Choosing a care home is rarely planned. It often starts after a fall or a hospital stay, with a family trying to understand fees, care types and inspection reports in a matter of days. The person reading your website is usually a son or daughter, on a phone, at lunch or late at night, sometimes from the other end of the country. Sometimes it is the person who will move in, reading with their glasses on and the text size turned up.
A care home website has to work for both. This is what families look for, what the CQC and the CMA expect your website to show, what care homes commonly get wrong online, and why this year’s design trends are the wrong choice for your readers.
Does a care home need its own website?
Yes. Families will find you on listing sites and on the regulator’s website, but each shows your home in its own layout, next to other homes. Your own website is the one place where you explain, in your words, what life in your home is like and what it costs.
It is also where the rules expect information to be. In England, the Care Quality Commission requires your latest rating on your website, and the Competition and Markets Authority’s consumer law advice expects key information, including fees, to be easy to find there.
How do families choose a care home?
The questions are much the same in every family. They want to know:
- What it costs. The weekly fee for the type of care needed, what it includes, and what costs extra.
- Whether there is a room. And if not, whether there is a waiting list.
- What kind of care you provide. Residential, nursing, dementia, respite, end of life care.
- What the rooms are like. Size, en suite or not, and what residents can bring.
- The food. A real menu, how special diets are handled, whether families can eat with residents.
- The days. Activities, outings, the garden, and whether residents can keep their own routines.
- The staff. Who the manager is, how the home is staffed, and how long people stay.
- Visiting. When family can come, and whether grandchildren and pets are welcome.
- The inspection rating. And a link to the full report.
- How to visit. A phone number that is answered, and an easy way to arrange to look round.
Families compare several homes at once. The one that answers these without making them call is the one that gets the visit.
What does the CQC require on a care home website?
In England, Regulation 20A of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 requires a provider that has received a CQC rating to display it at its premises and on every website it maintains. The website must show the CQC’s web address, where on the CQC’s site the latest assessment can be found, and the most recent rating, in a way that makes clear which home it relates to. The regulation says anything shown must be legible, displayed conspicuously, and show the date each rating was given.
The CQC’s guidance for residential care homes adds the practical detail: show the rating on the main homepage or appropriate landing pages, on a permanent page the public visit often, that is reached through your main navigation and makes clear which service it relates to. Ratings must be on your website no later than 21 calendar days after the CQC publishes them, even if you have asked for a review. The CQC offers a website widget, though you can use your own materials, and it says it can prosecute for a breach. The detail is in its guidance on how providers must display ratings.
Outside England, care homes are regulated by the Care Inspectorate in Scotland, Care Inspectorate Wales and the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority in Northern Ireland. Each has its own approach to inspection and publication, so check your own regulator’s guidance on what to show online. This is guidance on the website side, not legal advice.
Should a care home publish its fees?
The CMA thinks so. Its consumer law advice for care home providers, reissued in December 2021, says families need to be able to compare costs upfront, and that fee information is particularly important on first contact. The key information it expects includes an indication of the total weekly fees for self-funded residents, across the full range, for each type of care; what those fees include; extras charged separately; any deposit or upfront payment; and your latest inspection rating. On websites, the CMA considers that this key information is likely to need to be no more than one click from the homepage, for example through a clearly labelled “Our fees and charges” tab.
A fee range is not a quote. It tells a family whether you are within reach, which saves everyone a visit that was never going to work.
What do care homes get wrong online?
“Contact us for fees”
A family comparing five homes shortlists the ones that say what it costs. A page that asks them to call reads as expensive or evasive, and runs against what the CMA expects. Publish the range, explain what moves a fee within it, and say what is included.
Stock photos instead of your own home
Families recognise a stock photo of a smiling resident instantly. They want the actual lounge, a real bedroom, the garden and the dining room at lunchtime. Your own photos, with permission from anyone in them, are worth far more.
No sense of what a day is like
Many care home sites describe care in general terms and never show a menu, an activities timetable or what happens on a Sunday. Those are the details a family pictures.
Visiting is not mentioned
Families ask about visiting early. In England, Regulation 9A of the same regulations requires care homes to support residents to receive visits, unless there are exceptional circumstances. Say plainly how visiting works in your home and how to arrange it.
The rating is hard to find or out of date
A rating tucked into the footer, or one from a previous inspection, is a problem for the regulator and a worry for families. If it is not the rating you want, the CQC encourages you to explain what you are doing to improve.
Availability that is never updated
A “rooms available” banner from last year sends families into calls that end in disappointment. Keep availability current, or invite people to call.
Written for commissioners, not families
“Holistic, person-centred care in a homely environment” could describe any home in the country. Families need concrete things: who the manager is, how many residents live here, what is for lunch, and when they can visit.
Why are this year’s web design trends wrong for a care home website?
The design trends of the moment include full-screen video that plays on arrival, scroll-jacking and parallax, oversized headings above thin, pale body text, dark and moody colour schemes, galleries that scroll sideways, content that only appears on hover, menus hidden behind an icon even on a desktop, very little text, and motion in every section.
These suit fashion labels, beauty brands and online shops, where the site is part of the mood and the visitor has come to browse. They work against a care home’s readers. Thin, low-contrast text fails an older reader with low vision, which is why the web accessibility guidelines set a minimum contrast for body text. Parallax and constant motion can make people with vestibular disorders feel unwell. A hover-only reveal does nothing on a phone. A hidden menu turns “what are your fees?” into a search. And a relative reading in a hospital corridor, under strain, needs a phone number and plain answers, not an atmospheric film.
Good care home website design is calm and legible. Large text, strong contrast, little or no motion (and none for visitors whose devices ask for less), a visible menu with plain labels such as Fees, Rooms, Visiting and Our rating, and the phone number always on screen. None of this has to look dated. With your own photography, a warm palette and careful typography, a calm site can be as well made as anything on a design awards list. It is simply made for its readers.
We make the same case for funeral directors, whose readers are often the same families, in what a funeral director website needs.
What should a care home website include?
- Your latest inspection rating, on the homepage, with the date and a link to the full report.
- A fees page in the main menu, with weekly fee ranges for each type of care, what is included and what costs extra.
- A page for each type of care you provide, in the words families search for.
- The rooms, the food and the days, with real photos, a sample menu and an activities timetable.
- The manager and the team, with names and a short introduction.
- Visiting, explained plainly.
- A way to arrange a visit, including a phone number that dials when tapped.
- Schema markup, so search engines and AI assistants read your name, address and phone number correctly.
Families also find care homes through the map: see setting up a Google Business Profile properly, and why fast pages win local search for why speed on a phone matters.
Why audit your care home website?
Care home sites drift. Fees change, the rating changes, the manager moves on, and the photos get heavier. Nobody notices, because the people who run the home never need to use the site.
Our free website audit checks what a family and a search engine actually meet: how fast the site loads on a phone, whether the page titles say what you are and where, broken links, schema markup, and whether search engines and AI assistants can read the site at all. It takes about a minute.
Where Onlineify fits
Onlineify is a website product with published prices. We never use a template, so every site is designed for its audience. The studio that builds fashion-forward sites for clothing brands builds calm, legible ones for care homes, because a relative reading at midnight is not a shopper.
Every build includes a custom design, a first draft of the copy, Google Business Profile setup, schema markup, and Sanity, an editor where your staff update fees, menus, photos and news themselves. On Business and Plus, booking that syncs with your calendar is included, which suits arranging visits to look round, and enquiry forms are routed and tracked. Anything bespoke, such as a live room availability feed, is priced as a named line before you pay. There is one build fee, no Onlineify subscription, and every account is in your name. See Onlineify for local businesses, or read what a website costs first.