With over a decade of experience building care home websites, we thought we’d put together some of the key insights we’ve picked up along the way, which may come in useful if you’re planning a new care home website or considering a redesign.

One website vs. multiple websites

If you’re going to be opening multiple homes, one of the first things to consider is whether you’ll need a single website with a page (or pages) for each care home, or individual websites for each home.

There isn’t necessarily a right or wrong answer, but we generally recommend that if you’re a large group operating (or planning to open) a lot of homes, a single site with each individual home having a dedicated page (or pages) is almost always the best option. It makes scaling the site much easier as you grow.

If, however, you plan to operate a handful of individual homes, each with their own brand and messaging, then opting for individual sites for each home is often the better approach.

The good news is that even if you opt for individual sites, WordPress Multisite could allow you to manage them all from one login, making ongoing management much simpler.

Know your audiences

It’s always important to remember that care home websites never serve just one audience. Generally the three primary audiences are:

  • Family members looking for a relative
  • Potential residents
  • Job seekers (often overlooked)

All of these groups will be visiting your site with different goals and concerns. Understanding who you’re speaking to and what information they need will help shape the content, navigation and calls to action across the site.

Map out your user journeys

Once you’ve mapped out your audience groups, you need to start thinking about what you want visitors to do when they visit the site.

Whether it’s:

  • Arranging a visit
  • Downloading a brochure
  • Viewing sample menus or activity plans
  • Making an enquiry
  • Applying for a role

Whatever the goal, the journey should always feel simple and intuitive.

When we’re mapping out a care home website, we try to put ourselves in the shoes of each audience group and map out the calls to action for each one. This helps us identify any unnecessary steps or barriers, as well as anything we might have missed.

Calls to action are key, but don’t overwhelm users

Strong calls to action help guide visitors towards taking the next step, but too many can have the opposite effect.

Focus on the actions that matter most, such as booking a visit or downloading a brochure, and make sure they’re visible throughout the site without becoming distracting.

Should you display your prices?

We work with some providers that do, and some that don’t, and we know that pricing is often a difficult topic for care providers.

While some organisations prefer to discuss fees during the enquiry process, being transparent about pricing can help build trust and qualify enquiries.

Although we understand the trepidation, if your fees truly are all-inclusive and transparent, then display them with pride!

Think about third-party widgets

Review platforms such as carehome.co.uk, CQC and CIW can all add useful functionality and help build trust, but being totally honest, they can also look kind of ugly!

It’s also likely that new homes won’t have ratings yet, so it can be easy to forget about these during the design stage of the website.

Make sure any third-party widgets are factored into the design process from the start, so they fit seamlessly within the design of your new care home website rather than being added as an afterthought.

Recruitment is crucial

A care home is only as good as the people who work there, and it’s easy to focus so heavily on attracting new residents that recruitment becomes an afterthought.

Potential candidates should be able to search and apply for roles easily, but just as importantly, they should get a sense of what it’s like to work for your organisation.

Consider including pages about career progression, staff benefits and company culture. If you’re advertising a large number of vacancies, integrating with an external recruitment platform may also be worth exploring.

Don’t forget about the content!

The most crucial part of your website!

You’re going to need a lot of it. To launch a new site, you’ll need to consider:

  • Well-written page content — on-brand and with an SEO focus, but not written purely for search engines or LLMs.
  • Lots of imagery — stock photography is fine to a point if you’re still in the process of setting up, but if you already have bricks and mortar locations, you’re going to need some professionally shot imagery.
  • Brochures — both for print and as PDFs for people to download.
  • A handful of blog posts — ideally enough to give the new site some useful content from launch.

It’s always worth keeping in mind that good-quality content takes longer to write than you anticipate. Always!

Build, analyse and refine

Launching a new website shouldn’t be seen as the finish line.

Understanding how visitors use your site, where enquiries come from and which pages perform best will help you make informed improvements over time.

Regular analysis and refinement can have a huge impact on the long-term success of your website, so don’t launch it and then forget about it.

Final thoughts

These are just some of the things we think you should consider when planning a care home website. There are, of course, tonnes of other things that we consider when building and managing care home websites, including:

  • Website speed, on both desktop and mobile
  • SEO, both paid and organic
  • Accessibility
  • Ease of content management
  • Data management
  • Analytics and tracking
  • And plenty more…

Hopefully this has been a useful list. If you want to chat further about your existing or new care home website, please drop us a line!