Websites

Gridbeds hosts your property’s website, booking engine included: guests see your rooms and prices, book and pay, and the booking lands straight in Gridbeds, with no channel commission. Websites is in the Sales & Distribution group. It is part of your subscription’s Website Builder module; without it, the page says the module is not available. To create, change or publish a site you need permission to manage websites — by default Owner and Admin have it. The buttons show for others too, but their saves are refused (“You do not have permission to perform this action.”).

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Create the site

The Your Websites page has two buttons: A new site is a Draft: private, at subdomain.gridbeds.com, hidden from search engines.

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Working on the site

A site’s page has these tabs: Preview opens the site as it is now, with a link valid for an hour. Share preview makes a link for someone else — the whole site or a single page, valid for 1, 7 or 30 days; copy it straight away, it is not shown a second time.

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Which language you are editing

Every language of a page is a page of its own: the English home page and the Romanian home page are two pages, and the editor edits one of them at a time. The page picker shows the language beside the title once the site has pages in more than one, and marks a page that is still a draft Draft. Under the toolbar, a strip says where your edits show:

• Editing: the language of the open page, and whether it is the site’s default language.
• Whether the page is On the live site, a Draft (visitors do not see it), or on a site that is not published or is in maintenance.
• What readers in each of the site’s other languages see at this page’s address: their own copy of the page — marked when it was written before your latest changes, or when it was never checked against them — or the page in the default language, when their language has no copy of its own. Open opens that page in the editor.

A saved change reaches the live site within a minute. If the site shows something other than the editor, check the strip first: the site is most likely showing the page in another language. A template from Page Templates replaces the open page’s content in every language the page is written in, each language with the template’s own copy where it has one. You are asked first, and the confirmation names the languages. A language the template has no copy for gets the template’s English or Romanian text; translate it on the Languages tab. History keeps the previous content of each language.

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Formatting text

Click a text block to type in it. A formatting bar appears above the block, or below it when the block is at the top of the screen: bold, italic, strikethrough, headings, lists, links and alignment. From the keyboard, press Alt+F10 (Option+F10 on a Mac) while typing to move into the bar, and Esc to return to the text.

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Publishing

Publish opens Publish website? with the checklist. Required: at least one page, a home page, content on the home page. Recommended: the meta title and description, the logo and the favicon. Publish now stays disabled until the required items are fixed. Tick Also publish … draft pages to publish the drafts too; otherwise only the home page and the pages already published go live. Once published, from the ⋮ menu: Maintenance Mode (visitors see a maintenance page, with a Maintenance Message and an optional Expected End Time; come back with Go Live) or Unpublish (the site goes back to draft).

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Your own domain

In Domain Settings:

• Gridbeds Subdomain — the ….gridbeds.com address; Change Subdomain changes it (3–63 characters; some names are reserved). The screen says the old address redirects to the new one for a year; do not rely on it, and update old links.
• Custom Domain → Add Custom Domain opens Connect Custom Domain:

On the card the domain shows Pending or Active, and the certificate SSL Provisioning, SSL Active or SSL failed. Once your domain is active, the ….gridbeds.com address sends visitors to it. Remove Domain disconnects it; the site stays at its Gridbeds address. If the domain stops working or the certificate fails, the organization’s owner gets an email. URL Redirects keeps visitors and search rankings when you move from an old site: paste one line per redirect, “old path, new path” (optionally with 301 or 302), and Import redirects.

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Bookings on the site

The guest picks dates, room and rate, then pays according to Settings → Payment policy (Operations group), set per property or as the organization’s default: Pay in full, Pay a deposit, Card guarantee or Pay at property — see Payments. With pay at property, the booking waits for your approval and expires if you do not approve it within the window you set. For an online payment the guest is sent to the secure page of the property’s own payment provider — Stripe, PayU, Netopia or EuPlatesc, whichever the property uses (see Payments) — and comes back to your site. The booking holds the room until the provider confirms the payment, then it is confirmed. If the guest leaves without paying, the room is released after about an hour. At checkout the guest can enter a promo code — see Promo codes. The confirmation page can show your extras, which the guest orders from the portal — see Fixed charges, packages and extras. A rate plan’s stay rules — a minimum stay, a maximum stay, a day closed to arrival or closed to departure, a night closed to sale, set on the plan or by a season — hold on the site and in the booking widget too, and the guest is told before they choose rather than when they pay. A rate whose rules the chosen dates break is not offered; the guest sees which rule, naming the season that sets it (for example “During New Year, this rate needs a stay of at least 2 nights when arriving on 28 Dec 2026.”), and the nearest dates that meet it, which they take in one click. When no rate of the room is left, the site says so instead of showing the room as sold out.

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The site’s languages

The site can be in Romanian, English and Italian (Fully supported), and in Hungarian and German for the pages only (Pages only — the booking engine and emails are not fully translated). On the Languages tab, Translate prepares a page’s translation; the statuses are not translated, draft, published and outdated (the original page has changed).

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The booking widget on another site

Already have a website and only want direct bookings? The Embed tab: “Add the booking widget to any website with a copy-paste snippet.” The widget runs on the Gridbeds site behind it: it too takes bookings only while the site is published, and the properties must be attached to the site.