RV park website resources

Four questions, and everything else is secondary

A camper reaching the 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.

There are four of those reasons. Will my rig fit. What does it cost. Is it available. Is the place any good.

A plain site that makes rates, site fit, availability and booking obvious can outperform a more polished site that hides those answers. That is the whole test, and most park sites fail it on the second question.

How park websites actually break

Not dramatically. They drift, and the drift is invisible from the inside.

Rates stay at last season's numbers because changing them means emailing someone. The contact form stops sending after a plugin update and nobody notices, because a form that fails silently produces no error and no bounce. The booking link points at a page the reservation platform moved. Photos from a camera get uploaded untouched and the site takes eight seconds to load on the signal a camper actually has.

Every one of those is cheap to prevent and expensive to discover late. A form that broke in April and gets found in July has cost a season of inquiries.

Deciding between fixing and rebuilding

This is where parks waste the most money, in both directions. Some pay for a rebuild when a rate update was the actual problem. Others pour maintenance into a site that structurally cannot do the job.

The rough test: if the site works, can be edited, and is merely out of date, it needs upkeep. Maintenance will not fix a site that needs a developer for every edit, or that has no clear booking path on a phone.

You can settle it yourself in about ten minutes with the website scorecard, and neither answer requires talking to us.

The redesign risk nobody mentions

A park that already ranks can lose that visibility by launching a new site with different URLs and no redirects.

It is the most common way a redesign goes wrong. It usually surfaces weeks later, when the season is already underway. It is also entirely preventable by recording what exists before anything is rebuilt. That list is in the redesign checklist, worth reading even if someone else is doing the build.

A note on ownership

Before hiring anyone to build or host a park website, confirm who will own the domain, the site files and the content. Some providers register the domain in their own name or keep the site on a platform the park cannot take with it.

A park in that position cannot leave without starting over. What to ask, including of us, is in how to choose an RV park marketing agency.

Where to start

To judge the current site, use the scorecard. To keep it working, use the maintenance checklist. For the full picture, read the RV park website guide.

Start here

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