Small, mostly invisible fixes that make a booking site feel more polished and trustworthy, without you having to notice they exist.
What it does #
A booking site has rough edges that guests notice but you rarely see: a cryptic error message at checkout, a description that reads as one dense paragraph, a logo that will not upload, a broken site icon on inner pages. The Toolkit ships several small modules that smooth over these problems. Each one is a single on or off switch in the Hub. Most have no settings screen at all: you turn the module on and it works. The one exception is Friendly Error Messages, which also gives you an editable message map (covered below).
These modules are off until you enable them, and you enable each one per site from the Hub. Once on, they run on their own with little or nothing further to configure.
What each module does for your guests:
- Friendly Error Messages. When something goes wrong during a quote or at checkout, the booking system can return terse, technical wording that confuses guests and makes them abandon. Friendly Error Messages replaces those messages, on the booking widget, the checkout page, and the property search and explorer pages, with plain, reassuring language that tells the guest what happened and what to do next. It catches both messages shown when the page loads and ones that appear after the guest interacts, so a cryptic failure rarely reaches the screen. This module also has a settings screen in the Hub: an editable message map where you can reword any of the replacement messages or add your own.
- Property Description Formatting. The short description preview above “Show More” on a property page is built by trimming your full description down to its first couple hundred words, and that trimming step used to flatten every paragraph break and bullet point into one dense wall of text, even though the full description in the “Show More” popup was fine. This module rebuilds the preview from your original text so its paragraph breaks and bullet lines survive, matching what the popup already shows.
- Translation Compatibility Fix. On sites that offer translated pages with plugins like WPML, Polylang, TranslatePress, or GTranslate, the translation plugin can insert a language prefix such as
/es/or/de/into the addresses the booking widget relies on. That broke actions like applying a coupon code, which then showed a generic “Internal error” message. This module strips those prefixes so the widget keeps working for guests browsing in any language. - Image Alt Text Autofill. Images missing alt text hurt accessibility (screen-reader users cannot tell what an image shows) and SEO (search engines lose useful context). This module fills in missing or empty alt text from the alt text already stored with each image in your media library, working on the final page so it applies no matter which theme or page builder rendered the image. An image that has only a description and no stored alt text gets nothing, so it pays to keep the alt text field filled in on your key images.
- SVG Support. WordPress blocks SVG uploads by default because a raw SVG file can carry hidden malicious code, such as a script that runs when the image loads. SVG Support re-enables SVG uploads in your media library and cleans every file as it comes in, so you can use crisp vector logos and icons without the security exposure. The cleaning step rebuilds each file from a known-good list of drawing instructions, keeping the shapes, paths, gradients, text, and styling a real logo or icon needs and discarding anything else. Disguised or encoded scripts, links that point at code instead of an image, and the kind of file structure used to overload a server are refused outright.
- Favicon Repair. Your site icon can 404 on inner pages when the link to it in the page head points at a relative path that only resolves correctly from the homepage, or it can trip a browser’s mixed-content warning when the link uses the wrong protocol. Favicon Repair fixes those links wherever they are broken: it makes relative paths absolute, drops icon links with an empty address, and corrects mismatched http/https schemes, without ever touching your actual icon file. Icons that already work are left alone.
For example, a guest browsing your /es/ Spanish pages enters a coupon code and, without Translation Compatibility Fix, sees only “Internal error.” With the module on, the coupon applies normally. And a property with a long, bulleted description (“3 Bedrooms, 2 Baths” on its own line, followed by a features list) shows those same line breaks in the short preview once Property Description Formatting is on, instead of every line running together.
Toolkit’s on-page widgets, such as the search bar, filter panel, guest picker, checkout screens, mobile map-first explorer sheet, and brand color skin, are also built to resist your theme’s or page builder’s own styling rules bleeding in and changing their colors, buttons, or spacing. This runs automatically for every one of those modules once you turn it on, with nothing to configure, and it is what keeps a theme like Elementor from quietly recoloring the Search button or breaking the layout of the guest picker.
One more protection runs automatically for every site, with no switch of its own: the Toolkit adds a small set of rules to your site’s robots file that keep search engines and AI crawlers from indexing your dated search-result pages (URLs carrying check-in and check-out dates). Those URLs are effectively unlimited, since every date combination mints a new one, and a crawler working through them can load your database the same way a traffic spike does. Your regular, undated property and search pages are unaffected. Like the AI Booking Channel’s own robots-file addition, this only applies when your site is set to be visible to search engines, and it steps aside for a physical robots.txt file or an SEO plugin that manages one.
How to turn it on #
1. Open the Hub #
In the HomeRunner Toolkit Hub, find the module you want in the module list.
2. Switch it on #
Toggle the module on. Most take effect immediately with nothing else to set.
3. Repeat per site #
Each module is enabled per site, so switch on the ones you want on every site where you want them.
Settings #
Friendly Error Messages #
| Setting | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Built-in message overrides | Every built-in error is listed with its original technical text and its replacement. Edit a replacement’s text to customize the wording for your brand and clear it to revert that entry back to the built-in default. |
| Custom additions | Add your own original-text-to-replacement pairs for error strings your PMS surfaces that are not already in the built-in map. Paste the exact original text, since it has to match the error message character for character to be replaced. |
Tips #
- If the booking widget shows “Internal error” only on your translated pages, turn on Translation Compatibility Fix first; that prefix problem is the usual cause.
- If a property’s description preview above “Show More” reads as one run-on block even though the full description has clear paragraphs or a bulleted list, turn on Property Description Formatting.
- If your site icon shows as broken on pages other than the homepage, or a browser flags mixed content because of it, turn on Favicon Repair.
- If a theme or page builder update ever makes a Toolkit widget look off (wrong button color, broken spacing), it is worth a hard refresh first: the style protection is automatic and runs for every module, so a stale cached stylesheet is the more likely cause.
- The dated-search crawl protection and the AI Booking Channel‘s own robots-file addition are independent of each other: the crawl protection runs regardless of whether the AI Booking Channel is on.
- For the modules you do configure, see the Toolkit Overview, Toolkit: Conversion Tracking, Toolkit: Guest Identity, and Toolkit: Per-Night Price Consistency.