A note for Sara and Mark
Your lodges have 455 Airbnb reviews between them, rated 4.95 and 4.92. We think your website could feel as good as your lodges do, so we built what we’d do. You didn’t ask for this, and you owe us nothing.
The idea
Your guests aren’t buying a list of amenities. They’re buying an evening: the walk through the oaks, the lamps coming on, the tub, the burner, the mist on the Long Mynd in the morning. So the home page runs through a stay, from 3pm to the next morning, and the page changes colour with the time of day. When you reach dusk, Oaks Lodge lights up and embers rise from your fire pit.
The prices, times, facts and lodge photos are all yours. Four photos on the Things to do page are openly licensed from Wikimedia Commons and credited there, and you’ll have better ones of Steele’s and The Outdoor Depot. The wording is partly ours, to fit the idea, and we checked it against your site. If we’ve got anything wrong, it’s our mistake, and you would have the final say on every line.
What we kept
Your availability lookup. It’s the cleverest thing on the site, with live availability, prices, a next-free-weekend search and a last-minute-deal route to WhatsApp. We haven’t touched your tool. We gave it new controls to match the rest of the page, reading the same live data from it, so the prices and availability shown are real. Searches from this preview are tagged bsquared_preview, so you can tell them apart in your analytics, and we’d stop them straight away if you’d prefer. Your RentalBell calendars are unchanged too.
How you take bookings. Guests still speak to Mark. The WhatsApp and phone links on this preview go to your real number.
On a phone, side by side
What the numbers say
Both home pages loaded three times each on 1 November 2026 under the same conditions: an emulated phone on a slow mobile connection, in Chrome, with typical results shown. Treat these as a like-for-like comparison, not an exact figure for every guest.
| Measure | Your site today | This preview |
|---|---|---|
| Time until the main content shows | 36 seconds | 1.9 seconds |
| Data a phone downloads | 7.1MB | 0.29MB |
| Files requested | 56 | 9 |
| Description for search results | No meta description tag, only a social sharing one | One written for each page, plus a share card with a photo for WhatsApp and Facebook |
| Details Google can read directly | Basic data on the Larches page only | Business, both lodges, FAQs and page trails as structured data |
| Cookie banner | Google’s, on arrival | None from Google Sites; this build sets no tracking cookies of its own |
Why it could pay for itself
When we searched for a romantic hot tub lodge in Church Stretton, your Airbnb listing and the booking sites came up, and your own website didn’t. That was one search on one day, so it’s a clue, not proof. But it suggests guests are finding you through the platforms.
Published guides put Airbnb’s host fee at around 15.5% where the host-only model applies. You’ll know your own rate. At that rate, a £450 weekend at Oaks costs about £70 in fees and a £350 weekend at Larches about £54. When a guest books direct through Mark instead, you keep it.
A better site won’t move everyone. It only has to move some of the people who already look you up after seeing you on Airbnb.
Small things we noticed
- The spa partner is Love Pamper Company on most pages, but GloPamper in the Oaks Lodge text. We used Love Pamper Company.
- The walk into town is 10 minutes on the home page and 11 in the FAQ, and the station is 5 minutes on the Oaks page and 8 in the FAQ.
- A few typos: “surroudings”, “bage” and “leader-door”.
- Your home page shows your sort code and the end of your account number, which we take to be there so guests can check they’re paying you. It’s a sensible instinct, and worth talking through. We left them off this preview because bank details shouldn’t sit on a site you don’t control.
If you’d like to talk
We’re BSquared, a small UK software company. We build fixed-price websites and systems, and you own the code, hosting and accounts. This preview is hidden from search engines, and it comes down whenever you ask.
Brandon Bridges, brandon@bsquared.software, bsquared.software (opens in a new tab)