Saunas in Ireland: a sauna directory for the whole island
Finding a sauna in Ireland meant scrolling Instagram and hoping. I built saunasinireland.ie to fix that: every sea, lake and wood-fired sauna on the island, with ice baths, in one calm, searchable place.
Directory and guides
Next.js, static on Netlify, MapLibre
Research, design, build, content, SEO and analytics
October 2026
What was wanted.
Saunas have taken off in Ireland. Searches for "sauna Dublin" alone run to around 2,000 a month and have more than doubled since 2023. But the venues are small, new and spread around the coast, and most of them live on Instagram. The few directories that existed were barely getting any search traffic.
- One place for every sauna in Ireland, all 32 counties, North and South, with ice baths and cold plunges included.
- Listings people can trust. Prices, hours and booking links that are actually right, not scraped and left to go stale.
- Found on Google for "sauna near me", "sauna Cork", "ice bath Dublin" and the hundreds of venue and town searches in between.
- Calm and simple to use. An early design came out too technical, so the brief became: soft, obvious, and not looking AI-built.
What got built.
233 sauna listings, each one checked against the venue's own website, booking page and Google Maps before it went live
County pages for all 32 counties for saunas and ice baths, plus 96 town pages for searches like "sauna Kinsale"
An interactive map with every venue pinned to its exact spot, with filters for ice baths, sea, lakes and wood-fired
Search that understands "ice bath galway" or a misspelt county, and a "near me" button that finds the closest sauna
Long-form guides (first sauna, hot and cold routines, sea safety, buying a home sauna) with sources for every health claim
A soft, sea-glass design with a full-bleed photo hero, built mobile first and tested at every screen size
Proper SEO groundwork: keyword-led titles, structured data, an author page and an editorial policy explaining how listings are checked
GA4 through Tag Manager with a consent banner, tracking the clicks that matter: bookings, directions, searches and map use
Screens from the live site.
The build, in numbers.
Saunas listed and checked by hand
Of them with an ice bath or cold plunge
Counties covered, North and South
Town pages for local searches
The site launched in October 2026, so it is early days for rankings. Search Console and GA4 are tracking it from day one, and I will add results here as they come in rather than guess at them.
IrishCars.ie: rebuilding a motoring blog
Run a sauna? See web design for saunas, with an example of a booking-led sauna website.
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