The guide
Families ask five kinds of question before they choose a care home: can you meet the care needs, who will actually be looking after my relative, what will daily life feel like, what does it cost and what is included, and what happens when things change. They ask them in a fixed order, most of them before they ever ring you, and the home that answers them clearly and early is usually the home that gets the visit.
Updated September 2026
This guide is written for the owner, director or manager who has to answer, not for the family. It sets out the questions in the order they arrive, what a good answer sounds like, and where each answer needs to live. In brief:
Before contact
The first questions are asked of a screen, not a person. Before a family makes contact they are working out whether your home is worth contacting at all, and they answer that themselves from your website, your reviews and your listings.
At this stage they are asking:
None of these needs a phone call, and families increasingly do not make one until they have answers. Mediahawk's spring 2026 care trends report, drawn from call tracking between April 2025 and March 2026, found calls to care homes rose 9% year on year while the ratio of website visits to calls fell 7.5%, meaning families now read for considerably longer before they pick up the phone (Care England, 2026). The same report found calls originating from care home websites grew by just 1%, against 9% growth overall, which says most of that reading is happening without the website earning the call at the end of it.
Two conversations
These are two different conversations and they need two different kinds of answer. The call is about whether you can meet the need. The visit is about what the days will feel like.
On the visit
What is a normal Tuesday here? What happens if she does not want to join in? Can she bring her own furniture? Can we visit whenever we like? What is the food like and who decides it? How will you tell us if something happens? Who do we ring at the weekend? What do you do when someone is unsettled at night?
Notice how many of those are really the same question. They are asking who will notice her. Answer them with specifics about real residents rather than policy, and the visit does its job.
The question underneath
Underneath the practical questions sits one families rarely say: am I doing the right thing? Almost every family arranging care is carrying some guilt about it, and no amount of information resolves that on its own.
The Care England and Log my Care national study of 1,000 people arranging care, carried out by Sapio Research, found 97% said arranging care was difficult and only 3% found it straightforward. The same research found reputation was the top factor at 30%, ahead of safety and safeguarding at 29% and staff experience at 24% (Care England, 2026).
A manager who says, unprompted, that this is one of the hardest decisions a family makes and that most people feel exactly as they do, changes the temperature of the whole conversation. That is not a technique. It is the answer to the question they were actually asking, and it is why the homes families choose are so often the ones where somebody said the quiet part first.
What has shifted
Because two of the things families used to rely on have moved. The report they used to read has gone quiet, and the needs they are arranging for have shifted.
Inspection reports answer less than they used to. carehome.co.uk's Caring Britain report, published March 2026, found the average care home in England has gone more than four years without a full inspection, with 523 homes not inspected for at least eight years (carehome.co.uk, 2026). The Care England research already found inspection reports were a key factor for only 11% of families, and were used by just 19%. When the official picture is thin or old, families ask the home directly for what the report used to tell them.
Dementia and respite now dominate the enquiry. Mediahawk's spring 2026 report found dementia-related calls to care homes rose 211% year on year, and respite calls rose 183%. Those are not fringe enquiries any more, they are the sharpest growth in the sector, and families asking them often arrive frightened and unsure what they are even asking for.
The same Caring Britain report found provision for advanced and complex dementia needs varies widely by nation and region, from 57% of homes in London down to 33% in Wales and 23% in Northern Ireland. So "can you keep her as things get worse" has become one of the first questions rather than one of the last.
Side by side
Each question has a natural home, and putting an answer in the wrong place is what costs enquiries. If your site is due a rebuild, it is worth reading what a care home website needs to get right before you change anything here.
| Question type | Best answered on | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Do you meet this need, do you have a bed, where are you | Website, plainly, on the page a family lands on | Asked before contact. A family that cannot find it assumes the answer is no |
| What does the home look like and feel like | Website photography and film, and your Google Business Profile | This is judged, not read. Real footage of a working home answers it in seconds |
| What do other families say | Google and carehome.co.uk reviews, plus family stories on your own site | Families trust other families ahead of anything you write about yourself |
| What does it cost and what is included | Website, at least as a clear explanation of what is and is not in the fee | Asked of every home. Silence here reads as something to hide |
| Who is the team, how many at night, how long has the manager been here | Phone call and visit | These answers are about people, and people answer them better than pages |
| What happens when needs change | Phone call and visit, then confirmed in writing | The reassurance question. It needs a person and then a record |
| Am I doing the right thing | The visit, said out loud by a person | Nothing on a website resolves this |
Directories, Google and inspection reports all still do real work here, and families use all three. What they cannot do is answer a question about your home specifically. That part only you can supply.
The answer itself
Specific, honest about limits, and ending with a next step. Three things separate the homes that convert enquiries from the ones that field them.
"We have a lot of activities" answers nothing. "There is a gardening group on Wednesday and about eight residents go, and one of them plants the tomatoes every spring" answers everything.
A home that says plainly which needs it cannot meet, and offers to point the family somewhere that can, is trusted more, not less. Families are ringing several homes and they can tell who is selling.
Every answer should finish by moving the family forward: a date to visit, a call back at a time they chose, a page to read. Never leave the next move to them.
The practical bit
Four steps, in this order. None of them needs a budget, and the first one takes an afternoon.
Not what you think families ask. What they actually asked. The real list is usually shorter and more specific than expected, and it will not match your brochure.
In plain language, on pages a family can find without asking: care needs, dementia, fees and what is included, a normal day, visiting, and who the manager is.
Daily life and warmth are judged visually. Photographs of the real home and short films of real families answer the questions a page cannot. Stock imagery works against you here.
Who picks up, what gets captured, and that every call ends with a visit offered and, where possible, booked into the diary before anyone hangs up.
The avoidable four
The website answers the questions the home wants to answer. History, awards and the building, with nothing on dementia, fees or a normal day.
Fee questions get deflected. "Please call for pricing" is an answer, and it is the one a family compares unfavourably with a home that explained.
The call is handled by whoever is nearest. Warm, willing, no details captured, no visit offered, nothing to follow up.
Nothing is written down afterwards. The family gets a lovely conversation and no confirmation, so by the evening they cannot remember which home said what.
Cost, fit and pace
Most of it does not.
Rewriting your own pages around the real questions costs time rather than money, and how the phone is answered is a team decision. Where homes usually do bring in help is the parts that need a craft: photography and film of a working home, and a website built to answer these questions in the order families ask them.
Those are priced in a few different ways. A website is normally a one-off project fee, sometimes with a small ongoing hosting and support arrangement, and price varies with how much is being built. A subscription builder spreads the cost monthly, but you are renting rather than owning. Film is usually a project fee for a shoot and the edits that come from it, sometimes a day rate, occasionally tied to results. What matters more than the model is what you own at the end and whether you can leave. Our own care home website builds set out what each one includes, and the specifics are walked through on a call.
It matters most if your enquiry volume is healthy but few enquiries turn into visits. That gap is almost always an answering problem rather than a visibility one, and it is the cheapest thing on this list to fix. It can wait if families are not finding you at all, because if the phone is not ringing at all, that is a different problem. Start with being findable, then come back to this. If you are earlier still and want the whole order of work, start with where to begin with care home marketing.
Faster than most marketing work. Rewriting the pages families read and changing how the phone is answered can show up in the next month's enquiries, because you are converting interest that already exists rather than building new interest. The visibility work that brings more families to the website in the first place takes longer, usually a few months before it settles.
Common questions
Most families open with a version of "can you actually look after my mum?" They are asking whether your home can meet the specific needs in front of them, today and as those needs change. Answer the specific need first, then explain how you would know when the need changes, then invite them to visit.
Because more of the people they are arranging care for are living with dementia, and the provision varies widely by region. Mediahawk's spring 2026 care trends report found dementia-related calls to care homes rose 211% year on year, and respite calls rose 183%. If your website does not describe your dementia approach clearly, you are losing enquiries you should be winning.
Families ask about fees early and they ask every home, so the choice is not whether to answer but where. A home that explains what is included, what is extra and how fees are reviewed gives a family something to compare. A home that answers only with "please call" asks the family to spend a phone call finding out whether it is worth a phone call.
Whether they are doing the right thing. Almost every practical question sits on top of that one. A home that answers the practical question warmly and then addresses the unspoken one directly, by saying that this decision is hard and that most families feel this way, is the home the family remembers.
Both, in that order. Families research for longer before they make contact, so the website has to answer the early questions well enough to earn the call. The phone call and the visit then answer the questions that only a person can answer, about your team, your judgement and what happens when something goes wrong.
Keep reading
Why your home may be invisible where families look first, and the mostly one-off fixes that change it.
Films that answer the unwritten questionsWhat a real family saying what the first month was like does that no paragraph on a page can.
What a great care home website includesThe pages families actually read, the ones they never open, and what to fix first.
