Your Golf Course Website is Your First Impression – Don’t Blow It!

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression” may be an оld сliсhé, but it’s true. Especially when it comes to your golf course website.

A wеbѕitе represents your golf course оnline. A golf course website should look рrоfеѕѕiоnаl, clean, resourceful, and easy to use. A great golf course website can easily be had for a small investment. An outstanding website that incorporates powerful revenue increasing tools can be had for slightly more.

Think about the golf course website as an employee that works to sell tee times, banquets, memberships, and dining options. This employee works 24/7 with the sole purpose of converting visitors into customers. When you think of the golf course website this way, it’s clearly worth the investment.

Here are four questions to ask about your website to see if it’s time to upgrade.

Is it Useful?

When somebody lands on your golf course’s website, what do you imagine they are trying to do? If yours is a daily fee golf course, chances are they would like to book a tee time. Putting a call-to-action front and center that helps them complete their desired task is what makes a website useful. Hunting for Easter eggs and buried treasure may be fun, but hunting around a website for a tee sheet or other info is frustrating.

Frustrated website visitors don’t become customers. Neither do their friends. 57% of users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly-designed mobile site and since more than 50% of traffic happens on mobile devices, top golf courses are investing in making sure their mobile website makes the right first impression.

Is it Easy to Uѕе?

This goes hand-in-golf-glove with the above. This question is about making it not only easy for your visitor to find what they’re looking for, but also easy for your visitor to DO what they want to do. Imagine a visitor getting all the way to the booking and payment page on your mobile website only to find it confusing and cumbersome to enter credit card or other payment information? It would be like a perfectly paved road that leads to a dead end!

Test the various processes on your site. Is it easy to book a tee time, to get membership information, or to find a map to the golf course?

Is it Fast?

Let’s face it. People are impatient. Visitors to your golf course website want it to load quickly. Nearly half of web-surfers want a website to load in under 2 seconds. This is a case where speed kills… slow speed, that is.

When a page doesn’t load quickly, particularly on a mobile device, it’s dead simple for the user to hit the back button or to search for another golf course. Imagine how many tee time bookings are lost to slow website load times each day.

Big pictures, slow servers, and unnecessary code are all contributors to a slow website. Use Google’s free page speed insights to test your website load time.

Is it Pretty?

Web design is constantly evolving. Visitors can tell when a website hasn’t been updated for a long time and outdated websites reflect poorly on a golf course. The equation in the customer’s mind is poorly maintained website = poorly maintained golf course. Not only that, but Google prefers up-to-date sites, particularly mobile-optimized sites. An outdated site costs money in more ways than one.

Cоnсluѕiоn

Firѕt imрrеѕѕiоns соunt. Big time. Don’t let a lackluster website send your visitors to your competition. Make a great first impression with a stellar golf course website and turn more visitors into customers.