Care home website design that answers fees, rating and visits

Local search does the rest. Someone typing 'care home' and their town sees a map before any website, so your Google profile needs the right category, real photos and visiting hours; see create a Google Business Profile and get more Google reviews. A page per type of care and per town you serve brings in families who search more specifically, which is what local SEO is for.

Every provider in England with a CQC rating has to display it on each of its websites. The rating has to be legible and conspicuous, show the date it was given, and tell people where the latest report can be read on CQC's own site, with the address of that site. A provider with more than one location shows the rating for each. CQC can prosecute for a failure to display without a warning notice first.

On many care home sites the rating is a small badge in the footer, sometimes from two inspections ago. We put it in one place in the site, show it on every page of the home it belongs to, and update it once when a new report comes out, so the old rating cannot survive on a forgotten page. A Good or Outstanding rating is also simply the most trusted thing on the page, so it belongs near the top rather than in the footer. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own regulators and their own rules; we write those parts with you.

The CMA's advice to care homes on consumer law expects your website to give an accurate and representative indication of the total weekly fees you typically charge self-funders for each type of care, what the fee includes, which extras cost more and which costs a resident cannot avoid, such as a carer going along to a hospital appointment. Deposits and upfront payments belong there too: how much, whether they are protected and when they are refunded. Your standard contract terms should be on the site before a needs assessment, and the complaints procedure easy to find. Since April 2025 the unfair commercial practices rules of the DMCC Act 2024 apply as well.

A fees page that does this does not have to be long. For example, with made-up figures:

Under it: who you accept (self-funded, council-funded, NHS-funded nursing), how and when fees change, and the deposit terms. Marketing has to be truthful too, so the site only names an activities coordinator, a minibus or a cinema room that the home really has.

Health data is special category data under UK GDPR, and what a form never asks cannot leak. The site still needs a privacy notice and, if it measures visitors with cookies, a choice about that; see do I need a privacy policy and do I need a cookie banner. If you want families to pick a visiting slot themselves, the form becomes a booking system for your website. Many readers are older or reading on a small screen in a hospital corridor, so we write in plain words, use large text and strong contrast, and keep every page fast on a weak signal. A new rating or a fee change goes live the same day under website maintenance.

A care home recruits all year. Carers look for work on their phones after a shift, close to home, and they leave an application that asks for a CV and a cover letter. So the careers page lists the open roles with the pay range where you can share it, explains how the rota works and how far ahead it is set, and asks three questions. Applications land in a list the manager and deputy both see. Showing what it is like to work for you is employer branding; a rota in an app that staff already use says more than any advert.

The family side of the site works the same way. Visiting times, what to bring on moving day, the menu of the week, the newsletter and photos of residents who agreed to be in them. If families should see invoices or documents, that moves behind a login, which is part of the wider care home software we build beside your care record.