Guide: a website for a beauty salon

A portfolio is not decoration on a salon website, it is the main argument. But a before/after shot shows a real person’s image, and under French law an image counts as personal data — it falls under droit à l’image.

The rule is simple: the client’s written consent before publication, describing where and for how long the photo will be used, with the client free to withdraw that consent at any time. A spoken “sure, go ahead” is not enough — in a dispute, proving consent is on you. For a minor, written consent from a parent or guardian is required.

In practice this is settled with one piece of paper: a short consent form at the till or in the booking app, which the client signs right after the service, while the result is in front of them and it is easy to ask. Keeping the signed consents matters — that is your evidence, not a box-ticking formality.

For hairdressing salons, prices are not a nicety but a requirement of the order of 27 March 1987. Prices for at least ten of the most common services must be visible from outside if the salon serves everyone, or twenty — ten each — if it is split into a men’s and a women’s side. The fine reaches €3,000 for an individual and €15,000 for a company. The requirement is about the sign in the salon, but since it exists anyway, it makes sense to show the same prices on the site rather than leave the client guessing.

On the site, give at least a “from” price for every service: “cut from €35”, not a vague “ask us”.

If the final price depends on hair length, the amount of work or the products used — which is almost always the case in hairdressing and extensions — say so on the site in advance. A detailed quote is not always compulsory, but it is on the client’s explicit request when the price cannot be fixed beforehand; a receipt is due on request for services over €25 including tax. Work it out on the spot, before starting the service — that protects both the client and you: a dispute over price after the fact rarely gets settled in the salon’s favour.

For a salon, booking without phone calls is not a luxury: it saves reception time and does not lose the clients who write late at night. There are three options on the French market, and they are priced differently. Checked as of August 2026.

Planity — a fixed subscription, €74 to €114 a month depending on features (calendar only, calendar plus till, the full package), with no commission on bookings. The market leader in France among hairdressers and beauty studios.

Treatwell — charges 25% on the first booking of every new client who comes from their platform, and 0% on all their later visits. The model works as a fee for acquisition, not for the tool.

Fresha — a hybrid: a subscription plus roughly 20% on new clients coming through the Fresha marketplace, plus a separate payment fee of around 1.3–3.3%.

The difference is structural. Planity is predictable and pays off with a steady stream of regulars. Treatwell and Fresha are better value for a new salon with no client base of its own — you only pay for the clients the platform genuinely brought. If you have just opened, it makes sense to start with a pay-per-result platform rather than a fixed subscription.

The general mechanics of the listing — name, category, verification, reviews — are covered in the dedicated guide, and we will not repeat them here. What is specific to a salon comes down to two things.

First, the category. Google offers precise categories instead of a generic “Beauty salon”: “Hair salon”, “Barber shop”, “Nail salon”, “Spa”, “Eyebrow studio”. Picking the exact category directly affects which searches you appear in — a generic category dilutes your ranking.

Second, booking straight from the listing. If your online booking tool integrates with Google (both Planity and Treatwell offer this), a “Book” button appears right in search and on Maps, with no need to visit the site. For a salon that is often the shortest path from intent to booking — shorter than going through the website.

The general procedure — how to ask for reviews without getting them deleted, how to answer bad ones — is covered in the Google Business Profile guide, including the ban on asking only satisfied clients. We will not repeat it.

What is specific to a salon is that a review is almost always about one specific practitioner, not the business as a whole. “The stylist didn’t listen to what I asked for” is a complaint about a named person, and it needs a more careful answer than “the café was cold”: any hint of publicly criticising a staff member reads worse than silence.

Second, in the beauty trade a review is often written not right away but a day or two later, once the colour or the manicure has “settled”. Do not rush the request on the way out — a short message the next day, asking to share an impression if they liked the result, works better.

A full translation of the site is not needed for a small salon — the same rule as in the rest of this series applies: the minimum needed to decide, not a full copy in another language.

It is enough to translate the service list with prices, and how to book. Translate service names carefully: “balayage”, “brushing”, “modelage” are French beauty-trade terms that a foreign client living in France also sees written the same way at other salons, and machine translation distorts them.

For a salon, AI is useful exactly where it is for a café: where the cost of an error is zero.

Where it helps. Service descriptions: you dictate what is included and how long it takes, it turns that into a clear line for the client instead of “professional treatment”. Draft replies to reviews. Copy about the salon, its history, the team. Ideas for posts and seasonal offers — “pre-holiday treatments”, “summer manicure” — a month ahead. A first-draft translation of the service list.

Where it does not help. It knows neither your practitioners, nor your prices, nor what sets you apart from the salon down the road — and instead of saying “I don’t know”, it invents. A service description written entirely by a machine reads like any other salon’s.

Where it does outright harm. Wording that touches regulated terms — “massage” instead of “modelage” — never trust to AI: it does not know French beauty-trade regulation and will happily expose you to a complaint. The same goes for before/after photos: generated images of a result are a direct deception of the client, who will see one thing on the site and get another in the chair. And identical automated replies under every review are spotted at a glance.

The same rule as elsewhere in this series: AI can be trusted with form, never with facts. The moment a text touches price, qualification or result, you check it yourself. On the tools that assemble a whole site and where they bite, see the no-code guide.