Private school marketing and admissions teams are under constant pressure. You’re competing against neighboring schools, juggling tight budgets, managing stakeholders who don’t always “get it,” and somehow still expected to deliver a website that converts casual browsers into prospective families.
Your website (or, in today's world, AI's interpretation of your online presence) is your school’s front door, your admissions team’s hardest-working member, and your brand’s biggest storytelling platform. If it doesn’t capture attention, build trust, and guide families seamlessly towards enrollment, it’s not doing its job.
So what makes a good school website? Let’s break down the best practices for a school website, step by step, so you can build (or rebuild) a site that’s both beautiful and effective. Along the way, we’ll show you how schools are harnessing UBIQ’s innovation, like our unique branching feature or flexible editing software, all backed by a complimentary on-board team, to stay one step ahead.
In this blog:
- Why is User Experience Important?
- How to Use Storytelling Effectively
- Building an Effortless User Experience
- Making a Great First Impression
- Website Branching for Multi-Campus Schools
- Navigation Best Practices
- Content that Converts
- The Power of Social Proof
- Accessibility and Compliance
- SEO at the Speed of Search
- Analytics and Continuous Improvement
- Final Thoughts
- Frequently Asked Questions
Why is User Experience Important for School Websites?
Having a great user experience (UX) is the difference between a parent staying engaged with your site or closing the tab.
When a prospective family lands on your website, they’re already juggling busy schedules, competing options, and a lot of emotional weight around choosing the “right” school. If your site is clunky, confusing, or slow, you’ve just handed them a reason to look elsewhere.
Here’s why UX should be your top priority:
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First impressions shape trust. Parents equate a smooth digital experience with how well your school is run. If the website feels polished, professional, and easy to use, they’ll assume the same about your classrooms and campus.
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Reduced friction = more conversions. Think of your website like a guided tour of your school and what you have to offer. With this in mind, a good school website user interface guides visitors directly to the next step, whether that’s booking a tour, requesting info, or starting an application.
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Mobile is everything. Over 70% of parents now explore school options on their phones. If your design isn’t responsive and thumb-friendly, you’ll frustrate them before you ever get a chance to wow them. Consider thumb stretch zones and optimize your website so it is mobile-first.
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Accessibility builds inclusion. A user-friendly site that considers all audiences (parents with visual impairments, those who speak English as a second language, or simply families who aren’t tech-savvy) sends a powerful message: we thought about you. Plus, ensuring your website is skimmable, features Alt Text and a clear heirarchy structure will do wonders for your school's AI rankings.
At UBIQ, we’ve built our school website design philosophy around empathy. While our UX approach thinks carefully about navigation, it’s about anticipating parent questions alongside each school's unique goals, easing their stress, and nudging them toward action in the most intuitive way possible. For schools looking to truly resonate with their unique audience and drive high-quality conversions, we believe a templated solution isn't sufficient.
In the end, the smoother the experience online, the more likely a family is to picture themselves offline—walking your campus, meeting your teachers, and enrolling their child.
How Storytelling can Become the Framework for an Outstanding School Website
Your school has something unique to offer, and discovering and harnessing what this offer is will propel your website's narrative forward exponentially. Parents don’t fall in love with “academic excellence” or “state-of-the-art facilities.” They fall in love with stories. Thinking about and strategizing how you are going to communicate this story is the number one step you should take before taking action on updating your website.
When crafting your school website build, focus on the narrative that makes your school different. Here's a few key questions to ask:
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What does a “day in the life” look like for a student?
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How do you balance tradition with innovation?
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What’s the emotional moment families should feel when they land on your homepage?
Build your homepage around a hero story. Use authentic photography and a bold, clear headline that ties directly to your value proposition.
The best school websites push schools to integrate storytelling into the very architecture of their school website design—not just bury it in the “About Us” page. In action, that means weaving parent and student voices into navigation, creating unique features for schools that speak to brand and story, branching pathways, and even CTAs.
How to Make a User's Experience Feel Effortless
As inspiring as they can be, the best school websites aren't built from flashy design trends. A great school website should actively reduce friction for target audiences: whether that's new families for enhanced enrolment, new recruits for the opening of your state-of-the-art STEM facility, or increasing the customer lifetime value of your long-term fundraising donors.
Take a step back from your website and ask:
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Is the school website navigation intuitive, even for a first-time visitor?
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Are the most important actions (book a tour, apply, request info) always one click away?
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Does your content hierarchy guide visitors logically from curiosity → consideration → conversion?
What is responsive website design?
Responsive design means your site automatically adapts to different screen sizes, from desktop to mobile. Given that 70%+ of school searches start on mobile, ensuring your website looks and feels great on mobile is essential to surviving the competitive landscape of search (we'll touch on that in more detail later).
Making a Great First Impression on your Website
A school website user interface should be a true reflection your brand personality, and there's several ways of achieving this beyond unique design features:
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Typography: Font types matched to your school's identity. For example, you may opt for a serif font if you're a more traditional school, or a sharp sans serif if you're an innovative institution. Ensure you have clear brand guidelines before building a new website to ensure that your vision is well aligned across all aspects of your school's marketing and communications.
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Color: A palette that feels authentic to your school, outlined in your brand guidelines. If your color palette is limited, you can add gradient colours to add depth and reduce design limitations.
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Photography: Your school's photography style should speak to who you are as a brand, not a copy-and-paste of the school photography standard. Consider how you can visually communicate your message, offer, and facilities by becoming more creative with your image formatting or style.
When parents land on your website, they are subconsciously asking: Can I see my child here? Every design choice should help them say yes. The same goes for donors, professionals, and alumni.
Building Multiple Experiences for Multiple Campuses
Here’s where UBIQ really sets you apart. Our branching tool has proven incredibly useful for international schools and multi-campus independent schools around the world.
What is website branching?
Branching allows schools to run multiple websites under one CMS. That means:
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One platform, but different experiences for international families, boarding, alumni, or even feeder schools.
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Seamless brand consistency while tailoring content to specific audiences.
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No messy bolt-ons or third-party data silos. Instead, one dashboard with all your conversion information in one place.
Instead of opting for personalized pages packages from other providers, UBIQ's clients are opting for UBIQ's integrated branching which runs alongside the main site, so you capture the entire customer journey. With this, you can easily build microsites, adaptive pages for different segments, or multiple websites for different campuses, managed by one central dashboard. In action, schools can keep all prospects within the same ecosystem, enabling teams to build trust and measure engagement.
Navigation Best Practices
Having a great website navigation is the make or break between users being able to find what they are looking for and getting lost in the abyss of your school's website.
The best school websites:
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Keep menus short (5–7 main items).
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Use plain language (“Admissions” not “Join Our Journey”).
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Group logically (e.g., Academics, Arts, Athletics, not scattered pages).
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Always keep CTAs visible.
Test your navigation with a parent or user who’s never seen the site. If they can’t find the admissions page in under 10 seconds, fix it. You might be discouraging people from hitting inquire or apply without even knowing it. Simplifying your navigation and ensuring your parent/child page relationships are relevant and logical will only enhance your user's digital experience.
How to Convert Users with Great Content
Being strategic with your content goes beyond social media platforms. By saturating your website with high-quality, relevant content, you are aiding your organic search rankings (the kind of passive traffic you don't need to work for) and getting your school's message out there. Great content should:
- Comprise of high-quality images that are relevant to the context written on the page. Consider creating a bank of images using a professional photography, and diversifying your video content by creating different scenes and splicing up content so that you can re-use it time and time again.
- Serve indisputable value for users, so that they don't need to leave the page (and potentially go to your competitor) to find it. This could include helpful guides to apply, or information on the benefits of a holistic education like yours, for example.
- Educate and nurture your user, considering the whole customer journey rather than just the final (and most exciting) stage. We know how enticing those inquiries are, but focusing on the whole journey will encourage users to follow that user journey you've worked so hard to achieve in Step 1.
Focus on:
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Admissions Journey Pages: Tour, Apply, Tuition, FAQs.
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Parent Priorities: Safety, academic results, community feel.
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Calls to Action: Prominent, clear, repeated across pages.
Practical tip: Every page should answer two questions:
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What are parents asking? (You can directly answer these questions for SEO and GEO quick wins!)
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What action do you want them to take?
The Power of Social Proof
Prospects love social proof. It alleviates the element of risk, allows them to see themselves in your school through the eyes of someone else, and establishes you as a trustworthy source.
In short, parents trust other parents. Throughout this article, we've spoken a lot about how to tell parents about your outstanding facilities, great academic results, and well-rounded curriculum offer. Now, how about showing them? Within your internal stakeholder group, you will likely have a heap of advocates. Consider these future marketers for your school. Within your marketing strategy, consider how you will leverage this group.
Best social proof practices for a school website include:
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Highlighting parent testimonials (video if possible) and enabling parents to share their views. Choose a diverse range of families with different motivations, interests, and outcomes. This will ensure you have the greatest opportunity for prospective families to resonate with your school's offer.
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Featuring alumni success stories. Sharing the successful outcomes of your school's education enables prospects to envision what an education at your school may turn into, whether that's a college scholarship or a high-earning career path for their child. Like parent testimonials, it is key to diversify here.
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Publishing outcome-driven case studies (college placements, scholarships, unique pathways). Maximize your SEO impact by publishing case studies on your school's news feed. Not only will this enable your school to celebrate the success of your alumni, but also enhance the community and reach more people online.
Accessibility and Compliance
Accessibility is all about inclusivity. The best accessible sites:
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Alt text on all images.
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High-contrast text.
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Keyboard navigability.
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Clear language (avoid jargon).
This isn’t optional. Families with accessibility needs expect to be considered from the start.
Parents aren’t just evaluating your academics, they’re also evaluating how much they can trust you with their family’s information. That’s why data compliance and transparent cookie policies are now a critical part of school website best practices.
Why data compliance matters
Private schools collect a lot of sensitive information: inquiry forms, application data, donation details. If families don’t feel confident their data is safe, they may hesitate to engage–or worse–look elsewhere.
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GDPR and beyond: If you’re in Europe (or working with EU families), you must comply with GDPR. For US schools, regulations like COPPA (for children’s data) or state-level privacy laws (e.g., California’s CCPA) may apply. International schools need to be mindful of regional rules, too.
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First-party data focus: UBIQ is built around first-party data. That means data is collected and stored responsibly, directly through your website, without relying on third-party cookies that are increasingly restricted or blocked.
Best practices for cookie policies
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Be clear, not confusing. Families should know what you’re tracking, why, and how it benefits them (e.g., tailoring their journey).
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Consent banners. Add a simple, prominent cookie consent pop-up that gives users control. Don’t bury it in the footer.
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Granular options. Let visitors accept only essential cookies if they prefer, or opt in to enhanced tracking for a personalized experience.
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Regular review. Update your cookie policy annually to reflect changes in regulation and technology.
Compliance shouldn’t be a roadblock. Our school website design ensures cookie policies and data handling are not only legally sound but also parent-friendly. That way, you build confidence in every digital interaction.
Because when families trust you with their data, they’re more likely to trust you with their child’s education.
Speed, SEO and Search for Independent Schools
If anything slows parents down, they will leave. Your website should operate at the speed of light, be crawlable by search engines, with key pages indexed, too. Key words should be clear and relevant to your target audience and geo-targetting.
Best practices for school website user experience include:
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Fast load times (under 3 seconds).
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Strong SEO structure (clear headings, keyword strategy).
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Local search optimization (“private school near me” is still king).
UBIQ ensures school website design is technically sound, with speed tests, schema markup, and SEO baked in. No bolt-ons required.
Analytics, Dashboards and Continuous Improvement
A school website isn’t a “launch it and forget it” project. The best school marketing teams emphasize ongoing improvement and strategically plan this into their workload throughout their website contract. Without this, sites become outdated and painful to update years later. Your first impression should always accurately reflect the current offer of your school, so be sure to make a commitment to updating context as it evolves.
Best analytics practices:
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Monitor bounce rates, page visits, and conversion funnels.
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Track which personas engage with which content.
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Use A/B testing on CTAs and headlines.
how to
Build a Website
What makes a good school website? It’s a mix of:
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Storytelling that feels authentic.
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A user experience that’s effortless.
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Branding that sparks emotion.
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Content that drives conversion.
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Technology (like branching and dashboards) that keeps you ahead.
Most importantly, it’s about building trust at every digital touchpoint. Parents shouldn’t just browse your site. They should feel like they’ve already stepped inside your community.
A school website build is never just a technical project. It’s the foundational tactic for your admissions and marketing strategy. By following these school website best practices, you can create a site that not only looks good but works hard.
Frequently Asked Questions
| What makes a good school website? |
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| A good school website is clear, fast, and built around storytelling that reflects your school’s unique brand. It should make it effortless for parents to find key information, connect emotionally, and take the next step (like booking a tour or starting an application). |
| What are best practices for a school website? |
| The core school website best practices include: mobile-first design, simple navigation, strong calls-to-action, authentic photography, and accessibility compliance. Continuous improvement through analytics and A/B testing ensures your site stays relevant. |
| What is responsive design, and why does it matter for schools? |
| Responsive design means your website adapts seamlessly to any device—desktop, tablet, or mobile. Since most prospective parents now browse on their phones, responsive design ensures your content looks professional and easy to use everywhere. |
| What are best practices for school website navigation? |
| Keep menus short (5–7 items), use plain language, and group content logically. Always make admissions-related calls-to-action—like “Book a Tour” or “Apply Now”—easy to find on every page. |
| How important is user experience (UX) on a school website? |
| It’s critical. Families equate a smooth digital journey with the quality of your school. A strong school website user experience builds trust, reduces stress, and increases conversions. Poor UX, on the other hand, creates frustration and drop-offs. |
| How can a school website tell a better story? |
| Use authentic voices from students, parents, and alumni. Showcase “day in the life” content, videos, and testimonials. Storytelling should be embedded in your school website design—not just hidden in the “About Us” page. |
| What is website branching, and how can schools use it? |
| Branching lets schools run multiple websites under one CMS, tailored to different audiences (e.g., international families, boarding students, alumni). It provides personalized experiences without breaking analytics or creating silos, unlike third-party bolt-ons. |
| How does a school website help admissions teams? |
| Your website is your 24/7 admissions officer. Done well, it pre-qualifies families, answers their biggest questions, and encourages them to take action. With UBIQ dashboards, you can also see where families drop off and optimize the funnel. |
| How can schools measure the success of their website? |
| Track metrics like tour bookings, inquiry form completions, bounce rates, and time on page. With UBIQ’s real-time dashboards and persona tracking, you can go deeper—measuring which personas are engaging, which journeys convert, and where to refine. |
| How often should a school website be updated? |
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Continuously. Content (news, events, admissions dates) should be updated weekly, while design and navigation should be reviewed annually. A full website refresh is often needed every 3–5 years to stay aligned with technology and parent expectations. |
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Meet The Author: Maddie Lingard, Head of Marketing With 3 years' experience in education marketing, Maddie leads UBIQ's marketing efforts, helping schools worldwide enhance their digital presence and engagement strategies. With a passion for storytelling, she focuses on creating meaningful connections between schools and their communities. When she's not strategizing campaigns or hosting webinars, Maddie enjoys spending time with her Golden Retriever puppy (and the youngest fluff of the UBIQ team), Kenny, who often keeps her on her toes. |
