How to make a hair stylist website that builds your own client list

TL;DR: How to make a hair stylist website

This guide starts with the part most stylists skip, which is registering your domain name. From there, it covers a starting template, the six pages people open, and how to write out cuts, balayage, gray blending, extensions and bridal hair with a starting figure against each. Yola website builder gives you ready-made Services, Pricing and Galleries blocks, so a rate change or a new set of color photos is an edit you make between clients rather than a job you hand to somebody else.

The second half is where the work comes from. It goes into shooting hair properly, by a window in daylight, from the back and the sides and not only the front, and a consultation inquiry form that asks about box color and previous lightening before you try to price a correction. Then your cosmetology license and color line certifications, a page saying which salon or suite you are in right now and which days you work, and a Google Business Profile set to Hairdresser under your own name. Work through the ten steps and the site, the domain and the client list travel with you the next time you change chairs.

What to include

Top features of a hair stylist website

How to make a hair stylist
website in 10 steps

Use your name. Not the salon's, not a word you liked in 2019, and nothing you would have to walk away from the next time you change suites. When a client cannot find you where they last saw you, the thing they type is your first and last name with hair or stylist after it, and if that lands on your page you have kept them. Take the .com, because it is what people assume and type first.

Plenty of names are already gone. If yours is, put your city or your specialty on the end rather than a number, so you end up with something like jordanwrighthairnashville instead of jordanwrighthair2. Leave hyphens and numbers out either way. A client says your name out loud to a friend at the mirror and types it three days later, and both of those get dropped somewhere in between.

Register once and then use the same spelling everywhere your name appears: your Google Business Profile, your Instagram bio, the link on your business card, the page the salon keeps for its team. You can search for and register the name inside the Yola website builder while you are putting the site together, and annual plans include a free domain for the first year. The chair is rented. The name is not, and that is the whole point of starting here.

None of this needs code. Yola lets you edit text, swap photos and move sections yourself, the same way you edit a document, which matters here because the page that goes out of date fastest is the one with your address on it and you are the only person who will be fixing it.

Answer a few questions about what you specialize in and who sits in your chair, 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 what comes back as a starting point and check every line about your rates, your hours and where you work against what is true this month. Hosting, an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups come with the site. Starting from a template that already has a gallery, a services list and a contact form means you are editing a page rather than designing one, on an evening between a double color day and a Saturday.

Start from a template

Hair stylist website templates

Six pages carry nearly all of it, and two different people open them. One has never met you and is deciding from photos whether you can be trusted with a head of hair they have been growing out for two years. The other already knows your work and is trying to find out where you are now.

Keep the set small. Every extra page is another thing quietly going out of date while you work a ten-hour Saturday, and the six below are the ones that get opened. Your current address belongs on the home page as well as on Contact, because the client who lost you should not have to hunt for it.

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

Write the services out the way a stylist names them, not the way a salon menu shortens them. Somebody looking for lived-in color, a gray blend or a hand-tied row is typing that phrase, and a line that just says color services loses them to whoever wrote the actual word. If you are known for one thing, put it first and let the rest sit underneath it, because the whole point of working for yourself is that you get to choose the work.

Price the way the service actually behaves. A cut, a root touch-up and a blow dry take a known amount of time, so give a starting figure and the time each one holds in your day. Color does not work like that, since a full head of foils on hair down to the waist costs you three times the product of a shoulder-length refresh, so state the hourly rate or the starting figure and say the rest is quoted after a consultation. A correction on hair with box color or a previous lightening is not a price, it is a plan, sometimes across two or three appointments, and saying so on the page saves you the conversation where somebody expected platinum for the price of a toner.

Where one service carries real search demand on its own, and balayage, extensions and bridal hair usually do, give it a page instead of a line in a list. Yola's ready-made Services and Pricing blocks put the name, a short description and the figure together, so putting your rates up is an edit you make yourself on a Sunday night rather than a message to whoever built the site.

This is the part of the site that does the actual selling, and it is also the part you already have expertise in, because you look at hair all day. Shoot by a window in daylight. Salon spotlights are the single worst thing that happens to a photograph of color, since they push blondes orange and brunettes flat, and the tone you spent four hours placing stops existing somewhere between the chair and the phone. Find one window with indirect light, stand your client in the same spot every time, and let that become your background.

Shoot the back and the sides, not just the front. The front is the part a client can already see in the mirror at home. What they cannot judge from a smiling face-on shot is your blending down the back, the placement through the mid-lengths, the way the ends sit after a cut, and that is the whole reason somebody is looking at your portfolio rather than somebody else's. Three frames, front, back and one side, turns a nice picture into evidence.

The strongest thing you can put up is the same client photographed across a color journey. A session one, a session two and where the hair landed four months later says more about your judgment than twenty separate heads do, because it shows you planning rather than performing. Before and after photos in a gallery work the same way for corrections, as long as the before is shot in the same light as the after. Two different light sources and the improvement looks like a trick, which is the opposite of what you are trying to prove.

Ask before a face goes public, every time, and take no for an answer without making it awkward. A lot of people are happy for their hair to be online and not their face, so shoot from behind or crop at the jaw, and you lose nothing: the hair was the subject anyway. Keep a note of who said yes, because a client who agreed two years ago at a different salon has not necessarily agreed now.

Name the files for the technique and the city, balayage-brunette-portland.jpg rather than IMG_2291.jpg, and repeat that wording in the alt text so the photos can turn up in a local 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 any gaps from 10M premium stock images and 1M premium icons while your own set builds up. Skip the filters entirely. Yola does not host video, so a transformation clip goes on your usual video platform and gets embedded on the page.

Yola has no native booking, and for a color stylist that turns out to be the right shape. A big change cannot be priced from a form, and the worst version of your day is a stranger dropping themselves into a two-hour slot for something that needs five hours and two appointments. What you want off the page is an inquiry with enough in it that your reply can be a real answer instead of a list of questions.

Six fields cover it. What they are after, how long their hair is and what condition it is in, whether there is box color or a previous lightening in it, two or three dates that work for them, their budget range, and a phone number. The box color question is the one that saves you the most, because it is the difference between a toner and a three-session plan, and people rarely volunteer it. Ask for a range on budget rather than a figure, and put the rest of the boxes away, since every extra one costs you submissions from somebody filling this in on a phone between meetings.

You choose those fields yourself, because 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. Use that confirmation properly: say when you will come back to them, and ask for two photos of their hair taken in daylight, which is the thing that turns your reply into a quote. If you already run a booking tool you are happy with, it can be integrated into the site and linked from the same place, so regulars rebook themselves while new color goes through the form.

Say on the page what a submission is. It is an inquiry, not a held appointment, and the slot is theirs once you have confirmed it and taken whatever deposit you take for long color. Then answer inside a day. Somebody who has just decided to leave the stylist they have had for six years messages two or three people that evening, and the one who comes back with a plan and a number usually gets the head.

Cosmetology licensing is a state matter in the US, and the wording, the renewal cycle and even whether the number is public vary from one board to the next. So write this section as what you hold and where you hold it, in the words the issuing board uses, and leave out anything that does not apply to you. Nothing here is a marketing line. It is a list of true things, and its whole value is that it is checkable.

Working for yourself changes what else belongs on it. In a salon, the business carries the insurance and the client assumes the salon vetted you. Renting a booth or driving to somebody's kitchen, you are the business, so liability cover for freelance and mobile work is worth stating plainly, and suites and wedding venues often ask for it before they let you work anyway. Name the salon or suite you are currently in as well, with the address, since somebody deciding to follow you wants to know you are somewhere real and easy to park near.

Put the strongest two on the home page rather than burying them on About, and repeat them beside the consultation form where the person who cares is actually standing. Your color line certifications and extension method training belong near the services they apply to, because a client asking who did your hand-tied training is asking about one service, not about you in general. Years behind the chair does more work than most stylists expect. A plain count, with the cities or salons attached, reads as well as any certificate and cannot be faked by somebody six months out of school.

For most businesses this is a nice-to-have page. For you it is the one the whole site exists to carry, because your address is the thing about you most likely to change, and a client who cannot find you does not usually go looking twice. Call it Where to find me and put it in the main menu, next to Contact.

Start with right now. The salon or suite you are in, the street address, the suite number, how to get in if the building has a keypad or a front desk, and where to park. Suite buildings are the ones people get lost in, so a line saying second floor, ring the bell marked Studio 14 is worth more than a map. Then the days and hours you actually take clients, which for a freelance stylist is rarely the same as the building's hours. If you split your week between two places, say which days are where, because that is the question your regulars ask most.

Add the parts of the week that are not in a chair. The neighborhoods you will drive to for home visits, and what the travel fee is. Bridal dates already taken, listed as dates and nothing more, so a couple can see that a Saturday in June is gone before they message you about it. Class dates and assistant days if you teach. None of this needs a client's name on it. A date and the word booked does the job.

Yola has no events or calendar block, so this is an ordinary page you edit by hand, and that suits the way your year actually moves. Once the first few lines are laid out, changing one means copying a line and editing four words, which is a two-minute job on a phone. The discipline is the timing: update it the day you know you are moving, not the day you move, and keep a line saying where you used to be. That old salon name is what half your clients will search, and the sentence that says you are now at such and such address is the cheapest client retention there is. The month you change chairs, this page earns the entire site.

Leave the past up rather than clearing it. Bridal seasons you worked, classes you taught, the salons you have been in: that is a career on one page, and it answers the question a new client was going to ask anyway, which is how long you have been doing this and where.

Two searches matter to you and they behave nothing alike. One is a stranger in your city typing hair stylist with the city on the end, or naming the technique they want done properly this time, which is the map pack and the local blue links. The other is a client you already have, typing your name because they went to the old salon and you were not there. The second one is worth more per search than anything else on the site. Yola's SEO Optimized Website capability covers the technical side of your pages, the wording is yours, and the Google Business Profile is work you do on Google rather than inside the builder.

Before you send the link to anybody, open the site on a phone the way a client will. Tap the number and check it dials. Send yourself a consultation inquiry, read the confirmation that comes back and see whether it actually tells somebody what happens next. Time how long it takes to find your current address from the home page, and if it is more than one tap, move it 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 portfolio and Where to find me. A gallery of full-size photos straight off a phone is almost always what slows a stylist's site down, so resize them before they go up.

After that the upkeep is small and constant. New color photos go up while the client is still pleased with them, ideally the same week. Rates get corrected the day they change, not the following season. Anything about where you work gets changed the day you know, which is the one piece of maintenance that pays for itself outright. Ten minutes on a Sunday covers it, and a site that keeps moving holds its ranking better than one left alone since the last salon.

Common hair stylist website mistakes to avoid

The same few things go wrong on stylists' sites, and each one costs you either a new client or a regular you had already earned.

How much does a hair stylist 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. Against a chair rental, or against one balayage, it is not a number you have to think about for long.

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.

For a freelance stylist that second number is the one that decides it. Your site changes more than most, because the address changes, the rates change and new work goes up every week. If every edit is an email to somebody else, you either pay each time or you stop asking, and the page quietly stops being true right when you need it most, which is the month you move. Doing it yourself means the new suite number is live the evening you sign for it.