A senior living website has one commercial job: turning a family’s research into a tour. The design, the photography and the platform all serve that job. Sites that do it well share a short list of features: care-level pages that answer real questions, floor plans detailed enough to shortlist from, a clear position on pricing, tour booking that works on a phone, accessibility built in from the start, fast pages, and tracking that shows which of it is working.
This guide is for the people commissioning a new site or a rebuild, not the people coding it.
Start with who is reading
Two readers matter. The first is the adult child, usually on a phone, short of time, sometimes in the middle of a crisis. The second is the prospective resident, who is more likely to be comparing options calmly over months, and may be reading with enlarged text, a screen reader, or less steady hands.
A site built for both is clear, calm and easy to operate. A site built to win a design award is often none of those.
Before any design work starts, ask your sales counsellors for the twenty questions families ask most on tours. That list is the content brief. It is also the best test of the finished site: can a family find each answer within two taps?
The pages every community needs
Structure the site around care levels and communities, not around the organization chart.
A page per care level, per community. Independent living, assisted living, memory care and respite each need their own page, covering what is included, how care is assessed, what happens when needs change, and how to visit. These pages carry both search and conversion, and what you put on a community page decides whether AI search cites it.
Floor plans. Each plan with square footage, a drawn layout, what is included, which care levels it is offered under, and availability if you can keep that accurate. Families use floor plans to shortlist. Show the plans you find hardest to fill, and show them well, rather than hiding them.
Pricing. See the next section.
Photography and video. Real residents (with signed releases), real staff, the actual apartments and the actual dining room. A virtual tour helps families who live far away shortlist before they travel. Stock photography undoes trust the moment a family visits in person.
Staff and leadership. Names, roles and tenure. Families are choosing people as much as a building.
A way to book a tour on every page, not only on the contact page.
Keep navigation short and labelled in plain words: “Memory Care”, not a branded neighbourhood name. Add breadcrumbs, and a search box on larger multi-community sites.
Take a position on pricing
Families want to know whether they can afford you before they give up an afternoon for a tour. Operators worry that a published number will be compared out of context, or will put off families who would qualify for a different level of care. Both concerns are fair.
Our view is that you should publish something. The best option is a base monthly rate for each care level, dated, with a plain explanation of what it includes and how care costs are assessed on top.
If you will not publish numbers, publish the structure: base rent, care level tiers, what triggers a change between tiers, and any one-time fees. A page that says only “contact us for pricing” loses the families who just wanted a range. It also gives answer engines nothing to quote when someone asks what care costs in your town.
Make booking a tour effortless
The tour button is the most important element on the site. Put it in the header on every page and at the end of every care-level page. Offer three routes:
- A short form.
- A tracked phone number that a person answers.
- Where possible, self-scheduling into real calendar slots.
Keep the form to four fields: name, phone or email, care type, and what they want (a tour, a call, pricing). Budget and timeline belong on the call. The confirmation should say who will be in touch and when, and your process should make that true, because the first community to respond often gets the tour. Landing pages for paid traffic follow the same rules, applied more strictly.
A chatbot can catch the family who arrives at 11pm, provided it books tours, answers the cost question honestly, and never hides the phone number. Whether a chatbot earns its place on your site depends on how it is set up.
Avoid pop-ups over content, auto-advancing carousels, and anything that moves while someone is reaching for a button.
Accessibility: build to WCAG 2.2 AA
WCAG 2.2, published by the W3C in 2023, is the current version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and Level AA is the practical target. For this audience, accessibility decides whether prospective residents can use the site at all. These are the AA criteria that matter most on a senior living site:
| Area | WCAG 2.2 AA requirement |
|---|---|
| Text contrast | At least 4.5:1 for body text, 3:1 for large text |
| Resizing | Text can be enlarged to 200% without losing content or function |
| Reflow | Pages work at 320 CSS pixels wide without scrolling sideways |
| Colour | Information is never conveyed by color alone |
| Tap targets | At least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, or enough space around them (new in 2.2) |
| Keyboard | Everything works by keyboard, and the focus indicator is visible and not hidden by sticky headers (partly new in 2.2) |
| Forms | Visible labels, clear error messages, and no asking for the same information twice (the last is new in 2.2) |
| Media | Captions on video, text alternatives for meaningful images |
Go beyond the minimum where it costs little. We recommend body text of at least 18 pixels and main buttons much larger than the 24-pixel floor.
Third-party widgets (chat, booking and review feeds) count as part of your site, so test them too. Automated checkers catch only part of the problem. Before launch, do a keyboard-only pass and a screen reader pass. In our view, accessibility overlay plugins are no substitute for fixing the underlying code.
Speed: Google’s Core Web Vitals
Google publishes three thresholds for a good page experience, assessed at the 75th percentile of page loads:
| Metric | What it measures | Good | Poor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | When the main content appears | 2.5 seconds or less | Over 4 seconds |
| Interaction to Next Paint (INP) | How fast the page responds to a tap | 200 milliseconds or less | Over 500 milliseconds |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | How much the page jumps while loading | 0.1 or less | Over 0.25 |
Test on a phone over a mobile connection, not on the office desktop. The usual failures on senior living sites are autoplaying hero video, galleries that load every photo at once, and a pile of third-party scripts. The page speed numbers that cost you tours are covered in detail, fixes included.
Track what matters
A site you cannot measure is a site you cannot improve. Set up:
- GA4 key events for tour requests, calls, form submissions and pricing requests.
- Call tracking with dynamic number insertion, so phone inquiries are attributed to the channel that produced them. Many families would rather call than fill in a form, which is why call tracking matters so much in senior living.
- Forms that feed the CRM directly, with source and campaign captured in hidden fields.
- A consent banner where the law requires one.
Keep care and health details out of analytics and ad platforms. If your organization is a HIPAA covered entity, review exactly what your tracking pixels send.
Then report the numbers that follow the money: tours by source, the share of form fills that become tours, time to first response, and move-ins by source. Bounce rate and time on site tell you very little about any of those.
Platform, build and launch
Choose a platform your team can update without a developer. Out-of-date availability, rates or events do more damage than leaving them off. Name the person responsible for hosting, security updates and backups.
Protect what the old site earned. On a rebuild, keep URLs where you can. Set up a 301 redirect for every URL that changes, carry over titles and meta descriptions, resubmit the XML sitemap, and watch Search Console for several weeks after launch.
Test like a family would. Use real phones with enlarged text. Submit every form end to end and confirm the inquiry lands in the CRM and reaches a person.
A good senior living website is rarely the most striking one in the market. It is the one where a family finds the answer, trusts it, and books the visit.
Related from Inertia