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When spring and fall bring the crowds to Sedona and the Verde Valley, your website gets its hardest workout of the year. That’s exactly when an outdated hours listing, a broken booking widget or last season’s offer does the most damage.
The fix is to treat your website like the rest of your seasonal prep: check it a few weeks before the rush, not during it. Here’s a checklist you can work through in an afternoon.
Why busy season exposes website problems
During quiet months, a small error might cost you one or two inquiries. During peak season, the same error repeats with every visitor. And busy-season visitors are often deciding fast, on a phone, sometimes from a trailhead parking lot or a hotel room with weak signal. If the information is wrong or the page won’t load, they move on to the next result. Our mobile-friendly website checklist covers what those visitors need from a phone.
You’ll also be too busy to fix things once the rush starts. Anything you can settle beforehand is one less problem in the middle of a full day.
What to check, and where
| What to check | Where it lives | How you know it’s done |
|---|---|---|
| Hours and holiday hours | Website, Google Business Profile, booking tool, social profiles | Every place shows the same hours |
| Prices, packages and policies | Website, booking tool | Checkout matches what the page says |
| Booking and forms | Website and booking tool | A test booking and form reach your team |
| Speed and uptime | Website and host | Obvious mobile speed problems fixed; monitoring is on |
| Seasonal offers | Landing pages, Google posts, email | Each offer has one page with one clear action |
1. Update the basics everywhere
Start with the details customers rely on most:
- Hours, including any seasonal changes, extended evenings or days you close
- Holiday hours for the holidays that fall in your busy season
- Prices and packages, if they change by season
- Menus, tour schedules or class timetables
- Policies: cancellations, deposits, minimum stays, group sizes, pets
Then make sure those details match in every place they appear: your website, your Google Business Profile, your booking tool and your social profiles. Conflicting hours frustrate customers and confuse search engines. Our post on Google Business Profile and your website covers how to keep the two in step.
Do this: change hours on the website and Google profile the same day.
Not this: update the Google profile and leave “Open daily 9 to 5” in the website footer.
2. Make availability obvious
Busy-season visitors want to know one thing first: can I get in?
- Show real availability if your booking tool supports it, rather than a form that asks people to inquire.
- Say when you’re booked up. A clear “Sunrise tours are full through the weekend; afternoon spots are open” is better than letting people discover it at checkout.
- Explain walk-in policies for restaurants, galleries and shops, plus any wait-list option.
- Add a short banner for time-sensitive notes: limited parking, a temporary closure, a sold-out event. Remove it when it no longer applies.
Tour operators feel this most; our guide to tour company websites goes deeper on showing availability honestly.
3. Test your booking and checkout flow
Run through the full process yourself, on your phone, as a customer would:
- Find your business in Google and tap through to the site.
- Choose a date, time or product.
- Complete the booking or purchase with a real payment method, then refund it if needed.
- Check that the confirmation email arrives and contains the right details.
- Make sure the booking lands where your staff expect it.
If you use a third-party tool such as FareHarbor, Peek, Mindbody, OpenTable, Resy or Tock, confirm that seasonal schedules and pricing are loaded there too. The website and the booking system need to agree.
Test contact forms the same way. Submit one and confirm it reaches an inbox someone checks daily.
4. Check speed and reliability
A site that’s fine for a handful of visitors a day can struggle when traffic picks up.
- Check your mobile speed with PageSpeed Insights and fix the obvious problems, especially oversized photos. We go into detail in why website speed matters for Sedona businesses.
- Ask your host whether your plan can handle more traffic than usual, and whether a content delivery network (CDN) is in place. If the answers are vague, our guide on how to choose web hosting explains what a good host should tell you.
- Confirm backups are running, and that you know how to restore one.
- Update your software before the season, not during it. On WordPress, that means core, theme and plugins, ideally tested on a staging copy first.
- Set up uptime monitoring so you hear about an outage from an alert, not from a customer.
If you’d rather not handle this yourself every season, it’s the kind of work a website care plan covers.
5. Plan seasonal landing pages
A dedicated page for a seasonal offer usually works better than a line on the homepage. Examples:
- A fall tour package or a spring sunrise hike series
- A holiday menu or special event at a restaurant
- A gallery’s seasonal show or an artist’s visit
- A retreat or workshop running on specific dates
Each page should explain the offer, show dates and pricing clearly, and have one obvious action: book, reserve or call. You can link to it from your Google profile posts, emails and social media.
One tip: if the offer repeats each year, keep the same URL and update the content rather than creating a new page every season. That way the page keeps whatever search visibility it has built up. Need a page built for a specific offer? See our landing page service. Seasonal pages can also help fill quieter months, which we cover in how a website drives business growth.
6. Answer busy-season questions before they’re asked
Look at the questions your staff answered most often last season and put the answers on the site:
- Where to park, and what to do if the lot is full
- Whether reservations are needed
- How far ahead to book
- What to bring, wear or expect
- Directions from SR-89A, SR-179 or the Village of Oak Creek, if you’re hard to find
A clear FAQ section saves your team time on the phone and helps visitors who are planning on the road.
7. Prepare your team
- Decide who will update the site if something changes mid-season, such as weather closures or sold-out dates.
- Make sure that person has a working login and knows how to post a banner or edit hours.
- Keep a short note of where each account lives: website, booking tool, Google profile.
When the season winds down, your data shows what worked. Our Google Search Console guide explains which pages and searches brought people in, and our GA4 guide shows how to see which of those visits turned into bookings and calls.
How to get your website ready for busy season, step by step
Update hours, prices and policies
Change seasonal hours, holiday hours, prices and policies on your site, Google Business Profile, booking tool and social profiles on the same day. You're done when all of them match.
Test bookings and forms on a phone
Book, buy or submit a form as a customer would, then confirm the email arrives and the booking reaches your staff.
Check speed, backups and updates
Run a mobile speed test, confirm backups restore, apply software updates and turn on uptime monitoring before traffic picks up.
Publish seasonal landing pages
Give each seasonal offer its own page with dates, pricing and one clear action. Reuse last year's URL if the offer repeats.
Answer the common questions
Add parking, reservations, what to bring and directions to your site, based on what staff were asked most last season.
Assign a mid-season editor
Choose who will post banners or change hours during the season and make sure they have a working login.
Review after the season
Check which pages got visits, which questions the site didn't answer and what broke. Retire or update expired offers and list bigger fixes for the off-season.
Frequently asked questions
How far ahead of busy season should I update my website?
Early enough that you can test everything and fix what you find before the first busy weekend. Software updates and booking changes in particular are worth doing while things are quiet, so a problem doesn't land on a full day. If you need new pages built, allow extra time for content and review.
Should I take down a seasonal page when the offer ends?
If the offer comes back each year, keep the page and the URL, and update it to say the offer has ended and when it returns. That way the page keeps any search visibility it has built up. If it was a one-time event, redirect it to the most relevant current page instead of leaving a dead link.
Does Google update my hours automatically from my website?
Don't count on it. Your Google Business Profile has its own hours, including special hours for holidays, and you should update them directly. Keep the website and profile in step so customers see the same information in both places. Our guide to Google Business Profile and your website explains how they work together.
What should I do if my booking tool goes down during busy season?
Post a short banner on your site with a phone number or email so visitors can still reach you, and update your Google profile if needed. Contact the booking tool's support straight away. Afterward, note what happened and whether the site and staff knew what to do, so you can plan a fallback before next season.
Is a homepage banner enough for a seasonal offer?
A banner is fine for short notices like a closure or a sold-out date. For an offer people need to understand and book, a dedicated page works better: it can explain dates, pricing and details, it has its own URL to share in emails and social posts, and it can show up in search on its own.
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