each year, statistics show that more and more travelers are opting for mobile bookings. Given that 61% of consumers said they are more likely to leave a site if it isn’t mobile-friendly, having an optimized site might be the make or break factor which leads you to reaching (or otherwise, missing) a lot of potential customers.
According to the above chart from VRMA, there is absolutely no doubt that the vacation rental industry’s largest opportunity for growth lies in mobile channels, and we think that VR owners should be taking full advantage of this trend in order to stay ahead of the competition. When the average person in the United States is checking their phone 46 times a day, and US nationals are the second biggest spenders on tourism, this is a market you really can’t afford to neglect.
What’s more, 74% of consumers agree that if a site works well on their mobile device, they’re more likely return to it in the future. This could help you generate repeat guests – especially useful if they spread the message to their own network of friends and family. Good reviews and personal recommendations always help give you the edge against your competition in the vacation rental sector.
How Lodgify adapts your website to mobile devices
It’s highly likely your potential guests already use multiple devices like laptops, cell phones and tablets to research and even complete their booking. For that reason, your vacation rental website should be perfectly tailored to suit all screen sizes – something you can achieve with responsive web design through Lodgify.
Lodgify provides ready-made mobile responsive web designs to all its users. Our vacation rental software alleviates the frustration of users having to do this themselves, so there’s never any need to worry about optimizing your vacation rental website to each device manually.
That’s not to say that mobile friendliness is purely limited to your potential guests’ user experience – Google also takes it into account in its mobile search algorithm. Slow loading times, incorrect formatting and CSS issues are just a few of the problems which will disqualify your site from mobile search results. Lodgify’s website templates have all been designed with Google’s criteria in mind, so you can rest easy knowing that the only thing you need to take care of is running your own vacation rental.
Take a look
If you want to check how your Lodgify site appears on a mobile device, simply input your vacation rental website’s URL in Google’s handy Mobile Friendly Test tool.
Do you ever check which devices most of your traffic comes from? If not, you can do this using Google Analytics. Let us know in the comments how most of your visitors access your vacation rental site!