Putting a flipbook brochure on your website

A holiday park, a wedding venue or a furniture maker may already have this year's brochure as a page-turning flipbook on a hosting service. The next step is giving it a home on the business's own website.

Embed it or link to it

Embedding places the flipbook inside one of your own pages, in a window the hosting service supplies. Visitors turn the pages without leaving your site.

Linking sends visitors to the flipbook on the hosting service's own pages, away from your site.

Either way, one page on your site holds or points to the brochure. That page is the part you control.

Put the words on the page as well

Some flipbook services turn every page into an image. A reader who needs larger type or other colours cannot change words that are part of a picture, which is why W3C's guidance asks for real text wherever it can be used.

Write the main points of the brochure as ordinary text on the page that holds it: what you offer, when you are open, how to book. Google indexes HTML pages, and those words give it something to read.

A product catalogue with ranges and codes is a different kind of document, covered at catalogues.co.uk.

Check it on a phone and with a keyboard

Open the page on a phone and turn a few pages. Google explains that it uses the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking.

Then put the mouse aside and move through the page with the Tab key. W3C's Easy Checks describe keyboard focus as the visible marker that shows which link or form control has focus. W3C says people who rely on a keyboard need to know which link or form control has focus. That includes the controls inside the flipbook window.

Keep one address for it

When next season's brochure arrives, replace it on the same page rather than starting a new one. Links in old emails, social posts and other sites then still work.

Tim Berners-Lee put the idea in one line, in a 1998 note on W3C's site. A cool URI is one which does not change.

The cookies that come with it

A hosting service's viewer may set cookies of its own when it loads on your page. The Information Commission (which took over from the ICO on 30 September 2026) sets out the basic rule in its guide to the cookie regulations. The person running a site must tell visitors about its cookies, explain what they do and why, and get consent before storing one. The ICO's guidance, finalised in April 2026, lists five cases where consent isn't needed. One is a cookie the site needs to provide a service the visitor has asked for.

The Information Commission's checklist for site owners covers third-party cookies too, including what they share and what visitors are told about them. Ask the hosting service which cookies its viewer sets before you embed it.

Useful links