The guide
A care home website usually fails to produce enquiries for one of five reasons: families cannot tell what daily life is really like, fees are a mystery, the site is slow or awkward on a phone, there is no obvious way to make contact, or the people arriving are not local families at all. The fixes are completely different, so the first job is working out which one is yours rather than redesigning on instinct.
Updated August 2026
Most enquiry problems on a care home website are fixable without a rebuild. In brief:
Start here
Look at your visitor numbers before anything else.
You have visitors and no enquiries
If you have visitors and no enquiries, read on. The five reasons below are where to look.
Reason one
This is the most common cause by a distance. Care England and Log my Care surveyed 1,000 UK families who had recently arranged care and 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 and location at 24 per cent each. Reputation, in practice, means: does this look like somewhere my mother would be content.
How to tell: open your site and try to describe an ordinary Tuesday in the home from what you see. If you cannot, neither can a family.
The fix: real photographs of real residents and staff, with consent. A daily life page. Film if you can. Stock imagery is worse than no imagery.
The other four
Each one has a simple test you can run yourself.
Silence about money reads as something to hide. You do not have to publish a price list. You do have to explain what is included, what is not, how fees are reviewed and what the first conversation covers.
Most of your visitors are on a phone, often late at night. Debugbear's May 2025 research put the average UK mobile site load at around 1.8 seconds. If yours takes noticeably longer, families leave before they have thought about your care at all.
One clear route, repeated, beats five competing ones. A tappable phone number at the top of every page, a short form that does not ask for a life history, and a plain line saying who will reply and when.
Traffic is not the same as the right traffic. If your visitors are job seekers, suppliers or people in the wrong county, the site is working and the targeting is not.
The failure nobody counts
A family enquiring about care is usually in the middle of something difficult and is contacting several homes at once. The first thoughtful reply carries disproportionate weight.
Occupancy across England has tightened, rising from 78 per cent in 2021/22 to 84 per cent in 2024/25 according to CQC's State of Care report, which makes each private enquiry more valuable, not less.
Before spending anything on the website, decide who answers enquiries, how fast, and what happens next.
What to fix first
In this order, because the earlier ones are cheaper and matter more.
Decide who answers and how quickly, today, at no cost.
Make the phone number tappable and visible on every page.
Get real photographs up, even imperfect ones, and write the typical day honestly.
Add a plain explanation of what is included and what the first conversation covers.
Speed and structure come after those, because they only pay off once the site has something worth staying for. For everything a site should contain, see what a great care home website contains.
Fix or rebuild
Most homes need less rebuilding than they assume. Here is how to tell which side you are on.
| Fix it if | Rebuild if |
|---|---|
| The structure is sound | The site cannot show daily life properly |
| The problem is content or images | It cannot be edited without calling someone |
| The problem is speed | It is slow because of how it was made |
We walk through the distinction in redesign or start again, and if you would like an honest second opinion, including when the answer is that your site is fine, get in touch.
Common questions
Usually one of five reasons: nobody can tell what daily life is really like, fees are a mystery, the site is slow or awkward on a phone, there is no obvious way to make contact, or the visitors arriving are not local families at all. Diagnose which before changing anything, because the fixes are completely different.
There is no universal benchmark, and any agency quoting one should be asked where it came from. The useful measure is your own trend and, more importantly, whether you can trace where each enquiry came from at all. Most homes cannot, which makes every judgement about the website guesswork.
If you have very few visitors, it is a visibility problem, not a website problem. If you have visitors who leave without contacting you, it is the website. Check the visitor numbers before spending anything on either.
The same day, and ideally within the hour. A family enquiring about care is usually in the middle of something difficult and is contacting several homes. The first thoughtful reply carries disproportionate weight, and a good website with a slow response produces no more move-ins than a bad one.
Fix it if the structure is sound and the problem is content, images or speed. Rebuild if the site cannot show daily life properly, cannot be edited without help, or is slow because of how it was made. Most homes need less rebuilding than they assume.
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