The interior designer website that books consultations

An interior design website books consultations when it gets three things right. The first photo makes people stop scrolling. The services page says who you work with and how your fees work. The enquiry form is short enough to finish on a phone. Everything else on the site is there to support those three.

What happens between a first visit and a booked consultation?

The visitor makes three decisions in order, and most interior design sites lose people at the second one.

The first decision is about taste: is this work for me? People decide that on the first screen, in a couple of seconds, from the photos alone. Interior designers usually do this part well, because the photos are their product and they already have good ones.

The second decision is about fit: do they work with people like me, on projects like mine, in my city, at roughly my budget? This is where most visitors drop off. A site can be beautiful and still say nothing about fit. Then the visitor has to guess, and a visitor who is guessing closes the tab or sends a vague message that takes you two emails to sort out.

The third decision is about effort: how hard is the next step? A blank box labelled tell me about your project is a lot of work for someone who is only half sure.

A site that books consultations answers all three questions in that order.

Which photograph should the homepage open on?

Open on the room that looks most like the work you want more of, even if it is not the project you are proudest of.

Studios are often surprised that these are different photos. The project you are proudest of usually had the biggest budget or the most unusual brief, or it appeared in a magazine. The best opening photo shows the kind of project you do again and again, at the level you do it.

Show it full width, with no marketing line on top of it. If it needs a caption, give the room, the city and the scope in six or seven words. Visitors judge the projects as a group, so your weakest project sets their impression of all of them.

How many projects should sit on the homepage?

Show six to eight, as a working rule of thumb. That is enough to show your range, and few enough that visitors see them all before they decide. Once a grid has more than about a dozen thumbnails, visitors have to search it instead of simply looking.

Put the full archive on a separate projects page. The homepage should show a small, careful selection of your work.

What belongs on the services page if I do not publish prices?

Describe the kinds of work you offer, the smallest project you take on, and who your work suits. That is enough for people to tell whether they fit, without a price list.

Three things do most of the work:

First, list the kinds of work you offer, in your own words: full service, room by room, a paid consultation hour, or procurement only. Name each one plainly and say what it includes and what it leaves out.

Second, state a minimum. You could say that full service projects usually start at a whole floor, or at a stated fee. That removes the biggest single source of enquiries that aren't a fit, and you can publish a minimum without publishing a rate card.

Third, add a sentence about who your work suits, such as private homes in and around one city, hospitality clients or developers. Location and type of client answer half of the fit question.

The same goes for any fee. A number on the page changes who writes to you, but it rarely changes how many good enquiries you get.

How short should the enquiry form be?

Use six fields. On the interior design sites we build, the form asks for name, email, location, project type from a dropdown, a one-line description of the space, and a timeline from a dropdown. Phone is optional and labelled as optional.

Every extra field is another reason to give up for someone on a phone, on the sofa, at half past ten at night. Save the detailed brief for your reply. Once someone has typed their name and pressed send, they will happily answer eight more questions by email.

Two more details matter a lot. Put the form at the end of every project page as well as on the contact page, because people are most ready to get in touch right after a project they liked. And don't put a CAPTCHA in front of it. A hidden field that only bots fill in (a honeypot) and a check on the server stop the bots, and a paying client never has to click on traffic lights.

Where should the consultation actually be booked?

If you offer a discovery call of a fixed length, let people book it in a calendar on the site. Otherwise, use the form and say how soon you reply.

The promise matters more than the booking tool. A line saying we reply within two working days does more for enquiries than any button design, as long as you keep to it. If you can't keep to it in August, say three days.

For interior designers, the first meeting is often paid. If yours is, give it its own short page that explains what the client gets for the fee.

Does an assistant on the site help or get in the way?

It helps when it answers questions about fit in the late evening, when people actually browse, and then sends them to the form.

The assistants we build learn only from the studio's own site: projects, services, about and press. They answer the ten questions that arrive every week anyway. Do you work outside the city? Do you take on single rooms? What does the first consultation cost? Do you do the sourcing, or do I?

Its limits have to be honest. It can't quote a fee for a project it hasn't seen, and it shouldn't guess a timeline. When it doesn't know, it should say so and offer the form. An assistant that makes up an answer is worse than none, because the client then expects what it promised and you have to correct it in person.

How fast does a site full of photos need to be?

Google's limit for Largest Contentful Paint, the time until the biggest image appears, is 2.5 seconds on mobile. At least 75 percent of real visits have to meet it, as documented on web.dev¹. Interior design sites are the heaviest sites in this trade because the photos are the product, so this is the one technical number worth watching.

When we build, we keep to a budget. The first screen weighs under about 300 KB in total. Hero photos are WebP or AVIF at the size the device actually shows them. Everything below the first screen loads as the visitor scrolls. And there is no slider plugin loading three font files nobody chose.

This budget doesn't lower the image quality. A 2560 pixel wide hero in WebP at sensible quality is usually smaller than the 1.4 MB JPEG a theme uploads untouched, and it looks better on a retina screen.

What should you change first on an existing site?

Do these in this order. Each one takes a day of work or less:

1. Replace the opening image with the room that best fits the work you want, full width, with no text over it.
2. Add a paragraph about fit near the top of the services page: who you work with, where, and the smallest project you take.
3. Cut the enquiry form to six fields and repeat it at the end of every project page.
4. State how soon you reply on the contact page, and keep to it.
5. Compress the hero photo, remove any slider, and check the result on a phone against the 2.5 second limit.
6. Add structured data. On the sites we build, that means Organization, Person, BreadcrumbList and FAQPage JSON-LD, following the Google Search Central structured data documentation².

None of this needs a redesign. If your photos are already good, most of the enquiry problem is fit and effort, and you can fix both in an afternoon.

If the structure underneath the site is working against you, that is a different job, and it is the one we do. We build each site by hand in code, without a theme, around the studio's own projects. How we work is on our page about web design for interior designers.