The complete RV park website guide

A camper reaching a park website has usually already found it on Google and glanced at the reviews. The site is not persuading a stranger. It is removing the last reasons to hesitate, and there are only four of those.

Will the rig fit. What does it cost. Is it available. Is the place any good. A plain site that answers all four in the first screen outperforms a beautiful one that buries them, every time.

1. The pages every park needs

Most parks need fewer pages than they think. What matters is that each one has a job and is findable.

The common failure is not a missing page. It is all of this collapsed into one long home page. That leaves a single page vaguely about everything, and nothing findable for anything specific.

2. Site and rate structure

This is where most park websites lose the booking, and the causes repeat across almost every site worth reviewing.

• Rates from last season, or none at all with an invitation to call.
• Site types named in the park's internal language rather than a camper's.
• No maximum rig length stated anywhere on the site.
• Monthly and seasonal rates hidden, when they are a large share of revenue.
• Rates set as an image, which no search engine or screen reader can read.

What works is a table a camper can scan. For each site type: the length it takes, hookups and amp service, pull-through or back-in, surface, and the rate by night, week and month. A camper who can answer their own fit question in ten seconds is a camper who books.

One structural point that pays off later. Rates should live in content the owner can edit in a minute. A site that needs a developer for a rate change becomes inaccurate the first time that is inconvenient, which is usually within a season.

3. The booking engine

Nearly every park runs a reservation platform, and the website's job is to hand the camper over cleanly rather than to replace it.

Four questions determine whether that handoff works. Does availability appear on the park's own site, or is the camper sent elsewhere. Does the handoff carry across dates the camper already chose. Can the destination be tracked. And does the park's branding survive the jump.

That last one is worth planning for. A camper taps Book Now and lands somewhere that looks like a different company. Some of them stop there, particularly if they were not certain to begin with.

Platform-specific notes are in the guides for Campspot, ResNexus and RoverPass. FillMyPark is not affiliated with any of them.

4. Mobile

A large share of camper traffic arrives on a phone, frequently on weak signal, sometimes from a moving vehicle. Designing for a desktop and shrinking it produces a site that technically fits and practically fails.

• The booking action is visible without scrolling, and stays reachable while the camper reads.
• Rate tables are readable on a small screen, rather than locked in something that scrolls sideways.
• Tap targets are large enough for somebody standing at a fuel pump.
• The phone number dials on tap.
• Photos are compressed properly. Park sites are photo heavy, and that is what makes them slow.

5. Photos

Photos are what campers actually look at, and most park sites get this wrong in one of two directions.

Too few, and the site looks like it is hiding something. Too many decorative sunsets and too few of the actual sites, and a camper still cannot tell whether their rig fits.

The useful set is unromantic. Each site type, showing spacing and surface. Hookup pedestals. The entrance and approach road. Restrooms and showers, which campers care about a great deal and parks are often shy about. Laundry. The office. Then the surroundings that make the location worth stopping for.

Two rules. Photograph what is true now, because a photo from before a decline oversells and one from before an improvement undersells. And compress everything, because an uncompressed camera file is many times larger than a web page needs.

6. Directions and arrival

This page is more valuable at a park than at almost any other kind of business, and it is routinely thin.

Campers arriving with a long rig have real questions. Which approach to take and which to avoid. Whether there are low bridges, tight turns, or steep grades on the obvious route. Where the entrance actually is, as distinct from where a mapping app drops the pin. How wide the gate is.

Arrival matters too. What happens on a late arrival. How the gate works after hours. Where to stop for check-in, and whether somebody will guide them onto the site.

A park that answers these well removes a whole category of phone calls, and prevents the arrival that goes badly and becomes a review.

7. Policies

Policies feel like small print and behave like a booking decision. A camper who cannot find the pet policy assumes the worst, and a camper who discovers a cancellation term at check-in writes about it.

What needs stating plainly:

• Cancellation and deposit terms.
• Pet rules, including limits on number or breed.
• Quiet hours and visitor rules.
• Rig age restrictions, where they exist.
• Anything unusual the park enforces.

Rig age policies deserve particular care. Where one exists, stating it clearly saves everybody the awkward conversation and stops a booking that was always going to be refused.

8. Local content

Campers choose a park partly for the park and largely for where it is. Local content is how a site answers the second half.

What works carries real detail from somebody who knows the area. Drive times to the attractions campers come for. What the road is like. When places are busy. Which nearby things are worth the trip and which are not.

9. SEO foundation

A website build is the cheapest moment to get the search foundation right and the most expensive moment to get it wrong.

The essentials are structural rather than clever. Clean URLs. One canonical version of each page. Titles and descriptions that describe the page. Headings that reflect the content. Text as text rather than baked into images. A working sitemap. Structured data where it describes something real.

Beyond that, the strongest SEO decision a park website can make is chapter one: separate, specific pages for the things campers search for. The full treatment is the RV park SEO guide.

10. Tracking

Parks have a measurement problem other businesses do not: the booking usually completes on a different domain, inside the reservation platform.

Three things make the picture usable. Analytics on the park site, so the path up to the handoff is visible. Tagged links on the Google profile, so listing traffic stops hiding inside direct. And the reservation platform's own reports for actual bookings.

Attribution will still be partial, and any report claiming otherwise is overstating. What matters is having enough signal to tell whether a change helped. The setup is in tracking RV park bookings from Google.

11. Accessibility

This chapter is often treated as a compliance footnote. At a park it is a usability requirement, because of who the customers are.

A meaningful share of camping guests are older, and many will be reading a phone in bright sunlight with reading glasses on. Small light-grey text on white is not a style problem in that context, it is an unreadable page.

The practical items:

• Genuine contrast in body text.
• Type large enough to read outdoors.
• Tap targets that work with imprecise touch.
• Alt text on any image carrying information.
• Forms with real labels.
• A site fully navigable by keyboard.

One more that matters commercially: rates and site details as text rather than as an image. A screen reader cannot read a picture of a rate table, and neither can a search engine.

12. Maintenance

Park websites rarely fail dramatically. They drift, and the drift is invisible from the inside.

Rates stay at last season's numbers. The contact form stops sending after an update, silently, producing no error and no bounce. The booking link points at a page the platform moved. Photos of an improvement never get added.

The recurring work is small, and belongs on a calendar rather than in somebody's memory. Test the forms by submitting them. Test the booking link by following it. Update rates and hours at each season change. Check the site loads quickly on a phone.

The full list is in the website maintenance checklist. A park can score its current site in about ten minutes with the website scorecard.

Fixing versus rebuilding

The wrong call here wastes real money in both directions.

A site that works, can be edited, and is merely out of date needs upkeep, not a rebuild. Maintenance will not fix a site that needs a developer for every edit, or that has no clear booking path on a phone.

Where a rebuild is the answer, the URL and redirect map comes before any design work. That is the difference between a redesign that keeps the park's visibility and one that quietly discards it.