Daycare website essentials: the seven things the site has to do
What a child care website must show a parent at 10pm, tuition transparency, licensing pages, tour forms, speed, tap-to-call and the photo consent rules.
- 1. Answer the five screening questions above the fold
- 2. Publish a tuition range
- 3. Have a licensing and safety page
- 4. One page per program, per age
- 5. A tour request form that takes twenty seconds
- 6. Speed and phone layout
- 7. Show the rooms and the people, not stock children
- What to leave off
- Rough costs
- Frequently asked
33.2% of child care centers on Google link to no website at all. Those centers carry a median of 2 reviews; centers with a site carry 10. The website does not create the reviews, but the two travel together, and the practical point is this: a third of your competitors have handed you the entire evening research window.
Because that is when a daycare website gets used. Not at 2pm. At 9:40pm, on a phone, by a parent with a laptop closed and a decision to make about someone they have never met.
Here is what the site has to do in that window.
1. Answer the five screening questions above the fold
A parent is filtering, not shopping. Before they scroll, the phone screen must show:
- Ages served, as ranges.
- The neighborhood, by name.
- Hours, with the real opening time.
- Whether you have openings, and in which rooms.
- A tap-to-call button and a "book a tour" button.
That is it. No slider, no welcome letter from the director, no stock photo of a smiling toddler on a swing. Those go below.
A working header reads: "Licensed child care in Ballard. Six weeks to pre-K. Open 6:30am to 6:00pm. Infant and toddler openings for September." Then two buttons.
2. Publish a tuition range
This is the argument every center has internally and the answer is not close. Publish ranges.
"Infants from $1,650 per month. Toddlers from $1,390. Preschool from $1,220. Part-time schedules from $780. Registration fee $125."
Hiding tuition does not protect you from price shoppers. It fills your phone with them, because the only way to learn the price is to call, and your director spends four hours a week quoting families who were never going to enroll. Publishing filters at zero cost and reads as confidence.
If you accept state child care assistance or subsidy vouchers, say so on this page in plain words, along with which program. Families who need that information cannot find it anywhere else and they are loyal families.
3. Have a licensing and safety page
Your license number, the licensing agency, your ratios by age group next to the state minimum, group sizes, background check policy, staff CPR and first aid status, your illness policy, your security procedure at the door, and your emergency plan.
If you have a past citation, explain it here in two sentences. Parents can pull your inspection record from their state's system, most of which are reachable through childcare.gov, and they will. A citation you explained yourself is a non-event. A citation they find on their own becomes the reason they picked the other center.
This page is also the single most quotable page you can publish for AI assistants, which is covered in the AI search guide.
4. One page per program, per age
Infant, toddler, preschool, pre-K, before and after school, summer. Each page: ages, ratio, group size, the daily schedule hour by hour, what the child brings, what you provide, tuition, and current availability.
The daily schedule matters more than anything else on the page. Parents cannot picture the day and the schedule lets them. A grid running 6:30am arrival through 6:00pm pickup, with meals, outdoor time, nap and activities marked, answers about fifteen questions at once.
5. A tour request form that takes twenty seconds
Four fields. Name, mobile number, child's age, desired start date. Optional message box. That is the whole form.
Every additional field costs you conversions. You do not need their address, their employer, their email, how they heard about you, or which program they want. You will get all of that on the phone within an hour.
Then the confirmation page and the auto-reply text must both say the same thing: "Got it, [director] will text you within the hour to set a tour time." And someone must actually do it. See the missed calls guide.
If you can, offer a real booking calendar with two or three tour slots a week. Parents book at 9:40pm and cannot call.
6. Speed and phone layout
Test your site on a phone on cellular data, not office wifi. If it takes more than three seconds to show the header, fix it before you do anything else. The usual culprits in daycare sites are a hero video, an image slider, and eight uncompressed photos loaded at full resolution.
Practical fixes: compress every image to under 200KB, drop the slider, drop the video from the homepage, and let the phone number be a real tel: link rather than an image or plain text.
Also check with one thumb. A parent holding a baby uses one hand.
7. Show the rooms and the people, not stock children
The strongest photo set is the one no competitor has: your actual rooms, empty and clean, at child height. Your playground. Your art wall. Your kitchen. Your drop-off door. Your staff, with names, years at the center and credentials.
Staff turnover is the number one anxiety a parent brings to a tour. A page with eight teachers, their names, and "with us since 2019" answers it before they ask.
The rule on children stays the same everywhere: no identifiable child appears without written parental consent on file for that specific child, and never with a full name or anything that identifies their schedule or classroom. Stock photos of other people's children are legal and read as fake. Empty rooms shot well read as real.
What to leave off
A blog nobody updates, with the last post from 2022. A "our philosophy" page that runs eleven paragraphs before mentioning ages. A chatbot. A parent portal login as the most prominent button on the homepage, which is for existing families and confuses prospects. Autoplay music.
Rough costs
A five to eight page site for a single-location center is $1,500 to $5,000 built once, or $75 to $250 a month on a managed plan. A template on a mainstream builder with your own photos and the pages above will outperform an expensive custom site with vague copy. Buy the domain yourself and keep it in your own account, whoever builds it.
Frequently asked
Do I need a site if my Facebook page is active? Yes. Social platforms are not searchable the way parents search, they do not rank in Maps, and a parent researching at 10pm frequently is not logged in. About 2.5% of centers in our data list a social page instead of a site, and it puts them in the same position as having nothing.
How many pages? Home, each program, tuition, licensing and safety, about and staff, contact and tour, FAQ. Seven to ten pages total.
Should I put the daily schedule on a public page? Yes, but keep it general. Publish times and activities, not the exact location of a specific classroom or any child's routine.
Website design is one of the services in the free 14-day trial, and you keep the site either way. Text or call (385) 832-6175. See where you sit in the benchmark report or run your numbers in the calculator.