Web design for hairdressers and salons UK: finding clients

Almost every town has more hair salons, barbers and beauty rooms than it has web designers who have ever written to them. That makes web design for hairdressers and salons in the UK a sensible niche to look at: the businesses are plentiful, they are easy to find on a map, and the problems on their websites tend to be visible within a minute.

This is how we would approach it, from finding the right salons to deciding what to say.

What a salon website is actually for

A visitor to a salon site wants three things: to see the work, to know the prices, and to book. Everything else is secondary. A barber in Doncaster and a beauty salon in Bath have different clients, but the question in the visitor's head is the same: can I get an appointment, and will I like the result?

Many salons already take bookings through a third-party app or a booking widget, and that is fine. The website's job is to get the visitor to that booking button with as little friction as possible. So the audit starts there.

Where to look for salons

Search the business type and the town, for example “barber Lincoln” or “beauty salon Harrogate”, and work through the results. A few patterns are worth separating out:

• Salons with a site that looks several years old, or was clearly built from a template and never touched.
• Salons whose only presence is an Instagram or Facebook page. This is very common in the beauty trade, where the feed is the portfolio.
• Salons with a decent site and a broken or missing booking route.

Skip the ones that are clearly well looked after. You are not trying to win every business, only the ones where you can point at something real. Our guide to building a list of local businesses worth emailing goes through that sorting in more detail.

What to check on a salon site

The booking route

Click the booking button from your phone. Does it go to a working page? Is there a phone number you can tap? Dead booking links are common enough that we gave them their own post: the quiet ways a local business website turns work away.

Prices and services

Is there a price list, and is it current? A price list saved as an image or a PDF is hard to read on a phone. A list that does not match what the salon charges now is worse, because it sets the wrong expectation before the customer even arrives. The same applies to opening hours. Compare them with the Google listing, as we describe in when a website is quietly telling customers the wrong thing.

Photos and speed

Hair and beauty sites live on photography, and photography is the usual reason they load slowly. Full-size images from a phone, placed straight into a gallery page, can make a site feel sluggish on mobile data. If you notice a long wait for the first image, that is a specific, checkable finding. Our post on spotting oversized images shows how to confirm it.

Who is behind the chair

Clients choose a stylist, not just a salon. If the site never names the people who work there, or says anything about their experience, that is a gap worth mentioning gently. It overlaps with the point in the website that never says who is behind the business.

Instagram-only salons

A salon that runs entirely on Instagram is not doing anything wrong. The feed shows the work well. What it does not do is answer the practical questions without scrolling: where exactly is the salon, what are the hours, how much does a cut and colour cost, how do I book. A simple site that answers those and links to the feed is an easy thing to offer, and our piece on businesses trading on Instagram alone covers how to raise it without sounding dismissive of what they have built.

How to approach a salon owner

Timing matters. A salon owner with a client in the chair is not going to take a phone call, so email is kinder. Keep it short, mention the one thing you found, and make it something they can check in seconds: “Your booking button on the home page leads to an error” or “the price list is a PDF that is hard to read on a phone.” Offer to send over what else you noticed rather than listing everything at once.

Do not guess at their revenue or claim you will fill their diary. You do not know either, and the owner knows you do not.

If you are doing this across several towns, Patchscout can search a business type and location, audit each site it finds, and flag salons with no real website, including those that only have an Instagram or Facebook page. Our system then drafts an outreach email in your own voice, based on what it found, for you to send from your own mailbox. Choosing which single finding to lead with is still your call.