Web Hosting for Beauty Salons

The menu is what people book from

Watch how a new client uses a salon website. They are not reading about your training or looking at the fit-out. They are trying to answer one question: what do I book, and how long will I be here. Everything else on the site is there to support that.

The usual version of the menu makes that question hard to answer. Forty treatments are dumped into a single price list, alphabetically or in whatever order they were typed, with a number next to each one and nothing else. No duration. No indication of what is included. No sense of which of the four similar-sounding facials is the one for a first visit.

So the client phones. That call is not a sign the website is working. It is the website failing quietly and passing the cost to whoever is at the desk, usually while they have somebody in the chair.

What the list is missing

• Duration. A client with a lunch hour needs to know whether this is twenty minutes or ninety before anything else.
• Grouping. Nails, brows and lashes, facials, waxing, body. People arrive knowing the category, not the treatment name.
• A one-line description. Two sentences separating the express version from the full one is often the whole decision.
• Anything required before the appointment. A patch test rule found after booking becomes a cancelled slot.

None of that is a hosting feature. It is text on a page. But it is the difference between a site that books and a site that generates phone calls, and it is worth fixing before you spend a penny on anything else.

Treatment pages, and the searches that skip your homepage

People do not often search for a salon by name unless they already know you. They search for a treatment plus a place. Lash lift, dermaplaning, gel removal, a particular brand of facial, all with a town on the end.

If every one of your treatments lives as a single line on one long menu page, you have one page competing for forty different searches. It will not win many of them, because it does not really answer any of them.

The fix is to give your handful of signature treatments a page each. Not all forty. Pick the five or six that bring in the most money or the most new clients, and write a real page for each: what happens during the appointment, how long it takes, how long the result lasts, aftercare, what it costs, what to do before you come in.

• Keep the full menu as the overview. Link each signature treatment from its line to its own page.
• Write the page for somebody who has never had the treatment. That is who is searching.
• Answer the awkward questions plainly. Does it hurt, can you do it while pregnant, how soon can you wear makeup.
• Use the words clients use, not only the trade term. If half your clients say eyebrow tint, the page should say it too.

This is also the point at which a site stops being a leaflet. A treatment page brings in someone who has never heard of you, and it keeps working while the salon is closed.

Patch tests, consultations and the things you have to flag

Some treatments cannot go straight into the diary. Tints and lash work commonly need a patch test a set time beforehand. Some treatments need a consultation first. Some are ruled out by medication, pregnancy or a recent treatment elsewhere.

Every one of those is a booking that will be cancelled if the client finds out on the day. That is a lost slot, an unhappy client and sometimes a refund argument. The website is the cheapest place to prevent it.

• Put the requirement on the treatment itself, in the menu line and again on the treatment page.
• Say how far in advance, in days, not "in advance".
• If you take bookings online, the requirement should appear in the booking flow as well as on the page. Clients who book at eleven at night never read the page.
• Keep the wording general and about your own salon policy. Anything that strays into medical claims is worth running past your insurer or your own adviser first.

Salons that treat skin more clinically, with injectables or medical-grade devices, carry a heavier version of this problem and usually a different set of obligations. That is closer to the med spa page than to this one, and worth reading if it describes you.

How AldoMedia helps

AldoMedia has built and looked after websites for Western New York businesses since 1999, and salon sites with a forty-line price list and no durations are familiar work. We are an independent authorised reseller rather than the operator of the underlying platform, which means we have no reason to talk you up a tier. If the plan you are on is already right, we will say so.

If you are moving from an old site or taking one over from whoever built it, the order of operations that keeps your email working through the change is on the website migration page. Call 716-771-2536 or tell us what your site runs on and what your menu currently lives in.