How to Build a Website for a Boutique Hotel in Santa Teresa

A boutique hotel already appears on the big booking platforms. They bring reach, a payment system and a review base, and for a lot of properties they bring most of the bookings.

They're built for comparison, which is exactly what a traveller wants at that stage. Your own site is for the stage after: the one where somebody has already noticed you and wants to know what the place is actually like.

That's the job. Everything below follows from it.

Show the place before the rooms

Someone choosing Santa Teresa is choosing a stay, not a bed.

They want to know how long the walk to the sand takes, whether the road runs behind the building, what the garden is like at six in the evening, whether they'll hear anything at night. The room matters once they've decided they want to be there.

So the homepage opens on the place. Rooms come second, once there's a reason to care.

The room page has one specific task

It has to answer what a photograph alone can't: what you see from the bed, how the bathroom is arranged, whether there's shade in the afternoon, how the door opens onto the outside.

Three or four honest images beat twelve flattering ones, and a short clip of a room with the doors open tells someone more about the air in it than any description. Say the size in square metres, say the bed dimensions, say what's included. People are comparing, and clarity reads as confidence.

Make direct booking worth it, and easy

A direct booking is worth more to you than a platform booking, so give a reason and remove the friction.

The reason can be small: a late checkout, a welcome drink, breakfast included, a slightly better rate. What matters is that it's stated plainly on the page and not buried.

The friction is usually the booking engine. Two things to check. Does it look like the rest of your site, or does the design change abruptly at the payment step, because when it changes, people think they've been sent somewhere else and close the tab. And how many fields stand between choosing dates and confirming? Every extra one costs.

Practical answers before the payment step

Cancellation terms. Check-in time and what to do arriving late. Parking. Animals. Whether the rate includes tax, which in Costa Rica is not obvious to a visitor.

Someone who has to go looking for one of those answers loses momentum, and momentum is most of what a booking is.

Getting there, in plain terms

Santa Teresa takes some reaching: a ferry or a long drive from the airport, on roads that surprise people the first time.

A page that explains the options honestly, with rough times, does more for your bookings than another gallery. It removes the last real objection someone has while planning from abroad, and it signals that you're used to looking after guests who've never been.

Two languages, properly written

English carries most of the international traffic on that coast, Spanish is the language of the country. Two languages read by a native speaker will serve you better than four run through a translator.

An unreviewed machine translation is visible at once, and it costs you exactly the trust the photographs just built.

Weight, because of where people are

Visitors browse from the beach, from a phone, on a signal that varies. Large photographs are almost always what makes a hotel site slow, and compressing them properly is usually an afternoon's work with no visible loss.

It's the least glamorous item on this list and often the one with the biggest effect.

Where the video fits

A hotel site doesn't need a long film. It needs a few seconds in the right places: the walk down to the water on the homepage, a room with its doors open, the terrace filling up at the end of the day.

Short, silent by default, light enough not to slow the page, and shot vertically as well since most people will see it on a phone. Filmed knowing exactly where it will sit, rather than trimmed afterwards to fit a space it wasn't made for.

One thing to try this week

Ask someone who's never seen your site to find, on their phone, how far you are from the beach and what your cancellation policy is. Watch without helping.

Whatever slows them down is the first thing to fix.

I'm moving to Santa Teresa in September, and I build sites as well as film them: the two pages of that offer are here.