One place is years of fees
A new nursery family is not one sale. A child starting in the baby room may stay until they go to school, and a sibling often follows. That changes the arithmetic on a website completely. The question is not what the site costs. It is how many extra viewings it books a month, how many of those become places, and what a place is worth over its life at your setting.
Run your own numbers before you read any quote. Take your full-time weekly fee, multiply by your operating weeks, and ask how many places you are short of capacity across your rooms. Almost every nursery that does this discovers the site is being compared against the wrong thing.
The template
A childcare theme on Squarespace, Wix or WordPress, your logo dropped in, a gallery, a contact form. A few hundred to a couple of thousand, live in a fortnight.
What it does well: it exists, it looks tidy, and it stops the site being an embarrassment when a parent looks you up after a recommendation.
What it does not do is the part that fills rooms. Templates almost never carry a page per room, because the theme has a Gallery and an About and nowhere to put "toddler room, two to three years, registered ratio, room leader, typical morning, places from January". They put fees "on request", because the theme has no table component you can edit. They send funded hours to a paragraph of scheme names. They have a contact form instead of live viewing slots, so the 10pm parent leaves a message. And they get slow, because the gallery is twelve full-size photographs.
The custom build
Built around the decision a parent is making. Rooms modelled as records, so each has its own page, its own photographs, its own age band and ratio, its own leader and its own availability line, and so a manager can edit any of it in ten minutes. A fees and funding page as a table matched to what your software invoices. Viewing slots wired to a calendar. A waitlist form landing in Famly, Blossom or Kinderly as an enquiry with the child's date of birth attached. Inspection outcome shown and linked. Safeguarding and vetting stated. A day-in-the-life page and menus. Speed budgets on room pages full of photographs. Tracking on every viewing booking.
Three to seven thousand for a single site, four to eight weeks.
Where the extra places come from
Four routes, and none of them are design.
Local search. A room page is a page about a specific thing a parent searches for. "Baby room nursery" plus a town is a real query, and a template with one Rooms page cannot answer it. Four rooms means four pages that can rank, plus a fees page, plus a day-in-the-life page.
The 10pm viewing. Parents research after bedtime. Live slots convert that visit; a contact form defers it to an office that opens with children arriving and returns the call at three, by which time the parent has been round somewhere else.
The fees page. Every parent asks what it costs and whether funding covers it. A page that answers plainly removes the phone call and, more importantly, removes the reason to phone three settings and go with whoever picks up.
The waitlist as data. Names in a notebook do not forecast occupancy. Dates of birth and preferred start dates do, and that is a build decision, not a design one.
The arithmetic
Suppose the custom build costs four thousand more than the template. Ask what one additional child, staying two years on three days a week, is worth at your fee. For most settings the answer is that a single extra family covers the difference several times over, and the build is a fixed cost while occupancy is the recurring one. That is the whole case, and it does not depend on any claim about how many extra families a site produces, only on how many it would need to produce.
When the template is right
You are at capacity with a waiting list you cannot clear. You are a small setting with one room and no growth plan. You are pre-registration and need a holding page while you wait. Or the budget genuinely is not there this year, in which case buy the template, but insist the domain and hosting are in the nursery's name so nothing is lost when you replace it.
When the template is a leak
You have places in one or more rooms. The office answers the same fees and funded hours question every morning. Enquiries arrive as voicemails and forms rather than booked viewings. Your waitlist lives in a notebook. Your inspection outcome is good and the site does not say so. You cannot edit the fee schedule yourself in September. Any two of those and the template is costing more than it saved.
Deciding
Count your empty places this month, not your website's flaws. If the rooms are full, the template is fine. If they are not, the site is one of the few things you can change quickly that touches every enquiry before a member of staff does.
Where this sits
A nursery and daycare website built around rooms, fees and the viewing is what we do at a fixed price, and the wider approach across settings is on the childcare business page. Decide it on occupancy. A website that fills one more place has paid for itself before the child moves up a room.