The guide

How do families judge a care home before they ever pick up the phone?

Families judge a care home mostly on reputation and on whether they can picture daily life inside it, and they do it fast, on a phone, before speaking to anyone. Research with 1,000 UK families who had recently arranged care found reputation was the single most important factor in choosing a provider, ahead of cost, staff experience and location. Formal inspection reports mattered far less than most operators assume.

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Updated August 2026

The short version

Families decide quickly, on a phone, and mostly on what they can see. In brief:

Reputation was the top factor in choosing a provider at 30 per cent, ahead of cost at 25 per cent, staff experience at 24 per cent and location at 24 per cent (Care England and Log my Care).
Only 19 per cent of families used inspection reports when researching, so display your rating but do not expect it to win the family.
Families look in a fixed order: photographs, daily life, fees, then how to contact you.
Real faces, plain talk about money and current pages build trust, while stock photographs and hidden fees lose it.
Four changes this week need no new website: real photographs, a typical day, a fees paragraph and a tappable phone number.

What the research says

Reputation first, and formal frameworks a long way behind.

Care England and Log my Care surveyed 1,000 UK families who had recently organised care for a relative.

30%named reputation as the most important factor in choosing a provider

19%said they used inspection reports when researching

11%counted inspection reports among the most important factors in the final decision

40%said the hardest single thing was working out who to trust

Reputation was named as the most important factor by 30 per cent, ahead of cost at 25 per cent, staff experience at 24 per cent and location at 24 per cent. Only 19 per cent said they used inspection reports when researching, and around 11 per cent counted them among the most important factors in the final decision.

The same research found 97 per cent described arranging care as difficult, 61 per cent felt overwhelmed, anxious, frustrated or stressed, and 40 per cent said the hardest single thing was working out who to trust.

That is the person arriving on your website: someone under strain, in a hurry, trying to work out who to believe.

A resident and her daughter smiling together in the care home lounge.

The order they look in

What do they look at first, and in what order?

Photographs, then daily life, then fees, then how to contact you.

Photographs. The first judgement is instinctive and visual, formed before anything is read. If the images are obviously stock, most people recognise it, and the instinctive judgement is that you are hiding the real thing.
Daily life. Evidence of ordinary life: what happens on a Tuesday, what the food is like, whether the garden is used, who the staff are.
Fees. If they are still with you, they look for the money conversation.
How to contact you. Whether contacting you looks like it will be easy.

The signals

What builds trust, and what loses the family?

Five things build trust. Any one of six can lose it.

Builds trust

The signals that build trust

Real faces. Named staff with photographs. A family reading "our experienced team" learns nothing; a family seeing the manager's face and name learns a great deal.

Real residents, with consent. Photographed and filmed with dignity protected. This is also why films must be real people rather than actors or anything generated; a family can tell, and being caught out on this is unrecoverable.

Plain talk about money. Not necessarily a price list. What is included, what is not, how fees are reviewed, what the first conversation covers.

Other families' words. carehome.co.uk carries more than 400,000 reviews across UK homes, which is a reasonable measure of how much weight families put on each other. Bring some of that onto your own pages, with consent.

Currency. A dated vacancies line, recent photographs, an events page from this season. Out of date pages tell a family you do not attend to detail, and they extrapolate.

Loses the family

The signals that lose them

Stock photography. No sense of daily life. Fees nowhere. A site that is slow or awkward on a phone. An events page from two summers ago. No obvious way to make contact.

Any one of these is usually enough, because the family has three other homes open in other tabs. They are not building a case against you. They are reducing a list.

Where they are

On a phone, and often late.

Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 report found most UK online time is spent on a smartphone, that Google Search was used by 82 per cent of online adults in the month, and that Facebook and Messenger were used by 93 per cent.

The decision-maker is usually a close family member, most often an adult child but frequently a spouse, sibling, niece or grandchild, doing this after work and after the children are in bed.

Design for that person, on that device, at that hour.

This week

What can I do about it this week?

Four things, none of which require a new website.

Replace stock photographs

Replace any stock photograph with a real one, even an imperfect one.

Write a typical day

Write an honest account of a typical day and put it where it can be found.

Add a plain paragraph on fees

Add a plain paragraph about fees and what the first conversation covers.

Make the number tappable

Make the phone number tappable at the top of every page.

Then look at the wider picture. If families are not reaching the site at all, that is a different problem, covered in why families are not finding your care home online. If they are arriving and leaving, why your website is not bringing in enquiries is the place to start, and what a great care home website contains sets out the whole picture.

Common questions

How families judge a care home, answered.

Mostly on reputation and on whether they can picture daily life. UK research with 1,000 families who recently arranged care found reputation was the single most important factor in choosing a provider at 30 per cent, ahead of cost at 25 per cent, staff experience at 24 per cent and location at 24 per cent. Formal inspection reports mattered far less than operators expect.

Fewer than most operators assume. In the Care England and Log my Care research only 19 per cent said they used inspection reports when researching providers, and around 11 per cent counted them among the most important factors in the final decision. Display your rating, but do not expect it to be what wins the family.

Usually photographs, on a phone. Before reading anything they are forming an instinctive judgement about whether the place looks like somewhere their relative would be content. Stock imagery breaks that instantly, because most people recognise it.

The overall search takes weeks, but the judgement about any individual home is formed very quickly, often in under a minute of looking at a page. That is why speed, images and the first line of text carry so much weight.

No sense of daily life, no visible fees information, obviously staged or stock photographs, out of date pages, and no clear way to make contact. Any one of these is usually enough when the family has three other homes open in other tabs.