A care home website needs your phone number at the top of every page, your CQC rating, an honest guide to fees, real photographs and pages that open quickly on a phone.
It also needs a clear privacy policy and text people can read. Get those right and a worried family will feel able to call you.
Why does your website matter if you have empty rooms?
Your website is usually where a family decides whether to call. Think of a son in a hospital car park, on his phone, with a discharge date on Friday and three homes to compare.
He wants to know whether you can look after his dad, whether you are any good and whether the family can afford it. If that is hard to find, he will try the next home.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) agrees. Its consumer law advice for care homes says a family’s commitment starts to build with your website and the first call.
Say your room earns £1,200 a week. Most of what follows costs little or nothing, so one family who calls instead of moving on would pay for it many times over.
What should you check first?
Pick up your own phone and do these in order. It takes about 20 minutes.
- Open your home page on mobile data, with wifi switched off. Count the seconds until you can read it.
- Tap your phone number. If your phone doesn’t offer to dial it, fix that first.
- Look for your CQC rating without scrolling. Check it matches your page on the CQC website.
- Look for your weekly fees. If you can’t find them in two taps, a family won’t either.
- Count the photographs that aren’t of your home.
- Find your privacy policy from the home page.
- Ask a friend who doesn’t know your home to find your fees, the care you offer and how to arrange a visit. Watch, and say nothing.
What do families look for first?
Much the same things each time. We know of no good UK study that ranks them, but Age UK’s checklist, the CMA and carehome.co.uk’s 2026 report point the same way.
- Can you care for someone like my dad? The type of care and your town, in the first line of your home page.
- Are you any good? Your CQC rating and recent reviews.
- Can we afford it? A fee range and what it includes.
- What is it like? Photographs, food, visiting and what a day looks like.
- Who would be looking after him? Names and faces, starting with the Home Manager.
- How do I talk to someone? A number to tap, a short form and what happens next.
The first screen on a phone should answer the first and last of those. “Residential and dementia care in Harrogate”, with a number to tap, tells that son he is in the right place.
The CMA’s list of key information to highlight also includes whether you accept self-funded and council-funded residents, your rooms and facilities, how many beds you have and a brief description of staffing.
Give each type of care its own page, which also helps you get found. Our guide to being found on Google and AI explains how.
Where should your phone number go?
At the top of every page and again at the bottom, as real text that a phone can dial with one tap. Keep it on screen as the page scrolls if you can.
TrustedCare Pro’s analysis of 12,000 enquiries found 67% came by telephone and just over a quarter by online form. That is one firm’s data, and it sells call answering.
Say when someone will answer. “Call us from 8am to 8pm, or leave a message and Rachel will call you back by 10am” tells a family what will happen. Promise only what you can keep.
Keep your form short: name, phone number, email address and a line about what they need. Test it every month. What happens next is covered in how to handle care home enquiries.
How must you show your CQC rating on your website?
In England it is the law. Regulation 20A says every website run by you or for you must show your latest rating, legibly and conspicuously, with the date it was given.
It must also show the CQC’s web address and where to find your latest report. The CQC gives you 21 calendar days after publishing a rating to update your website and your poster.
The easy way is the CQC’s own widget, which it strongly recommends. The widget fetches your rating, links to your report and updates itself when your rating changes.
The CQC asks you to place it above the fold, meaning people can see it without scrolling. To get it, find your home on the CQC website and open “ratings posters and widgets”.
Your web person pastes in the code. Check it is the code for your location, which is your care home. Groups may have to show a provider rating as well.
What if your rating isn’t what you want? It still has to be there, clear and conspicuous, even if you have asked for a review. You can add a note saying so.
If you are rated requires improvement or inadequate, the CQC encourages you to explain what you are doing about it. Our guide to your CQC rating and your marketing covers each rating.
The CQC says it may take enforcement action if your rating isn’t on your website at all. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own regulators and rules.
Should you put your fees on your website?
Yes. The CMA’s guide says key information, including an indication of weekly fees for people paying for themselves, should be prominently highlighted on your website.
It also asks you to say what the fee includes, what extras cost and what you take upfront, such as a deposit. The law behind this advice changed in April 2025, with broadly similar rules.
A range does the job. The CMA’s own illustration shows a weekly fee for each type of care and room, marked as a guide for self-funded residents and subject to a care needs assessment.
Residential care, single room with en-suite: currently from £1,150 to £1,350 a week. (These are example figures. Use your own.)
Be careful with the bottom of your range. The CMA says that if your lowest figure is for one exceptionally small room, it is likely to be misleading.
Owners worry about competitors and about putting families off. Your competitors can find out with one telephone call, and a family who can’t afford you is better told early, kindly.
Value for money is the lowest-rated category in carehome.co.uk’s 2026 review data, and its report says families want clearer communication about fees and extras. Whoever answers the phone needs the same figures as your website.
What photographs should you use?
Your own. A smiling stranger from a picture library tells a family nothing about your home, and neither does a picture made by AI. The CMA is clear that your marketing must be truthful.
Start with what they will ask about: a real bedroom, a bathroom, the lounge with people in it, the dining table laid for lunch, the garden and your front door.
Show your team as well. In carehome.co.uk’s review data, staff score highest of any category across every price band, so put names and faces on your site, starting with the Home Manager.
Get written consent from anyone in a picture, saying where it will be used. Keep it where you can find it, and take a picture down when someone asks.
If a resident can’t decide for themselves, follow your mental capacity policy. A relative’s yes doesn’t settle it on its own.
Phone pictures taken in daylight are a fair place to begin. When you are ready for more, see our guide to branding, photographs and film, or our care home photography and care home video production services.
What care home website design ideas actually help?
The useful ideas answer a question a family is already asking. Most homes can do these with what they have.
- A day here. Breakfast to bedtime in plain words, with what really happens.
- This week’s menu. Age UK tells families to ask about menus, so show them.
- Visiting. Times, parking, whether children and dogs are welcome, and whether visitors can eat with residents.
- Rooms. What is en-suite and what can come from home.
- Recent reviews. Real words with a date and a link to where they came from. Our reviews guide shows how to earn them.
- What happens next. Three short steps after someone enquires, so calling feels less daunting.
- A short film. The Home Manager walking round and talking normally.
Leave out moving slideshows, pop-ups and anything that plays by itself. Put your brochure and service user guide on a web page too, because PDFs are hard to read on a phone.
How fast should your website be on a phone?
Aim for the main content to appear within 2.5 seconds. That is the “good” mark in Google’s own measure, known as Largest Contentful Paint.
You can check for free. Paste your home page into PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile result. Small sites often have too few visitors for real-world figures, so go by the test.
The usual causes are oversized photographs, slideshows, videos that load by themselves and plugins nobody uses. Ask whoever looks after your site to shrink the images and remove the rest.
What does privacy law ask of your website?
Anyone who fills in your form hands you personal details, and often something about a parent’s health. So you need a privacy policy in plain English, linked from every page.
It should say who you are, what you collect and why, where it is kept, who sees it, how long you keep it and how someone can ask for their data or complain.
That last part is newer. Since June 2026, the ICO, the data protection regulator, says all organisations must give people a clear way to raise a data protection complaint and acknowledge it within 30 days.
Cookies come next. Advertising tools from Google or Meta need a visitor’s consent first. The ICO’s guidance lets you count visitors without consent, purely to improve your site, if you offer a simple way to object.
Test your banner. Say no, then ask your web person to confirm the advert tools really stay off. Ask for only what you need on your form.
This is practical guidance and not legal advice. Our guide to GDPR and your privacy policy goes through it line by line.
How do you make your website easy to read?
Write and build for someone in their eighties, or for someone reading at midnight on a small screen. Making the site easier for them makes it easier for everyone.
There is a legal side too. Under the Equality Act, organisations have to consider reasonable adjustments for disabled people, such as giving information in large print or audio.
If you provide publicly funded care, the Accessible Information Standard applies as well. If you send someone to your website, you must check it is accessible to them, or inform them another way.
The usual yardstick is the international web guidelines, WCAG 2.2 at level AA, and their authors have guidance on older users. Check these.
- Text can be enlarged to 200% without breaking the page.
- Text contrast is at least 4.5 to 1, and colour is never the only signal.
- Links say where they go, so “See our fees” and never “Click here”.
- Every box on your form has a label, and errors are explained.
- Photographs have a text description, and films have captions.
Then watch a relative in their seventies or eighties use your site for ten minutes.
When is it worth getting help?
You can do much of this yourself if someone can edit your site. Our free enquiry review takes six minutes and gives you a list of what to fix first.
Help is worth paying for when your site can’t be edited, doesn’t work on a phone, or is old enough that patching it would cost more than replacing it.
Our care home website design package, Pro, gives you a website and an enquiries list together. Our Pressbeau case study shows 8.5 times more visits for a group of eight family-owned homes.
Whoever you use, check who will own the site and the domain name before you sign. If your worry is families not finding you, see our help with being found on Google.
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