The guide
A carehome.co.uk profile is usually enough to be found, but rarely enough to be chosen. The directory puts your home on the shelf where comparing families look; your own website is where a family decides you are different from the home two miles away. A home that wants steady private enquiries needs both, working together, with the website as the asset it owns.
Updated July 2026
The profile introduces your home; your website convinces the family. In brief:
The profile
It puts your home where late-stage demand already looks. It reaches its limit at the point of persuasion.
Where it reaches its limit
Your home appears as a card in a grid, next to every nearby alternative, with the same fields and the platform's branding over the top. You cannot decide what the family sees first, cannot show a resident's day the way you would tell it, and the family is one click from a competitor. The profile does the introduction; something else has to do the persuasion.
Your own website
Your website is the one place online where a family experiences your home rather than reads a summary of it. It can open with the thing families actually want to know, what daily life feels like, and answer it with real photography, real staff, real families on film, never stock and never AI. It can carry the practical answers a profile has no room for: how admissions work, what a first visit looks like, and the questions a worried family member sits with at midnight.
The decision-maker is usually the adult child, though often another close family member, and UK adults now spend more than four and a half hours a day online (Ofcom, Online Nation 2025). When that person checks your home late in the evening, the website is the visit before the visit. It is also the destination every other channel feeds: the directory profile, your Google Business Profile and any advertising all work harder when they point at a site that closes the story.
Working together
The profile introduces, the website convinces, and each covers the other's blind side. The healthy pattern in family behaviour runs in this order.
The family builds a shortlist on the directory, weighted by reviews. This is where your profile earns its place and where families expect to find you.
They check each home's own site to make the judgement. A strong profile with a weak website leaks families here, quietly, because nobody reports disappointment.
Reassured by what they saw, the family enquires. The two channels together cover the journey end to end, from first find to first call.
Side by side
Best at different jobs. The profile is found; the website is chosen.
| carehome.co.uk profile | Your own website | |
|---|---|---|
| Best at | Being found by comparing families | Being chosen once found |
| Format | The platform's, same for every home | Yours entirely |
| Reviews and story | The platform's trusted review base | Your films, stories and answers in full |
| Competitors | One click away, by design | Not on the page |
| Ownership | Rented presence | An asset you own outright |
| Ceiling | Cannot tell your story your way | Cannot generate comparison-stage traffic alone |
Who it's for and pricing
This is a decision for the owner, director or manager, and the useful pricing question is about models, not a single number. A website is either a one-off build you own or an ongoing arrangement, and either a refresh of what you have or a full build with new photography and a capture day for film. Price varies with scope, and the questions that protect you are simple: what exactly is included, who owns the site afterwards, and is there any lock-in.
Our own approach, including both builds and how ownership works, is set out on our care home websites page. The point that matters most here is that the website is the one asset in this pair that you keep and that compounds, so it is worth getting right.
The timeline
Improving the website does not mean touching the profile at all, and a build is measured in weeks, not months. Keep the profile live and current throughout; there is no trade-off where one must pause for the other.
A refresh of an existing site is quicker; a full build with a photography and filming day takes longer, because the strongest material comes from real days in the home. The reassuring part is that nothing needs to go dark while the asset you own is built quietly behind the shelf presence families already use.
Common questions
For visibility, often yes; for persuasion, rarely. A profile puts your home in front of comparing families, but in the same format as every neighbour. Your own website is the only place a family gets a full, honest picture of daily life in your home, told your way.
Yes. Families researching care live online like everyone else, and shortlisting typically involves checking the home's own site after finding it on a directory or on Google. A missing or dated website does not stop the search; it quietly shapes the conclusion.
Keep the profile, because late-stage demand already looks there, and invest in the website as the asset you own. The profile rents attention on a shared shelf; the website compounds and every other channel points back to it.
The models matter more than any single number: one-off build versus retainer, a refresh versus a full build with a capture day, and whether you own the site outright. Price varies with scope, so ask what is included and who owns what. The specifics of our two builds are on our care home websites page.
Keep reading
What a great care home website actually includes, and why families judge a home by it before they call.
Template builder or built for youWhether to build it yourself on a template or have it built for you, and how each option is priced.
Why families are not finding you onlineWhy families may not be finding your home online, and the visibility fixes that bring them to your door.
