What parents look for on a school website
Parents shortlist schools on their phones, late at night. What your school’s site has to answer first, how it should work on a phone and how to make booking a visit easy.
November 12, 2026Last updated November 12, 2026
In 2024, INEGI, Mexico’s national statistics institute, counted 100.2 million internet users in the country, and 97.2% of them went online with a smartphone. Among them are the parents who, once the kids are asleep, open three tabs for three schools and start comparing.
They do it in bed, with the brightness turned all the way down, and the school that doesn’t load or doesn’t answer their questions is off the list before midnight. The families and schools in this article are made up. The tabs open at eleven at night, not so much.
What they look for first is rarely on the homepage
Many school homepages open with the mission, the values and a photo of the building. At that hour, parents are looking for something else: which grades you have, the schedule, whether there’s extended care, how far away you are, when enrollment opens. Put that at the top, in plain words. The mission can live one page further in.
Think of Daniela and Jorge, who just moved and have a son starting first grade. She looks at schools while he does the dishes. Her real question is very specific: is there a school less than twenty minutes away with hours until four, because they both work. The school that answers that on the first screen earns a visit. The others earn a “I’ll look later,” which almost always means never.
Here’s a simple test. Ask someone who doesn’t know your school to open the site on their phone and tell you, within a minute, which grades you offer and what time the kids get out. If they can’t, you know what goes at the top.
The site that matters is the one on the phone
For Google, the phone version is the main one. Its documentation says it uses the mobile version of a site’s content for indexing and ranking, and it recommends that the mobile site have the same content as the desktop site. If the enrollment information only looks right on the computer in the principal’s office, for many families it barely exists.
Then there’s the brightness turned down. Light gray text on a white background looks elegant on the designer’s big screen and disappears in bed at eleven. The W3C’s accessibility guidelines ask for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for regular text, with people with low vision in mind. Meeting it also helps any tired parent with a dimmed screen.
And there’s the weight. Fifteen-page PDFs with the enrollment circular, uncompressed photos and videos that start playing on their own all make the page slow. On a crowded home connection, every second of waiting is an invitation to switch tabs. We wrote more about this in how your website looks on a phone.
Photos of an ordinary Tuesday
A parent wants to picture their daughter there on any given Tuesday: the classroom, the playground, lunchtime, pickup. Stock photos of smiling children who aren’t your students are easy to spot, and they cost you trust. A few real photos, well taken and with families’ permission, do more than any sentence.
You don’t need a commercial shoot. One morning with someone who knows how to take photos and respects the rhythm of the classroom is usually enough for a year. Look for ordinary moments: a teacher crouched down to a child’s height, a table covered in paint, the line at pickup with its colorful backpacks.
Photos of special events help too, but they can’t be the only ones. If the whole site is the spring festival and graduation, families wonder what happens the rest of the year.
Show who will be looking after their kids
After the schedule and the location, what weighs most is the people. A family is about to leave their child for eight hours a day with people they don’t know yet. Every clue helps.
A team page, with a photo and one line from each teacher, does a lot. So does a short note from the principal, written in the first person and without brochure phrases, about what an ordinary day at the school is like. If someone on your team has been there fifteen years, say so: that kind of steadiness reassures more than any adjective.
If a family has questions about the school’s formal matters, the best move is to invite them to talk directly with the principal or the school office. The site can say clearly who to contact and how.
Booking a visit should take a minute
Almost no family enrolls without seeing the school. If booking a visit means calling during office hours, the visit gets postponed, and sometimes it never happens. Jorge, the dad from before, works nine to six and can’t make personal calls at one in the afternoon.
A button to pick a day and time, or a short form that someone actually answers the next day, keeps the decision alive. The form should ask for very little: name, phone or email, the grade they’re looking at and when they’d like to come. Everything else can be asked during the visit.
Once the visit is confirmed, send a reminder the day before with the address and which gate to use. It seems obvious until a family circles the block three times looking for the visitors’ entrance, with a child in the back seat asking if they’re there yet.
The most important part happens after someone hits send. Someone has to read it and reply quickly, ideally with a concrete date. If you want to check what happens to your form messages today, who reads your website forms may help.
The link will end up in the parents’ group chat
When a family is torn between two schools, they send the link to their WhatsApp group to ask for opinions. In 2024, according to the same INEGI survey, 90.6% of smartphone users used instant messaging apps. There, your site opens on twenty more phones, many belonging to people who aren’t even looking for a school. If it looks good and makes sense on that small screen, every forward works for you.
Before anyone opens it, the chat shows a little card with a title and an image. Your site decides what goes on that card, and it can be set for each page. A clear photo of the playground and a title like “Visits for next school year” work much better than a cropped logo and the word “Home.”
It also helps when each topic has its own page. If enrollment information lives on a page with its own link, the family can send exactly that, instead of the homepage and a “scroll all the way down.”
Common mistakes on school websites
There are mistakes we see again and again, at large schools and small ones. The good news is that almost all of them can be fixed without rebuilding the site:
- A six-image carousel on the homepage that moves too fast to read anything.
- Enrollment information in a heavy PDF that doesn’t open well on a phone.
- A menu with thirty options where “Admissions” sits in position twenty-two.
- A news section whose latest post is three school years old.
- A contact email nobody has checked since the person who set it up left.
The news one seems minor, but it says a lot. A family that sees the last post from three years ago wonders, fairly, whether anyone is keeping an eye on everything else.
What to ask whoever builds your site
If you’re about to redo the site or hire an agency, these questions help you know whether it will work for families. Ask them before you look at any designs:
- How does the homepage look on a mid-range phone with the brightness down?
- Who on our team will be able to change dates, photos and notices without asking for help?
- What happens to form submissions, which inbox do they go to and who answers them?
- How does the link look when someone shares it on WhatsApp?
- Are the domain and the accounts in the school’s name?
If you’d like us to look at your school’s site the way a family would at 11 p.m., phone in hand and brightness all the way down, book a 30-minute call.
