Most schools we meet in London are sitting on websites that were built five, ten, sometimes fifteen years ago. They work, technically. They list the right information. But they’re slow on phones, hard to update, and increasingly out of step with what parents actually expect.
When trustees or headteachers ask us about a redesign, the conversation rarely starts with “what should it look like?”. It starts with: “What do we actually get back?” Fair question. Here’s how we’d answer it.
The hidden costs of a stale school site
Before talking about returns, it’s worth being honest about what an underperforming school site is already costing you.
A site that’s hard to navigate pushes parents to phone the school office instead. Every “Where do I pick up my child?” or “When does term start?” email is admin time. Multiply that across a term, and you’re looking at meaningful staff hours spent answering questions the website should have answered in two clicks.
There’s also a reputational cost. Parents comparing two local schools open both websites on their phones. The one that loads fast, looks current, and makes the admissions process obvious tends to win the first impression. It’s rarely the deciding factor, but it shapes perception in a way that lingers.
And then there’s compliance. UK schools are covered by the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018, which means your site needs to meet WCAG 2.2 AA. An older site built before the latest guidance often doesn’t, and that’s a real liability for the governing body.
Where the ROI actually shows up
A good school website redesign pays you back across four overlapping areas:
1. Admissions and enquiries. A clearer journey to the admissions page, more prominent contact routes, and faster load times generally mean more completed forms and fewer drop-offs. For schools with a competitive intake, even a modest uplift in enquiry conversion has real value when measured across a year.
2. Parent self-service. Newsletters, term dates, lunch menus, uniform lists, calendars, consent forms. When these are easy to find and well organised, the volume of “quick question” emails to your office drops noticeably. As we cover in our piece on functional websites, conversion is about removing friction, not adding polish.
3. Staff time. Modern content management systems let non-technical staff update the site without filing a ticket with an external supplier. That alone removes a recurring cost and a recurring delay. A Year 5 teacher adding a class photo in five minutes is worth more than the saved support contract over the lifetime of the site.
4. Compliance and risk. Building the new site to WCAG 2.2 AA, with proper cookie consent and clear data handling, takes a real risk off the table. It’s not glamorous, but trustees and bursars tend to appreciate it once it’s done.
What a “good” school website actually looks like
Forget the design trends. For a school, “good” means a few specific things:
- Core information (term dates, admissions, contact, safeguarding) reachable in one tap from the homepage.
- Mobile-first layout, because the majority of parent traffic is now on phones.
- Structured content for the audiences you actually serve: prospective parents, current parents, students and staff.
- An accessible CMS that the office manager can update without ringing a developer.
- Built-in compliance: accessible by default, GDPR-friendly forms, no tracking scripts without consent.
If you’d like a wider lens on this, our piece on user-friendly website layouts walks through the underlying principles in more detail.
How to estimate the ROI before you spend
A rough but honest framework:
- Estimate the monthly “avoidable” admin hours tied to website queries. Multiply by the staff cost per hour.
- Estimate the value of each successful admissions enquiry against your intake numbers.
- Add the avoided accessibility and compliance risk (harder to price, but real).
- Subtract the realistic lifetime cost of the new site (build plus a few years of light upkeep and hosting).
If the first three add up to more than the fourth, the case is straightforward. Most schools we work with find it does, often within the first year of going live.
Common pitfalls to avoid
- Treating the project as a design exercise rather than a service design exercise. The look matters less than the structure.
- Letting one enthusiastic governor steer the information architecture on their own. Test it with real parents before sign-off.
- Choosing a platform on price alone. Migration costs later often dwarf the upfront saving.
- Skipping staff training. A site nobody can confidently update drifts back into “stale” within months.
So, is it worth it?
For most schools we speak to, yes, and the case usually strengthens the longer an outdated site has been left untouched. The trick is to start from the numbers and the user problems, not from a mood board.
If you’re weighing up a redesign for your school, we’d love to talk. Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we’ll look at your current site, talk through what a realistic ROI case looks like for your specific situation, and give you an honest view of whether now is the right time. Book your discovery call here.