TL;DR Key takeaways
- Spring is the time to fix your site, not August when every booking counts.
- Test your booking journey on a real phone over mobile data, start to finish.
- Heavy images and third-party widgets are usually the biggest speed problems.
- Make prices, availability and cancellation terms obvious before the booking step.
Every summer Edinburgh fills up. The Festival Fringe, the International Festival and the Tattoo bring visitors from all over the world, and guesthouses, tour operators, cafés and venues all compete for their attention. Much of that planning happens months in advance, on phones, often on the train or in a queue.
If your website is slow or your booking flow is awkward, you will not see the people who gave up. You will just see fewer bookings than you expected. April is the right time to fix that, while you still have breathing room.
Walk the journey yourself
Before touching any code, do this: take your own phone, switch off Wi-Fi, and try to book with your own business as a stranger would. Start from a Google search, not your bookmarks.
Note every moment of friction. How long before the page is usable? Can you find prices without hunting? Does the booking widget load, and can you complete it without zooming? Do you get a confirmation email promptly?
I do this with every tourism client and it always reveals something the owner had never noticed.
The usual speed culprits
For tourism sites in particular, the same problems crop up again and again:
- Huge hero images. A beautiful photo of the Royal Mile straight off a camera can be several megabytes. Resize and compress it, and serve modern formats.
- Sliders and video backgrounds. They look lovely on a desktop and cost a lot on a phone. One strong image usually works better.
- Too many third-party scripts. Review widgets, chat bubbles, social feeds, several analytics tags. Each one adds weight and delay.
- Heavy booking widgets. Some embedded booking systems load a lot of code on every page. Load them only on the page where people actually book.
Google measures real-world experience through Core Web Vitals, and slow, jumpy pages can hold you back in search as well as frustrating visitors. If you would rather hand this over, my Core Web Vitals speed fix is €149.
Visitors decide in seconds. Your site should not need longer than they do.
Make the booking step boring
In a good way. Visitors should know exactly what they are getting before they reach the booking form:
- Show prices or from prices clearly, including any extras
- Show availability or at least how far ahead dates fill up
- Explain cancellation and refund terms in plain words
- Keep the form short and let people book as a guest
- Send a clear confirmation with address, time and a map link
Festival visitors are often juggling several bookings. Clear, calm information builds trust and reduces the emails asking what they actually booked.
Think about international visitors
Many of your summer visitors will not be from the UK. Show prices in pounds sterling clearly, make sure your payment provider accepts common international cards and wallets, and avoid idioms in key instructions. Opening hours and addresses should be easy to copy into a map app.
Keep it stable once the season starts
Get changes done by late spring, then freeze anything risky. August is not the month to update every plugin at once or redesign the homepage. Make sure backups are running and that someone is checking the site is up.
Getting ready
If you run a tourism or hospitality business in the city, you can see how I approach web design in Edinburgh. And if you want a quick outside view before the season, my free website check will flag the obvious speed and usability problems.