On a July evening Westport is full. Bridge Street and the Octagon are crowded with walkers back from Croagh Patrick, cyclists back from the greenway and families up from the Quay, and every pub with music has a queue at the door. On a Tuesday in February the same streets are quiet and the town belongs to the people who live and work here. A business in Westport lives in both of those towns, and website design in Westport has to work for both: the visitor who has never heard of you and the local who has. We are in Dublin, so for a Westport owner the first chat is a video call, we build the site from your photos and details, and we keep in touch by WhatsApp. The planned Georgian streets photograph well, which helps.
What the visitor types into the phone
Nobody arriving in Westport knows where to eat. They stand on the Octagon or sit in the car at the Quay and search “restaurant Westport”, “trad music Westport tonight”, “bike hire greenway”, “B&B Westport”, and they choose from the top few results on Google Maps. Those results show hours, photos, a rating and whether you are open now. If your listing is right and your page loads fast on a phone with one bar of signal, you get the table. If the hours are last year’s, you get a one-star review from someone standing at a locked door.
The same visitor often asks a question rather than typing a keyword. “Is there anywhere near Westport House that does an early dinner with kids” is the kind of thing people now put to ChatGPT or to Google’s AI answers, and those tools lean on the same facts: a clear page, correct structured data, a verified Google listing. We set those up as standard, and we do not promise where you will appear.
Bookings, deposits and the no-show
A B&B here fills up for Reek Sunday and the greenway season and then has gaps in spring and autumn that a booking page can fill from abroad while you sleep. A restaurant on Bridge Street loses real money to a party of eight who booked three places and showed up at one. Online bookings with a deposit solve most of that, and Complete includes them, with the money going straight to your own account. We have written up how to take online bookings and how deposits work under Irish consumer rules if you want the background first.
Weddings, music and the people who photograph them
Westport is a wedding town, with the hotels around the Quay and the bay doing a steady trade, and that feeds the photographers, videographers, bands, florists and hair and make-up people who work out of the town and across Mayo. Most of them are on Instagram and nowhere else. Instagram is where the couple finds inspiration; Google is where they check that you exist, read the reviews and look for a price. A short page with a gallery, your available dates and a contact form is what turns a saved post into a booking, and getting more Google reviews honestly is half the sale.
Being exact about where you are
The town has the Octagon, Bridge Street, James Street, Shop Street and the Mall along the Carrowbeg in the centre, and the Quay out the Louisburgh road, and a visitor on foot needs to know which. Put the street and the F28 Eircode on the contact page and in the structured data, note where to park, and keep the Google pin on the right building. For a business that also serves Louisburgh, Newport, Murrisk and Castlebar, say so in words.
The cost
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month. Complete is €1,499 and €100 a month with bookings, deposits, payments, chat and monthly work on your Google listing, and most visitor businesses in Westport are better off with it. Both are on the pricing page, and the pubs page shows what we build for a music pub.