What Should an Assisted Living or Home Care Website Have? What Families and Discharge Planners Actually Look For

Most families find a care provider the same way they find a dentist: a search, a few websites, and a phone call to the one that looked real. Discharge planners do a faster version of the same thing, often from a hospital computer between two other tasks.

I run a licensed Maryland assisted living facility and a home care agency, and I have built websites for other operators. This is what I have learned about what a care website has to do, what it doesn’t, and what it should cost.

The short answer: a care website has one job. Make a family who has never heard of you trust you enough to call. Seven things do that work. Everything else is decoration.

Who is actually reading your website

Three kinds of people, and they want different things:

• The adult child. Usually a daughter or son in their 50s, often searching at night after a hospital visit or a fall. Stressed, short on time, and worried about getting it wrong. They are looking for reasons to trust you and reasons to rule you out.
• The discharge planner or social worker. Needs to place someone, sometimes within 48 hours. Wants your license status, your level of care, whether you have a bed, and a phone number that gets answered.
• The caregiver looking for work. Wants to know you are a real, licensed employer before they apply.

Nobody in that list is reading your mission statement. They are scanning for the seven things below.

The seven things your site needs

1. Your phone number, everywhere, tappable

More than half of your visitors are on a phone. The number belongs at the top of every page, as a link that dials when tapped. If a visitor has to copy it or scroll to find it, some of them will try the next site instead.

2. Real photos of your actual place

Families can tell stock photos from real ones in about a second. A glossy picture of a luxury lobby on a site for an eight-bed home does damage, because it tells the family you either don’t have real photos or don’t want them to see your place. Ten well-lit phone photos of your real rooms, common area, and outside beat any stock photo. If you have none yet, launch without photos and add them within a month.

3. Your license, stated plainly

Say what you are licensed as, by whom, and your level of care. For a Maryland facility that means your Office of Health Care Quality (OHCQ) license and your approved level of care. For an agency it means your Residential Service Agency (RSA) license. Discharge planners check this first, and a family who reads “licensed by the Maryland Department of Health, Office of Health Care Quality” relaxes a little. Leave it off and the planner assumes you are not.

4. What you do and who you serve, in plain words

Say the kind of care you provide, who it is for, and what you do not do. “We serve residents who need help with bathing, dressing, medication, and meals. We do not provide skilled nursing.” That one sentence saves everyone a wasted phone call, including you. Mention Medicaid waiver acceptance, VA, or private pay if it applies, because families filter on it.

5. A name and a face

Families are deciding whether to hand a parent to a stranger. A photo of the owner or manager, a first name, and two sentences about why you do this work does more than any paragraph of adjectives. This is the single most common thing missing from small care websites, and the single cheapest fix.

6. A contact form that reaches a human the same day

Some people will not call. They will fill out a form at 11 p.m. The form should ask for name, phone, and a short message, nothing more, and it should land in an inbox someone checks every morning. A form that goes nowhere is worse than no form.

7. It loads fast and works on a phone

If the site takes more than a few seconds on a phone, or the text is too small to read without zooming, the visitor leaves. This is a build quality issue, not a design choice, and it is where cheap do-it-yourself builders often fall down.

What you can leave off

• A blog. Unless you will actually write it every month, an abandoned blog with two posts from 2024 tells families nobody is minding the store.
• A pricing page with exact numbers. Give a range or say “call for current rates.” Rates change, care levels vary, and a number on a page becomes an argument later.
• Online booking, chat widgets, pop-ups. They slow the site down and families do not use them. The phone number does the job.
• Stock photos of smiling seniors. See number two.
• More than five or six pages. Home, About, Services, Photos or Testimonials, Contact. That covers it.

The two things that live outside your website

Your website does the convincing, but two other things do the finding.

Google Business Profile. This is the listing with the map, the hours, and the reviews that shows up when someone searches your business name or “assisted living near me.” It is free, it is the most important listing you have, and most small operators have never claimed theirs. Claim it, add the same real photos, and ask three families you have served well to leave a review.

Your name on the state’s lists. Maryland publishes licensed facility and agency directories. Make sure your listing is current, because planners use those too.

What a care website should cost

There are three honest ways to get a site, and each has a real cost.

Route	Upfront	Ongoing	What you are really paying with
Build it yourself on a site builder	$0 to $200	$15 to $40 a month	Your evenings, and it often shows
Hire a general web designer	$2,000 to $6,000	$0 to $100 a month	Explaining what an RSA is, and waiting 4 to 8 weeks
A productized service for care operators	Around $1,000	$50 a month	A fixed scope, fast, with the care context built in

The monthly fee is not optional in practice. A website has to be hosted, backed up, kept secure, and updated when your staff or services change. A site nobody maintains eventually goes stale or breaks, and then you are paying for it twice.

A checklist you can run on your current site tonight

Open your site on your phone and check:

1. Is the phone number at the top, and does it dial when tapped?
2. Are the photos of your actual place?
3. Does it say what you are licensed as, and by whom?
4. Does it say in one sentence who you serve and what you do not do?
5. Is there a name and a face?
6. Does the contact form work? Send yourself a test.
7. Does it load in a few seconds and read without zooming?

Seven yeses and your site is doing its job. Fewer than five and it is probably costing you placements you never hear about.

This article is practical guidance for Maryland care operators, not legal or marketing advice. Price ranges are typical figures as of October 2026 and vary by vendor.