The symptom
Traffic looks fine. Half term is a fortnight away, the site had a few hundred visitors, and the Wednesday and Thursday of week two are half empty. Meanwhile your inbox has eleven emails asking whether you take Tax-Free Childcare, what time drop-off opens, and whether a seven year old can go in the older group with a sibling.
Every one of those emails is a booking that stalled on your website. Here are the eight usual causes, in the order worth fixing.
1. The programme is a PDF
This is the most common and the most expensive. A parent on a phone opens the PDF, gets a page of small type, pinches, gives up, and emails you instead. A PDF cannot be found by search, cannot be tapped to book, and cannot show only the week they care about.
Fix: a page per holiday and per age group, with the days listed as text and a book button on each. Keep the PDF as a download for the fridge if you like, but it must not be the only version.
2. Fees and funding are not answered anywhere
A parent whose budget depends on a voucher scheme or a funded place will not email you to find out. They will open the next club in the results. Silence on this reads as no.
Fix: a fees and funding page that names the schemes you accept, says exactly how to pay with each, and says what to do if the parent is unsure. Link it from every programme page and from the booking area.
3. Booking throws them to another domain
The button says Book and the parent lands on a platform page that looks nothing like your site, often in the cramped browser inside Facebook or Instagram. Some of them stop there.
Fix: embed the platform where it offers an embed, and deep-link per week and age group so the parent lands on the thing they were reading about, already selected.
4. Registration is asked for again every time
A family who came in August has to retype the allergy, the doctor, the photo permission and the two authorised collectors to book October. That is five minutes on a phone in the evening, and five minutes is enough to lose a booking.
Fix: parent accounts in the booking platform, with the child record held between bookings and only a confirmation asked for at the second booking. Say on the site that returning families book in two minutes.
5. Arrival, pick-up and what to bring are missing
These generate more email than anything except fees. What time can I drop off, is there a late pick-up, packed lunch or provided, does my child need a swimming kit on Thursday.
Fix: one plain page, written once, linked from the confirmation email and from every programme page. It removes a week of your admin every holiday.
6. The site is slow on a phone in a car park
Big unoptimised photo galleries and a booking script loaded on every page make the programme take four seconds to appear. Parents booking childcare do it in fragments of time, often on a bad signal.
Fix: compress and size the images properly, load the booking script only on booking pages, and target the programme page appearing in about a second on a mid-range phone.
7. There is one Clubs page instead of a page per holiday
One page that gets edited every school holiday can never rank for a specific search, and it never carries enough detail for the week in front of the parent.
Fix: a page per holiday period, published two to four weeks before parents start planning, and kept afterwards rather than deleted, so next year's version has history behind it.
8. Nobody is measuring anything
Without tracking you cannot tell whether the summer page or the fees page produced the bookings, so you guess, and next year you guess again.
Fix: track booking clicks, form sends and call taps by page. Look at it once at the end of each holiday.
The order
Publish the programme as pages. Write the fees and funding page. Deep-link and embed the booking. Then registration reuse, then the arrival and pick-up page, then speed, then the page-per-holiday habit, then tracking.
The first two usually move the number on their own, because they are the two questions that stop a parent, and neither of them is currently on your site.
Where this sits
Programme pages, embedded day booking, registration collected once and a plain funding page are how we build an after-school and holiday club website, and the same order of fixes applies across the childcare and family sites we work on. What each package covers is on pricing. Count the emails you answered last holiday. Most of them were the website talking.