If you own a gorgeous country cottage, a beautiful beach house, or a cabin in the jungle, leasing your vacation home may be an excellent way to earn passive income.
This strategy is typically a straightforward approach to build wealth. You may hand over the property to someone who handles cleaning and maintenance in your absence.
Should this sound like a dream to you, building excellent vacation home rental websites is the starting point. What’s better, you may create for friends and colleagues (for a token) if you have the time.
However, owning a personal website doesn’t negate listing on top vacation rentals websites like The Short Term Shop’s website. It’s easier to find customers on such established real estate sites, and these prospects are more convinced of your legitimacy if your advert leads to an organized website.
Step-by-step Guide for Setting up Your Vacation Rental Site
- Select a Host
The first step to building any website is to find a hosting website. The host provides you with webspace, which is the uptime, RAM, bandwidth, and disk space. Their primary purpose is to keep your website online and facilitate easy access to it.
There are various giants among website hosting platforms these days. You have to do proper research to find out which works best for rental vacation properties and at the lowest cost.
- Select a Hosting Plan
A typical web hosting website has three hosting plans from which to choose. Costs, of course, differ, but each can set up a rental vacation website.
- The Starter Plan: This kit often offers a free domain, tailorable templates, website analytics, cloud hosting, and a drag-and-drop editor.
- eCommerce Plan: This package is for websites involving the provision of online products or services. eCommerce is the plan to go for if you’ll allow bookings and payments through your rental website.
- Premium: The premium package offers all you’ll find in the starter kit and (typically) priority support. This feature provides you full support with the creation and maintenance of your website. We think this plan may be excessive for a simple rental vacation site.
- Choose a Domain Name
The best vacation home rental websites have unique domain names. Your domain name has to be eye-catching and creative.
To create one, you’ll find the “create domain” box and enter the name that you think. Know now that your top choice is rarely available. Most catchy titles are already in use for other websites.
If the name you enter is unavailable, you’ll have to think of another creative title to try. You can search for already existing popular short term rental companies to see how their domain name looks.
You may want to include a location-specific keyword in your domain name, as it may help searchers find you quickly.
- Create Account
If you’ve found an acceptable domain name, you have to create your account with the host. To do so, connect an email address or use any available option (typically Facebook). Proceed to enter payment information for your subscription to become active.
This step makes it mandatory to be careful when choosing a suitable web host. Beware of sites with unreasonably low costs, as they may be a means to dupe you. It’s best to stick with confirmed sites.
- Choose the Appropriate Template For Your Website
Most web hosting services offer numerous templates for your website. You can make the options more customized by entering the niche of your website. Put in keywords like “vacation” and “rental” to find coin templates for such websites.
The only thing you have to do is select a template and edit with the drag-and-drop editor (if necessary at all).
However, if you have some knowledge about this, you may choose to design your website yourself. You can create a new, unique template to use for your website only. This uniqueness tends to increase visitors’ regard.
- Set up Pages and Contents for Your Website
The next step after selecting or creating the ideal template for your vacation rental website is to tailor the pages to satisfaction. To start, select “start editing, and you’ll get directed to your dashboard. Here, you can edit, add, and delete pages on your site.
Since the purpose of your website is to provide rentals to vacationists, the following are few pages that you may want to have on the site:
- Home: The homepage serves as the welcome page. It’s the first view available to whoever opens your website. Therefore, you may want to have a gorgeous image of your property or related images and captivating, helpful content on this page.
- About: This page contains relevant information about you and the rental you’re offering. You don’t have to reveal sensitive data about yourself, but you should sound real enough. Think too: what would I read about a landlord that’d get me interested in their vacation rental property?
- Gallery: The gallery section is always a critical page for vacation rental websites and other commercial sites. You have to add crystal-clear, absorbing images of your property here. Have exterior and interior shots here, focusing too on the unique edge of your rental.
- Contact: This page links interested prospects to you. The trick here is to provide details that show you care for whoever’s at the other end. Your phone number and email address would be more convincing than a contact form.
- Payment: This page is not typical on websites like yours, but it makes the whole transaction easier. The obstacle is that people are wary of entering their payment details on websites that don’t belong to reputable companies.
You can design pages and create content with the drag-and-drop editor. You’ll only have to point and click with a mouse. Depending on your plan, some hosts provide a comprehensive guide to this process.
Also, your website should contain bespoke descriptions. You may have to hire a professional writer to create premium content.
- Review the Website and Launch if Satisfied
When done with the pages and contents, it’s time to assess what you’ve created. If there are any corrections, effect them before proceeding to launch. Preview the website to have an overview of the pages.
Conclusion
The finest short term rental houses are hardly hired on time without appropriate packaging. Therefore, you must put reasonable effort into creating your website.
Do some research, and you’ll realize that the best vacation home rental websites are impressive to look at and operate. Importantly, ensure you don’t use copyrighted images or plagiarized content on your website. Originality is key.