How to use the off-season to fix everything wrong with your website

You know that list of things wrong with your website? The one you’ve been ignoring since May because the phone kept ringing? The off-season is when you actually fix it. A website audit for your off-season outdoor business isn’t glamorous work, but nothing else you do this winter will pay off as much when bookings pick up again.

Most outfitters, guides, and lodge operators treat their website like a set-it-and-forget-it brochure. It goes up, it stays up, and nobody touches it until something breaks visibly. Meanwhile, pages load slowly on phones, the booking button goes somewhere confusing, and half your photos are from three seasons ago. Visitors notice. They just don’t tell you. They leave.

The off-season is your window to go through the whole site systematically and fix what’s costing you bookings.

Start with speed because it affects everything

Run your homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights. It’s free, takes thirty seconds, and gives you a score out of 100 for both mobile and desktop. If your mobile score is below 50, you have a problem worth fixing immediately.

Why mobile specifically? Roughly 65-70% of people searching for outdoor activities are on their phones. And they’re impatient. Google’s own data says 53% of mobile visitors leave if a page takes longer than three seconds to load. Every additional second of load time pushes your bounce rate up by about a third.

The most common culprits for outdoor business websites are oversized images and heavy homepage videos. That hero shot of your rafting trip might be a 4MB file when it could be 200KB with proper compression and modern formats like WebP. If you have an autoplay video above the fold, consider whether it’s actually helping or just slowing everything down.

PageSpeed Insights will tell you exactly what’s dragging your score down. You don’t need to understand all of it. Focus on the items marked in red.

Update your photos (yes, it matters that much)

People judge your business in seconds, and they’re judging based on what they see. If your website still has photos from 2019, or worse, stock photos of people kayaking somewhere that’s clearly not your river, visitors pick up on it. It doesn’t feel trustworthy.

Take time during the off-season to sort through last season’s photos. Pick the best 20-30 shots that show your actual trips, your actual gear, your actual location. Get them edited, compressed, and up on the site.

A few specifics that matter:

• Every image should have descriptive alt text. Not just for accessibility, though that matters too. Search engines use alt text to understand what’s on the page.
• Resize images before uploading. Your phone takes 12-megapixel photos. Your website needs maybe 1200 pixels wide, max.
• Replace any generic stock photos with real ones. Authenticity converts better than polish.

Walk through your own booking flow on your phone

This is the test most operators skip, and it’s the one that matters most. Pull out your phone, go to your website, and try to book a trip. Time it. Count the taps. Note every moment where you have to pinch-zoom, scroll sideways, or wonder what to do next.

Common problems we see:

The booking button is buried below the fold. Visitors have to scroll past three paragraphs of welcome text before they see how to actually book. Or the button links to a third-party booking system that opens in a new tab, drops all your branding, and feels like a different website entirely. Or the form asks for twelve fields when it needs four.

Each friction point costs you a percentage of the people who were ready to give you money. You don’t need a perfect system. You need a clear one. Big button, short form, obvious next step.

Audit your content for gaps and dead weight

Open Google Search Console and look at two things: what pages are getting impressions but almost no clicks, and what search queries are bringing people to your site.

Pages with impressions but low clicks usually have a title or description problem. The content might be fine, but if the search result doesn’t look compelling, nobody clicks. Rewrite those meta descriptions. Make them specific. “Guided rafting trips on the Deschutes River, half-day and full-day options from Maupin” beats “Welcome to our rafting page” every time.

For the queries report, look for searches you’re appearing for but don’t have dedicated content about. If people are finding you through “family rafting trips [your area]” but you don’t have a page specifically about family trips, that’s a gap worth filling. The off-season is the time to build that content before search volume climbs. And remember, anything you publish now needs months of lead time to rank.

Check the basics people forget

There’s a tier of website issues that nobody notices until a customer mentions them, or until you lose a booking you’ll never know about.

Go through your site page by page and check: are your prices current? Is your seasonal schedule updated, or does it still say “2025 Season”? Do your phone number and email actually work? Is there a cancellation policy linked somewhere findable? Are there any broken links, especially in your navigation?

Run your site through Screaming Frog or a similar crawler if you want to catch broken links at scale. The free version handles up to 500 pages, which is more than enough for most outfitter sites.

Also check that your site has an SSL certificate (the padlock icon in the browser). If visitors see a “Not Secure” warning, especially on a page where you’re asking for payment info, a lot of them will leave without saying anything.

Make a priority list and work through it

You’re probably not going to fix everything in a week. That’s fine. The point of an off-season overhaul is to come out of winter with a site that works harder for you when things pick up.

Rank your fixes by impact. Speed and booking flow come first because they directly affect whether visitors convert. Photos and content come next because they affect whether visitors trust you. The small stuff (broken links, outdated dates, missing alt text) fills in around the edges.

Set yourself a target: one section per week through the slow months. By the time your season starts, you’ll have a site that doesn’t just look better but actually books better. And that’s the whole point.