Two different families, two different flows
A nursery website has to serve two people who look similar and are not.
The first has a place in mind for next month and wants to walk round. The second is twenty weeks pregnant, has heard your baby room has a queue, and wants to be on it. Sending both to one contact form loses one of them, usually the second, who is the more valuable of the two.
So build two flows: book a viewing, and join the waitlist. Two buttons, two pages, two different sets of fields, two different follow-ups.
Book a viewing
Viewings are the one thing a nursery genuinely cannot delegate to a form. They need to happen when a room is settled, when the manager is free, and often not at nine in the morning or during lunch and sleep.
Publish real slots against the manager's calendar rather than a request box. Two or three windows a week is enough, and a parent who can see Wednesday at half two available now books it in a way they never book "we will get back to you".
Ask for: parent name, mobile, email, child's date of birth or due date, the start month they are aiming for, the days and sessions they think they want, and how they heard about you. Nine fields, no more. Anything you need for enrolment can wait until they have seen the place.
Give the parent a choice of slot lengths if your tours differ, and say what a viewing is: how long, who shows them round, whether the child comes, whether they can see the room in session rather than empty. Nurseries that let parents visit during the day rather than after close should say so on this page, because it is a real advantage and most sites bury it.
Then handle the awkward part: what happens if the room they want is full. Say on the page that a viewing is worth doing anyway, and link the waitlist.
Join the waitlist
This one is a form, not a calendar, and it should be short enough to complete on a phone in a maternity waiting room.
Ask for: parent name, contact details, child's date of birth or expected date, the month they would like to start, the room that implies, the days wanted, and whether they expect to use funded hours. That last field lets you plan the room, and nobody else asks it.
Say what the waitlist actually means at your nursery. Whether there is a registration fee and whether it is refundable or credited. How places are allocated, and be honest if siblings and full-time bookings get priority, because parents find that out eventually. Roughly how long the queue is per room, expressed as a season rather than a number of families. And how often you will be in touch.
That last promise is the one nurseries break. Pick an interval you will keep, once a term is realistic, and keep it.
Where the tools sit
Famly, Blossom and Kinderly all handle enquiries, waitlists and the pipeline from enquiry to enrolment, and one of them is usually already running the nursery. Send the waitlist form into that system so the family becomes a record rather than an email, and so the manager works one list.
Viewing slots are a calendar problem, and a scheduling tool such as Acuity handles them cleanly against the manager's real availability. Some nursery platforms include tour booking of their own. Where yours does, use it and keep everything in one place; where it does not, run the scheduler alongside and make sure both send to the same inbox. Confirm the current feature set with the vendor before you design a page around it.
Whatever the combination, the parent should never see the seam. Two buttons on your site, both leading to something that works on a phone.
After the form
The automatic confirmation is not the follow-up. It should say what happens next and by when, name the person who will be in touch, and link the fees page and the rooms.
The real follow-up is human and it belongs to the manager. A viewing booked online gets a text the day before. A waitlist registration gets a personal reply within two working days and then a note in the system for the next check-in. A viewing that happened gets a message within a day asking whether anything was left unanswered.
Nurseries lose places at exactly this point far more often than they lose them on the tour.
Testing it
Do the whole thing from your own phone once a month. Book a viewing, cancel it, join the waitlist, and check the record landed where you expect. Do it once from a link in an Instagram bio, because in-app browsers behave differently from Safari and a broken calendar there is invisible to you.
Track taps on both buttons per page. Over a term that tells you whether the rooms page or the fees page is doing the persuading.
Where this sits
Viewing booking and an online waitlist wired into the system the nursery already runs are standard on a day nursery website as we build it, and the same two-flow pattern runs through our other childcare and family websites. What each package includes is on pricing. Two buttons, two honest pages, and the voicemail stops.