Six tests, ten minutes
A nursery website has six jobs. Each has a test you can run on your own phone while the children are at lunch. Do them on mobile data, in a private window, as a stranger would, not on the office desktop with the site already cached.
1. Let a parent see inside the room they need
Test: open the site and try to look at the room your youngest cohort is in. Count the photographs of that actual room.
Pass: a page for that room, six or more photographs of it as it really is, the age band, the ratio you are registered for, the room leader named with a face, and a few sentences on a typical morning.
Fail: one Rooms page, a gallery of twelve mixed thumbnails with no captions, or a stock image of building blocks.
Fix: build rooms as editable records, one page each, and shoot them properly. Photograph rooms empty or at nap time unless you have recorded consent for every identifiable child, and keep the consent register beside the shot list.
2. Price a week without phoning you
Test: find what three full days for a two-year-old costs. Time yourself.
Pass: under twenty seconds. A fees page with session types as a table, the fee for each, what is included, the extras named, and a worked example of a typical week.
Fail: "fees on request", a downloadable PDF from two Septembers ago, or a number that does not match what your software invoices.
Fix: publish the table, state the extras, date the page, and make it something a manager can edit in ten minutes each year. Match it to the invoicing so the first bill holds no surprises.
3. Answer the funded hours question
Test: find out how funded hours or subsidy work at your setting.
Pass: one plain, dated paragraph written for the country you operate in, framed as orientation rather than advice, with a link to the official eligibility checker as the authority. Then your part: term-time or stretched, what you charge alongside, what the parent needs to bring, and when it starts.
Fail: silence, a list of scheme names, or a summary of rules that have since changed.
Fix: write it once, date it, link the checker, and put a review reminder in the calendar for the month your fees change.
4. Book a viewing in one tap
Test: from the room page, book a viewing. Count the taps and try it at ten at night.
Pass: Book a viewing in the header of every page, opening on real slots for the afternoons you show parents round, the room pre-selected, and a confirmation carrying the address, parking, buggy access, how long it takes and the fees link.
Fail: a contact form, an email address, or a phone number as the only route.
Fix: live slots, in your nursery software if it books tours, or in Acuity or Bookeo if it does not. Then check what the parent gets back.
5. Capture the family you cannot place yet
Test: try to join the waitlist. Then find out where it went.
Pass: a short form asking the child's date of birth, sessions wanted, preferred start and parent's contact, landing in Famly, Blossom or Kinderly as an enquiry, with an acknowledgement telling the parent what happens next and when the list is reviewed.
Fail: no waitlist route, or a general contact form whose replies sit in an inbox nobody owns.
Fix: wire the form into the platform, write the acknowledgement once, and review the list against occupancy monthly, in date order.
6. Show who you are and that you are checked
Test: find your inspection outcome, the designated safeguarding lead, and the qualifications of the room leader.
Pass: the inspection rating with its date and a link to the published report on the regulator's own site. A team page with a photograph, role, qualification and first aid status for each person, and a sentence on the recruitment and vetting checks you run. A published safeguarding policy naming the designated lead by role, with a plain route for raising a concern including the external one. Regimes differ by country, so say which applies to you.
Fail: none of it, or a policies page linking to a broken PDF.
Fix: publish it as pages rather than attachments, keep it factual, and give it an owner and a review date.
The seventh test, which is speed
Time your busiest room page from tap to fully loaded on mobile data. Over about three seconds and the other six tests do not get run by anyone. Images at layout widths, compressed, modern formats, lazy-loaded below the first screen, one prioritised hero per page.
Scoring
Six passes and your website is doing its job. Four or five and you have a content afternoon ahead of you. Three or fewer and the site is not the reason your rooms have spaces, it is one of the reasons.
Run the tests again after the fixes, and again each September when fees change and the rooms move up.
Where this sits
These six are the specification we build a nursery and daycare website to, at a fixed price, and the same checklist shape covers the other childcare websites we work on. The tests take ten minutes. The places they find take a year to lose.