Building a website for your beauty studio: what the first site really needs

You’re opening a beauty studio, or so far you only have an Instagram profile and now need a website of your own. This guide shows what belongs on the first site, which notices are mandatory in Germany, and which route suits your studio. It’s based on the website I built and look after for the La Femme beauty studio in Oldenburg.

A client opening your site usually wants to know three things: does the studio offer the treatment I’m looking for, what does it cost, and when can I get an appointment? Everything else is secondary. That gives you the content every studio website needs:

• An overview of your treatments with duration and price, ideally one page per treatment.
• A way to book that is one click away from every page.
• Address, opening hours, directions, and phone number.
• You and your studio: photos of the room, your training, the brands you work with.
• Reviews from real clients, for example from your Google profile.
• Legal notice and privacy policy, more on that below.

Almost all visitors arrive on a phone, mostly straight from Google search or Instagram. So design the site for mobile first: large type, short paths, the booking button always visible.

A business website in Germany needs a few notices. It isn’t rocket science, but it should be right from the start, because missing notices can lead to formal warnings.

• Legal notice (Impressum) under § 5 of the German Digital Services Act (DDG): name, address, contact, and where relevant VAT ID and professional details.
• Privacy policy under Art. 13 GDPR: which data the site processes, for example through the booking tool, embedded maps, or contact forms.
• Consent before non-essential services under § 25 TDDDG: Google Maps, Instagram feeds, or analytics may only load after consent. At La Femme the map therefore only loads after a click.

This section isn’t legal advice. There are reputable generators for the legal notice and privacy policy; for health data, a quick review by a professional is worth it.

The most important button on your site is “Book an appointment”. There are three fundamentally different ways to handle it:

With an external tool, one detail pays off: don’t just link to its start page, link straight to the treatment. At La Femme a client on the “Microneedling” page jumps with one click into exactly that treatment in the booking tool, instead of searching for it again. Ask your provider whether it supports such deep links.

Most clients search for a treatment and a city, such as “microneedling Oldenburg”. Four things help your studio show up there:

It’s free and for local searches often more important than the website itself: correct address, opening hours, photos, a link to the website, and new reviews on a regular basis.

A “Our services” page with twenty bullet points ranks for no single treatment. A dedicated page per treatment with process, duration, price, and frequent questions does. La Femme has seven such pages, for facials and lashes.

With invisible extra information in the code (such as BeautySalon from schema.org), Google directly understands your studio’s address, opening hours, and reviews. Site builders often only cover part of this; on a custom site it’s part of the job.

Google takes into account how fast pages load on a phone. Large, uncompressed photos and many embedded extra services are the most common brakes, whatever the system.

There isn’t one right route. What matters is how much of your own time you want to invest and what the site should do for your studio.

My honest advice: if you’re just starting, have no budget yet, and don’t know how the studio will develop, a site builder is a sensible first step. Just make sure the domain and content belong to you so you can move later. Once your studio is running and the website should bring in new clients, a site built around your treatments, your city, and your booking tool pays off.

Whichever route you choose, these things speed up any project and remain yours even if you switch later.

• Your own domain, registered in your name.
• A list of your treatments with duration, price, and two or three sentences on the process.
• Good photos of the studio and of you, in portrait and landscape.
• Logo, colours, and fonts, if you have them.
• A decision on a booking tool, or at least how clients book today.
• Your Google Business Profile, if it already exists.

La Femme in Oldenburg is a good example of a studio website that grows. Today it has a page for each treatment, a price list, deep links into online booking via Studiobookr, a digital consultation form with signature, Google reviews on the treatment pages, and a map that only loads after consent. You can see it at lafemmekosmetik.de.

If you’d like to know what of this makes sense for your studio and what it costs, you’ll find the packages on my page for beauty studios. A 30-minute first call is free. I’ll also tell you honestly if a site builder is enough for your start.