Who the site is for
Picture the person reading your site. It is rarely the future resident. It is usually a daughter in her fifties, on her phone at 10:40 p.m. after a call from the hospital, with three community sites open in three tabs.
That is who you design for. Pew Research Center’s 2026 survey found that 91% of U.S. adults own a smartphone, and so do 79% of adults 65 and older (Pew Research Center). So the parent may be reading too, with the text size turned up. Both want the same thing: a clear answer and an easy next step.
Build the phone version first. Google now crawls sites that work on mobile primarily with its mobile crawler (Google Search Central), so the phone version is also the one search engines judge.
The market raises the stakes. NIC MAP put assisted living occupancy at 89.1% in the third quarter of 2026 (NIC). Full buildings mean a family tours the two or three communities that answered her questions tonight.
The four questions a family needs answered in 30 seconds
Open your homepage on a phone and start a timer. Can a stranger answer these in 30 seconds?
- What care do you provide, and for whom?
- What does it cost, roughly?
- What does a day look like here?
- How do I visit, and who do I talk to?
Care: say it in the first screen
The first screen should carry the care type, the town and a tour button. “Assisted living in Littleton, Colorado. Book a tour.” That line does more work than any slogan. Offer more than one level of care? Name each and link it to its own page.
Cost: say something
Most communities hide pricing, and families notice. A Place for Mom’s 2026 cost report put the national median for assisted living at $5,419 a month, and the company said affordability is the number one concern it hears from families (Senior Housing News). A family that cannot find a number on your site assumes the worst, or moves on to a competitor who gave them one. You do not have to publish a rate card. A starting rate, a range, or one plain sentence about what is included beats silence.
A day: show it
Families want to know whether Mom will be bored or ignored. A weekly activity calendar, a sample menu and a few lines about a typical morning answer that better than a page of amenities.
Visit: make it one tap
A tappable phone number on every screen and a tour button that opens a calendar. The next section covers it, because it is where most sites fall down.
The pages a senior living website needs
The page set we build for a single-location community. Groups repeat the care and contact pages for each building.
| Page | Its job | What goes on it |
|---|
| Home | Answer the four questions and route people | Care types, town, a photo of your actual building, tour button, phone number, a few reviews |
| One page per care type | Rank for “assisted living [town]” and answer care questions | Who it is for, what help is included, staffing, a day in the life, photos of that wing, a pricing note, tour button |
| Pricing or pricing range | Keep the family on your site when they ask about cost | Starting rates or ranges, what is included, how care fee tiers work, who to call |
| Photos and virtual tour | Let the family walk the building at night | Real photos by room type, dining room, common areas, a short video walk-through |
| Team | Prove real people run the place | Director and nursing lead, with photos and names |
| FAQ | Answer what your phone team hears daily | Admissions, medications, pets, visiting hours, what happens when needs change |
| Contact and tour | Turn a visitor into a booked tour | Phone, address, map, calendar booking, short form, what happens after submit |
One page that mentions every service you offer will rank for none of them. The page for assisted living should read as if it were the only page on the site. Google’s SEO starter guide asks for a title that is “unique to the page, clear and concise” and for headings that help readers find their way (Google Search Central). One clear H1 per page, with the care type and the town in it, is the practical version of that.
The tour-booking path
Every page exists to produce one of two things: a phone call or a booked tour. The path to those outcomes is the most important design work on the site, and usually the least considered.
- Phone number on every screen. On a phone, a sticky bar with “Call” and “Book a tour”. On desktop, the number in the header.
- A calendar, not a request form that lands in an inbox. Let the family pick a day and a time, synced to the calendar of whoever gives tours. A family that books a slot at 11 p.m. shows up far more often than one promised a callback.
- A short form for people not ready to book. Name, phone, who the care is for, a free-text box. Five fields, not fifteen.
- A real confirmation. After submit, say what happens next, name the person who will call, and send a text. Most sites show “Thanks!” and stop.
- A human on the other end. The best website in the state loses to voicemail. If nobody answers within minutes, the number and the form are half built.
In the one community result we have written up publicly, the new website and the phone process went live together. The site was built around the questions families ask first, in the order they ask them, and the team on the phone was trained to listen before selling. Within three months of signing, that community added $21,000 a month in move-in revenue, with three move-ins in a single month (case study). The site alone did not do that. The site plus the person on the phone did, which is why our lead handling team answers the calls a site produces.
Real photos beat stock, every time
Families can smell stock photography. The silver-haired couple laughing over a salad is on a thousand sites, and when a daughter sees it on yours, she assumes you are hiding something.
Book a photographer for a half day. The shot list we hand them:
- The front entrance in daylight, so the family recognizes it when they arrive.
- A furnished studio and a one-bedroom, shot from the doorway.
- The dining room with a meal on the table.
- Two or three staff portraits, with names.
- A hallway. Families wonder about hallways.
Get written releases from anyone who appears. Compress the images, and give each one an alt attribute that says what is in it. Google describes alt text as “a short, but descriptive piece of text” explaining the image (Google Search Central), and WCAG requires a text alternative for all non-text content (W3C). A daughter using a screen reader is a real visitor. So is the search engine indexing your photos.
A two-minute video walk-through, filmed on a phone by someone who knows the building, beats a polished drone shot. Start at the front door, end in a resident room.
Readable for a 78-year-old, usable for everyone
Most senior living sites are designed by people in their thirties on sharp monitors. The parent reading one may be 78 with cataracts. What we do, and what WCAG 2.2, the W3C’s accessibility standard, asks for:
- Body text at 18px or larger, in dark ink. Light grey on white is the most common failure we see. WCAG 2.2 requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text (W3C). The pale grey most templates ship with does not pass.
- Text that scales. WCAG asks that text can be resized to 200% without losing content or function. Test with the phone’s text size turned all the way up.
- Big tap targets. WCAG 2.2’s target size criterion asks for at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels (W3C). We go larger on anything that matters: the call button on a phone should be at least 48 pixels tall.
- Buttons that look like buttons. A solid fill, a verb on the label, and nothing that depends on a hover state. Phones do not hover.
- Keyboard and screen-reader basics. Alt text on every image, a visible label on every field, a page you can tab through in order, and color never the only thing carrying meaning.
- No carousels, no autoplay sound. A carousel hides your best content behind a click nobody makes.
None of this is decoration. Accessible sites convert better because the person reading them can read them.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
A slow site on weak hospital Wi-Fi is a closed door. Google measures page experience with three Core Web Vitals and publishes a “good” threshold for each (web.dev):
| Metric | What it measures | Good |
|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | How long until the main content is on screen | 2.5 seconds or less |
| Interaction to Next Paint (INP) | How quickly the page responds to a tap | 200 milliseconds or less |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | How much the layout jumps around while loading | 0.1 or less |
Google assesses these at the 75th percentile of real visits, so the goal is a site that is fast for most people, not one that passes a lab test on your office connection. The usual causes of a slow senior living site: uncompressed photos, a page builder loading forty scripts, a chat widget, three tracking tags and a hero video. Fix the photos first. Then remove everything that does not help a family call you.
Check your site in PageSpeed Insights, on the mobile tab, and look at the care-type pages rather than the homepage. If those are not green, start there.
Local SEO and AI search, built in from the start
A website nobody finds is a brochure. The choices that help Google and AI assistants understand your community are cheap to build in and expensive to retrofit.
- One H1 per page, with the care type and the town. “Assisted living in Castle Rock, CO”, not “Welcome”.
- Town names in plain text. The towns you serve, the hospitals you take discharges from, the neighborhoods families drive in from. AI assistants pull these for “assisted living near Parker”.
- LocalBusiness structured data. Google’s LocalBusiness markup carries your name, address, phone, hours and map coordinates (Google Search Central), and helps Google connect your site to your listing.
- A link to and from your Google Business Profile. The profile’s website field should point to the matching location page, and the name, address and phone must match character for character. Our Google Business Profile service exists largely because this is where listings go wrong.
- Answers written as answers. AI assistants quote pages that state a fact plainly. “Starting rates are $4,800 a month and include three meals a day” is quotable. “Contact us to learn about our flexible pricing options” is not.
- FAQ sections on the page, for readers. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026 (Google Search Central), so do not add FAQ markup hoping for a snippet. Keep the questions on the page anyway. Families read them, and AI assistants do too.
Most design agencies skip this part. It is where our SEO and AI search work starts, and the senior living marketing guide covers the off-site work that follows.
What to measure
Pageviews say nothing about move-ins. Measure the three things a site is for, by page.
| Measure | How | What it tells you |
|---|
| Calls | Tracking numbers that swap by source, with recording | Which pages make the phone ring, and whether anyone answers |
| Form fills | Submissions tagged with page and source | Which pages convert and which leak |
| Tour bookings | Calendar bookings tracked as conversions | The number that predicts move-ins |
Then connect bookings to tours that happened and move-ins that followed. That is the monthly report an owner should see, and what our analytics service produces: leads, tours and cost per move-in, by source.
A senior living website design checklist
| Item | Why it matters |
|---|
| Care type and town in the first screen | Answers the first question before the scroll |
| Phone number and tour button on every screen | The two outcomes the site exists for |
| Calendar booking, with a text confirmation | Booked slots get kept |
| Contact form with five fields or fewer | Every extra field costs submissions |
| A page for each care type, with one H1 each | Lets each care type rank on its own |
| A pricing or pricing-range page | Keeps the family on your site when they ask about cost |
| Real photos of rooms, dining, staff and the entrance, with alt text | Trust |
| Body text 18px or larger, contrast at least 4.5:1 | The parent can read it |
| Core Web Vitals green on mobile for the care-type pages | Speed where it counts |
| LocalBusiness structured data matching your Google Business Profile | Ties the site to the listing families see first |
| Call, form and booking tracking in place | So you know which pages produce tours |
| A person who answers within minutes | The site is only half the job |
Common mistakes
- Leading with a slogan instead of the care type and the town.
- Hiding pricing entirely.
- A “request information” form with twelve required fields.
- Stock photos of people who do not live or work there.
- Light grey text, small type, and buttons with no fill.
- Forms that email a shared inbox nobody checks on weekends.
- Reporting traffic instead of calls, forms and tours.
What it costs, how long it takes, and what to do next
Anyone who quotes a senior living website price without seeing your community is guessing. What sets the number:
What drives the cost
- Locations and care types. Each needs its own pages, photos and copy.
- Photography and video. A half-day shoot per building. The line item communities try to skip, and the one that moves tours.
- Copywriting. Someone has to write the care pages, the pricing page and the FAQ in plain language. Templates do not include it.
- Integrations. Calendar booking, call tracking, your CRM.
- Upkeep. Photos, rates and staff change. A site nobody updates is lying within a year.
What drives the timeline
The build is rarely the long pole. Gathering photos, rates, staff bios and sign-offs is. A community with those ready can be live in a few weeks. One without can take months, waiting on the slowest approval. Decide who owns the content on day one.
How Care Growth does it
We build senior living websites as part of a full system: site, search, Google Business Profile, ads, lead handling and reporting, usually live within the first 30 days. We charge per move-in rather than per project, and if a resident placed through us moves out within 30 days, we credit the fee back. Care Growth is headquartered in Denver and works with assisted living and senior living communities nationwide.
Want a second opinion on your site? Claim a free growth audit. We open it on a phone, run the 30-second test, time how long it takes to reach a person, and tell you what to fix first.
Related: Websites · SEO & AI search · Lead handling · Senior living marketing guide
