What Has Changed For Hairstylists' Websites in 2026

Raise your hand if you fucking hate having to edit your website and build your website. I'm raising my hand. It's genuinely, literally like I, I hate it too, girl. Like, trust, believe.

I know that I'm yelling at you to have your own website that you own and you build and you control, and you're like, "I fucking hate this, Hunter. Why are you making me do this?" I hate it, too. It's literally one of my least favorite things ever.

I have switched website builders, like, three to four times, bitch. Like, I've been to Wix, Squarespace, Showit. Like, it- I hate it. I hate it all.

And recently, in the past year, I've discovered creating, building, and editing and hosting websites with AI, and it has changed the absolute game for me and my students, because I've been teaching this for a minute now, and it has been really, really cool. And it's not just about the convenience factor, it's also about actually the performance factor of how well your website actually does. Because in today's day and age, your website matters. If you wanna be a high-ticket hairstylist making a lot of money and attracting high-ticket clients, then your website better be and look high motherfucking ticket.

And unfortunately, no matter how good we are with tech skills, and no matter how great the tool itself is in giving you templates and things like that, it is very hard to be a good designer. Like, I suck at design. Like, I'm really, really bad at it. I have a good eye for it.

It's like the situation where it's like you can't do it yourself, but you can give everybody else, everybody else advice about it. Um, I'm, I'm really bad at it. And so it's like h- like, it's like one thing, a huge uphill battle of, like, making sure that the content that you create for it is actually good content that's actually going to convert potential clients, but then it's actually also applying that to the website and then making it all look good and putting it in the right places. That can be a massive, massive struggle and big time suck.

And so we have been teaching to using AI to actually create and host websites moving forward. That is, making it so stylists can get all of that stuff up and done very quickly with our proven method of, and facilitation of what content you actually put on there. Mm-hmm. And so this is also allowing us to fulfill our need for much better SEO performance than we've ever needed before.

Because right now, clients are finding their people through Google, Google AI summaries, and their chatbots. And SEO is becoming more, and more, and more important because of those things, and more specific and more c- uh, um, discerning, I guess you could say. And the unfortunate thing with the majority of these website builders that are, like, drag and drop, like, such as Squarespace or Wix or whatever it may be, is that they oftentimes, yes, do have these little, like, SEO checkers for you, and they have, like, assisting things. But they don't have the actual capability for you to just plug and play code everything that you would need to code to fully boost your SEO very, very well and easy.

Because there's a bunch of backend code and different weird things that you don't actually see on the website that will very much so affect how well or how often you are recommended in AI searches or on Google. And so having the AI actually just do all the coding for you to be able to add the backend SEO work in there, and then make sure that the front side is very polished and looks high ticket as well, all at the same time, is super powerful from a performance perspective and an efficiency perspective. And the efficiency part is so important, because you as a business owner, your time is so freaking valuable and scarce. So every single minute or second that you're spending tweaking a text box and trying to make the font the size that it's supposed to be, or putting this picture exactly where it's supposed to be, every single second that you spend doing that, you could be spending actually posting on social media and getting another client or whatever it may be, right?

So the faster you can make changes, the faster you can get this stuff set up, the better. And the great part about it is, it can be done in a really beautiful way, as long as you have your good marketing fundamentals in place, which is exactly what we set you up for in Modern Stylist Movement. Now, here are some caveats to this situation and a lot of the questions that you guys may have. So, um, right now, there are two, like, kind of easy to get into, um, like, AI website and app builders.

There's Lovable, and then there is Base44. And fun fact, Base44 just got acquired by Wix, and so the hopeful situation is is that Wix will eventually allow you to just edit the website just by talking to it. We are not there yet, and I'm surprised that we're not there yet. I'm assuming that it's gonna be very difficult for them to actually integrate that into what they currently have.

Um, and so w- at the time of recording this, we're recording this on July 20th, 2026, that is the situation. If you have Wix and you're locked into a three-year contract, maybe don't make the switch over to an AI builder all of a sudden. Maybe you're gonna wanna stick with Wix for a little bit and see what it does, because now they have them at-- Now they own Base44 as a company, and hopefully they'll get some AI building, um, uh, features into their, their builder soon enough. Um, what else do I need to talk about here?

I think, uh, one of the other things would be, like, from a build perspective, from a hosting perspective, what does this look like? Okay. Another question that I'll get a lot of the times is, "Okay, so, like, am I gonna have to change from Wix to Lovable or Squarespace to Lovable, or does this just edit my current website?" The answer is it-- You are now going to host it through Lovable or Base44.

So, like, you can absolutely transfer your domain. You can transfer if you're paying for your professional email address through Wix or Squarespace or whatever. You can transfer the, all of those things over. They are all transferable, and it may be a little bit painful if you're not super tech literate.

But all that upfront work will be very worth it for you when you can get this stuff done very quickly and well in, in the future. So, um, you will have to pay for hosting, but it actually seems to be a lot cheaper or can be cheaper than what you're paying for right now, and you get so much more in return for, uh, what you're paying for. Um, just a little other tip, 'cause we're talking about, like, what's changed in 2026. Besides, like, my recommendation of, like, the AI and making sure that you have the code and the back end that's actually supporting your SEO to get ahead, um, speaking of SEO, uh, uh, another thing that's been really, really powerful and very important is for people to have specialty pages.

Um, when you have... It's the same concept of having a blog. So, like, when you have a blog, there are more signals to AI and SEO crawlers that you are a expert in the specific topic that you, that a person will be searching about. Um, so let's say that somebody is looking for an extension artist in the area, and there's a...

You have a competitor, right? And the competitor has a salon website that is exactly like yours, right? Like, it has every single same thing that you do, and maybe you're even cheaper or something like that. If they have an extensions page, then that person is 100% going to get recommended more than you are just because they have something that's so specific that's speaking about the specific thing that the person is searching for.

That is, like, that is where, like, niching down and specializing, and your messaging being so refined and polished and targeted in today's day and age, that is why it becomes so important, because people now have the luxury of doing much more targeted research- Right ... and shopping because of AI, right? And so making sure that your messaging is really nice and polished and refined and, like, speaking very specifically to a specific thing, and then also that the e- the website is SEO optimized for those specific things versus something too general, that will actually get you ahead versus hold you back, right? And that specialty page by itself is one big, large thing that you can do to make sure that you hit that mark.

So you would have a specialty page of whatever your specialty is, whether it be Brazilian blowouts, braiding, locks, whether it be extensions, whatever it may be. And on that page, you would just go really deep into the topic and how you're providing solutions for that topic. You would answer all the questions that your client may have, hit the pain points that they have, and any, and then fight any of the objections that they have. So you would wanna add, like, a FAQ section, and any of the questions that your extension clients would normally have or the misbeliefs or myths that they have, you want to address them there.

You wanna have your service menu in there. You just wanna talk about that specific topic pretty extensively, and it will boost your SEO like crazy. Another thing is reviews. Social proof is so freaking important.

I want you to blast testimonials all over the motherfucking place. Every single-- Between every section of your website, there should be a testimonial. I don't give a fuck. And the reason why is because, again, the AI and the SEO crawlers.

The more social proof there is, the more likely it's going to want to recommend it to the person. These companies want their recommendations to be good, so therefore, they are going to be looking for signals that you are a trustworthy recommendation and that the client or the customer will have a good experience finding their hairstylist or whoever else on that software. And so it's programmed to make sure that you look like a trustworthy source or a trustworthy, uh, person to recommend. And the more social proof that you have, the better your results will be with that.

That very much goes into, um, Google reviews, very much so. Like, as many Google reviews as you possibly can on a consistent basis. Um, but also even just having it on your website helps very much so. Adding the stories or the testimonials, the before and after pictures, helps from an SEO perspective and then, of course, from a conversion perspective, because humans are so sick of being sold to, and they don't trust anything nowadays.

So if they can go on your website and they see the proof right then and there, that can be very helpful for them as they're reading the price right next to the testimonial, right? So it's like they read the price, they're like, "Damn, this is pretty expensive," but then they see the before and after right below it, and it's like, "Well, that looks really freaking good, and the story says something that's very similar to my before and after, so maybe this price is worth it." So that's where this becomes very powerful. I think we've covered what has changed, and essentially what has changed is the importance of SEO, things like blogging, things like having those additional pages to make sure that you are at the top.

That's one of them. Uh, the importance of Google reviews, I think that's just, like, huge and probably will just continue to get more important, and then the ease of building and getting that back-end code set up. Yeah, dude. You can just make pivots so quickly and easily.

You can make resources so easily. So, like, let's say that you wanna, like... Like, something that you would normally do in Canva, like, you could get done much-- Because Canva AI is terrible at the time of recording. Like, you can just, like, have the AI create a private webpage for you that's branded and beautiful and perfect very quickly with the information that you want it to put in there.

Like- Mm ... it just can do things so efficiently and so well, and it makes business growth and the, the extracurriculars of business growth a lot faster and easier, which allows you to grow faster and easier, and that's what we all want, right? And it's makes-- It sets you apart. Again, it's like if you wanna be the high-ticket stylist and you wanna charge high prices and you wanna attract those high-ticket people, they're out there, but they're going to your competitor that has a much more polished and beautiful website.

So you can have the same thing if you, if you lean into these more modern tools and you're not afraid to take the risk of making the switch. My caveat to this, and maybe this is a terrible way to end the episode, is that if you already have a website that is working really well for you, you may n- not wanna disrupt this situation. Because at-- when you switch your website over, your SEO is gonna have a little bit of a reset moment where the Google and AI has to re-understand and relearn your positioning. And we've had people who are ranking really well and really high right off the bat, uh, after switching over, so it's not a death sentence in any way, shape, or form.

I really wanna make sure that that's clear. But is this really a priority for you if your we- website's already working well for you and you're doing really well getting found on Google? Probably not, and you might wanna wait a little bit until maybe your contract's over with your current website builder, until you see results die, or until you're really fucking sick of having to do all the website work yourself. Right.

Hopefully this is helpful for you, my friend. Go build a kickass website. Peace out, Girl Scout. Bye-bye.

End of transcript. © 2026 Hunter Donia LLC.