How to make a hair salon website that keeps the chairs full

TL;DR: How to make a hair salon website

The first half of this guide covers a domain, a salon template, and the pages people open, which are the services, the price list, your stylists, the gallery and one obvious way to get in touch. Yola website builder gives you ready-made Services, Pricing and Galleries blocks, so a color price rise or a new stylist is an edit somebody makes between clients. It also covers how to publish a price list that survives contact with a real salon, with from figures, a rate per stylist level and a consultation line against color corrections and extensions.

The second half is about filling the chairs. You shoot the gallery properly, in daylight and from the back and the sides rather than the front, add a booking inquiry form asking for the service, the stylist and two or three dates, put your licensing, your color line certifications and your review count where a client sees them, and keep a page carrying your hours, your late nights and which stylists work which days. Then you claim a Google Business Profile under "Hair salon" and write a page for balayage and the other services people search by name. Work through the ten steps and somebody who hears your name at nine at night can see the price, see the work and ask for a Saturday without calling.

What to include

Top features of a hair salon website

How to make a hair salon
website in 10 steps

Your domain is the name somebody reads off the window and types into a phone an hour later. Use the salon's trading name exactly as it appears on the sign, and take the .com while it is free, because that is what people assume and type first. Salon names repeat more than most trades do, so if there is a business with a similar name two towns over, putting your city on the end sorts that out and helps in local search at the same time.

Leave out hyphens and numbers. A client says your name to a friend at the school gate and the friend types it that evening, and both of those get dropped on the way. Register once and use the same spelling on your Google Business Profile, on the window, on the price cards at the desk and on any marketplace profile you keep.

You can search for and register the name inside the Yola website builder while you put the site together, and annual plans include a free domain for the first year.

None of this needs code. Yola lets you edit text, swap photos and move sections the way you edit a document, which matters for a salon because the price list moves whenever your color costs do and the team changes over a season. Whoever ends up making those edits is going to be you or the person on the desk, in the quiet half hour after lunch.

Answer a few questions about the salon and Yola's AI Website Builder hands back a first draft to work from. The free plan has basic AI and the full set of AI tools sits on the paid plans, so treat whatever comes back as a starting point and check every price, every stylist name and every opening hour against what is true this week. Hosting, an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups come with the site. Starting from a template that already has a services layout, a gallery and a contact form means you are editing a page rather than designing one.

Start from a template

Hair salon website templates

Six pages carry a salon site, and two different people open them. One has never been in and wants a price and a photo of your color work before they will call. The other already knows you and is standing in the street checking your hours on a phone.

Keep the set small on purpose. Every extra page is another thing going quietly out of date while everybody is on the floor, and the six below are the ones people actually open. A separate Book page is not one of them, since the inquiry form belongs on Contact where everybody already looks for it.

Build these first, then add anything else once the site is live:

The price list is the page people came for. A salon that hides it gets a phone call that opens with what does a full head of highlights cost, and ends with the caller ringing the next salon on the list anyway. Publishing prices gives away nothing you were keeping back, and it clears out the calls that were never going to turn into an appointment.

Name each service the way a client says it, not the way the color line does. Balayage, a full head of highlights, a root tint and toner, a keratin treatment: those are search terms and price questions in the same breath. Under each one, say what is included. A cut that comes with the blow dry and a cut that does not are two different prices, and the confusion always lands at the desk while somebody is waiting to pay.

Prices in a salon are never a single number, so publish the structure instead of pretending. Three things move a color price and all three belong on the page: the length and thickness of the hair, the stylist's level, and whether the work is correcting somebody else's color. A from figure against each service, a line saying long or thick hair is priced up at consultation, and a separate rate per stylist level between them cover nearly every conversation you would otherwise have at the desk. Say plainly which services need a consultation before a chair is held. Color corrections and extensions always do, and where your color line asks for a patch test before a tint, put the timing on the page so nobody walks in expecting color the same afternoon.

Give a headline service its own page where the search demand justifies it. Balayage is the obvious one for most salons: a page carrying the price, how long it takes, how often it wants redoing and six photos from your own chairs will out-pull a line in a list every time. Bridal is the other, because that client is planning months ahead and reads all of it.

Yola's ready-made Services and Pricing blocks put the name, the short description and the figure together, so a price rise is a ten-minute edit on a Monday morning rather than a job you hand to somebody else. Put the date you last updated the list at the bottom of the page, and then keep that date honest.

Hair is hard to photograph and most salon galleries prove it. Shoot near a window in daylight, with the client facing the light and the flash off. Overhead salon lighting turns blonde yellow and flattens brunette, so the color you spent three hours getting right is the first thing it kills.

Shoot the back and both sides, not just the front. Balayage, a graduated bob, a color melt: the work is in the back of the head, and a face-on photo shows almost none of it. Stand far enough back to get the whole length in, take one from each side and one from directly behind, and use the same corner of the salon every time so the set looks like a set rather than a folder of phone pictures.

Dry, finished hair only. A wet-look shot taken at the backwash reads as a job half done and nobody books from one. Wait until the blow dry is finished and the gown is off.

Before and after photos in a gallery are the strongest thing you can put up, especially for color corrections and extensions. Shoot the before in the same spot, the same light and the same framing as the after, because a before taken in a dark corner looks like a trick even when the work is real. Put the pair together with one line saying what was done and how long it took.

Ask before a client's face goes on the internet, every time, and get it in writing where you can. Plenty of people are happy to show the hair and not the face, and a shot from behind solves that without losing any of the work. Credit the stylist under each photo as well, since that is what turns a gallery into bookings for a particular chair.

Name the files for what is in them, balayage-long-brunette-side.jpg rather than IMG_2213.jpg, and repeat that wording in the alt text so the photos can turn up in image search. Yola's ready-made Galleries block holds the set, and on a paid plan you can lay out a custom gallery with the Custom code block and fill the gaps from 10M premium stock images and 1M premium icons until you have enough of your own. Yola does not host video, so a clip of a finished blow dry goes on your usual video platform and gets embedded on the page.

Yola has no native booking, so be clear with yourself about what you are building here. Two routes are honest. One is a customizable inquiry form on your Contact page, which the desk answers. The other is a third-party booking tool you already pay for, embedded in the site so a client picks a live slot. This step describes the form, because it costs nothing, it works on day one, and it catches the person who is not ready to pick a time yet anyway.

Five fields do it. The service they want, the stylist they want or no preference, two or three dates and times that would work, whether they have been to the salon before, and a phone number. New or returning is the field that earns its place: a first-time color client needs a consultation and possibly a patch test before anybody can give them a slot, while a returning client goes straight into the book. Leave a short notes box at the bottom for the ones who want to explain what happened to their hair, because those messages tell the desk how much chair time to allow.

You choose those fields yourself, since Yola's contact form is customizable rather than pre-made, and the Forms block help article walks through setting one up. Yola sends an automatic confirmation the moment somebody submits, so they know it landed. Write that confirmation properly: say the salon will come back with a time, give the number for anybody who needs an answer today, and say what hours the desk is staffed.

Say on the form that a submission is a request and not a confirmed appointment. The slot is theirs once somebody from the desk confirms it, and a client who read that is not standing in the doorway on Saturday expecting a chair. Your deposit and cancellation policy belongs in the same few lines, particularly for bridal and for color that blocks four hours of somebody's day.

Then answer them. Most of these land in the evening, after the desk has gone home, and the salon that replies at nine the next morning is usually the one that gets the client. Make it a job with a name against it, the way the phone is, because an inquiry sitting for three days is somebody who booked elsewhere on the Tuesday.

If you already run a booking tool, embed it and keep the form as well. Not everybody wants to pick a square out of a grid, and a color correction needs a conversation before it needs a time.

Cosmetology is licensed state by state in the US, so there is no single line that is true everywhere. Write what the salon and the stylists actually hold, worded the way the issuing body words it, and leave out anything that does not apply to you. Where your state licenses cosmetologists, naming the board that licenses your team is worth more than a vague sentence about qualified staff.

The certifications clients recognize are the color lines. If your stylists trained with a named brand, say which and say when, because somebody who has had good work done with a particular line will look for a salon that carries it. Extension methods work the same way, and there the training counts for more than the brand, since a badly fitted set is the thing people have heard about from a friend.

Put these on the home page and on the stylists page rather than on an About page nobody opens, and put one of them beside the booking button. Somebody with the form open is deciding whether to bother, and a line of proof at that exact point does more than a paragraph three screens further up.

The most common visit to a salon website is somebody checking a time. Are you open Sunday, do you do late nights, is anybody in on a Monday. Give that its own page and repeat the hours on the home page, because a fair number of people never get past the front.

Regular opening hours go at the top, then everything that differs from them: the late nights, the Sunday you started opening in the spring, the week you close after Christmas, the public holidays you work anyway. Underneath, say which stylists work which days. That block answers the question the desk fields most, which is whether the person somebody had last time is in on a Thursday, and it quietly steers a flexible client toward the chairs with room in them.

The rest of the page is what is on. Bridal season availability, and how far ahead your trials are booking. A color correction clinic, or a training night where models get cut at a lower price. Seasonal offers, gift cards before December, an introductory rate while a new stylist builds a column. Each entry wants a date, a time, what it costs and how to reserve a place, and reserving goes through the same inquiry form as everything else.

Yola has no events or calendar block, so this is an ordinary page kept current by hand, and for a salon that is the right shape anyway. Hours move when somebody goes on leave or you add a late night, and a page you edit yourself moves with them in about two minutes. The discipline is doing it the week the change happens. Hours that are wrong on a holiday weekend send somebody to a locked door, and that person does not try you a second time.

Nearly all of a salon's demand sits within a few miles of the door, and most of it arrives through the map pack, those three listings with the little pins at the top. Yola's SEO Optimized Website capability covers the technical side of your pages. The rest is your wording, plus a handful of jobs you do on Google rather than inside the site.

Before you tell anybody it is live, open the site on a phone the way a client will, standing up and one-handed. Tap the number and check it dials. Send yourself a booking inquiry and read the confirmation that comes back. Time how long it takes to get from the home page to a price, and if that is more than two taps, move the price list up.

Yola sites are mobile optimized and responsive, so the layout adapts between phone and laptop on its own, and every site gets an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups. Check page speed on the pages doing the work, which are home, the price list and the gallery. Full-size photos straight off a phone are usually what slows a salon site down, so resize them before they go up.

After that the upkeep is small. Prices get corrected the week they change. New photos go up while the client still has the blow dry in. A stylist who leaves comes off the team page that week, and a new one goes on with the space in their column said out loud. Ten minutes on a quiet Tuesday covers most of it, and a site that keeps moving holds its ranking better than one nobody has touched since it went up.

Common hair salon website mistakes to avoid

The same handful of things go wrong on salon sites, and each one costs you either an empty chair or a client who never rang.

How much does a hair salon website cost?

On Yola the site starts free, and a paid plan is $9.95/mo once you want your own domain, more pages and the full AI tools. Annual plans include a free domain for the first year. Set against a single color client a month, it is not a line anybody will notice on the books.

Paying somebody else to build a comparable site often runs from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, depending on how much design and photography goes into it, and changes afterwards usually carry a fee of their own.

That second figure is the one that matters for a salon. Your price list moves when your color costs move, your team changes over a year and the gallery should be growing every month. If every one of those edits is an email to somebody else, you either pay each time or you stop asking, and a price list two rises out of date is worse than no price list at all. Doing it yourself means a price change agreed on Monday is on the site on Monday.