What to actually print and post at check-in, not just text

You can send the world's clearest check-in message and a guest will still stand at your door, phone dead or buried in a bag, unable to find it. A pre-arrival text is read once, if it's read at all. A sign posted where a guest is actually standing gets read every time, by every guest, whether or not they saw the message.

These aren't competing approaches, they're doing different jobs. The message sets expectations before arrival. The signage backs it up in the moment it's actually needed.

What belongs on a physical sign, not just in a text

The door code or lockbox combination, printed large enough to read in dim porch light. Which door to actually use, if there's more than one and it's not obvious. Anything that's easy to get subtly wrong: turn the handle down versus up, push versus pull, a keypad that needs a pound sign after the code.

Skip anything that isn't strictly about getting in the door. Wi-Fi, house rules, and everything else has its own place, this sign has one job.

Where it actually needs to go

Not just at the front door, at every point a guest might reasonably approach the property from. If there's a driveway entrance and a front walkway, both need a sign, or a clear arrow pointing to the one that matters. A guest arriving from an unexpected direction, wrong side of the building, wrong entrance entirely, is exactly the guest who's going to need this most.

Make it survive weather and low light

Laminate it, or use a page protector, if it's going anywhere outside. A rain-soaked printout with running ink at 9pm is worse than no sign at all, because now there's a sign that looks like it should have the answer and doesn't. A phone flashlight test at night is worth doing once: stand where a guest would stand, in the dark, and see if you can actually read it.

The message and the sign are a pair

Send the check-in instructions as a message before arrival so a guest knows roughly what to expect, and back it up with signage at the property for the moment the message isn't in front of them anymore. Together they cover both the guest who read every word and the guest who skimmed it once three days ago and forgot the details by the time they're standing at your door.