A school website spends most of the year serving current families and then, for a few weeks, becomes the front door of the admissions process. That shift is where the problems show up — not because anything changed, but because far more people arrive at once, with a much lower tolerance for friction.
Start with the phone, not the desktop
Most prospective parents will reach your site on a phone, often on mobile data, frequently in the evening. If the admissions page takes six seconds to load or the prospectus is a 40MB PDF, you are losing enquiries you will never hear about.
- Open your own admissions page on a phone, on mobile data, not office wifi
- Time how long it takes before you can read something useful
- Try to complete an enquiry with one thumb
- Check the prospectus download size
Make the enquiry path short and obvious
The single most common problem we see is not a missing form — it is a form three clicks deep behind a menu labelled something internal, like "Registrar" or "Admissions Office". Parents are looking for "Apply" or "Book a visit". Name the link after what they want to do.
If a parent cannot find the answer in about a minute, they call the front office. A website problem becomes a staffing problem.
Fix the content nobody can update
Term dates from two years ago do more damage than an unfashionable design. If updating a date requires emailing a developer, it will not happen during the busiest term of the year. Whoever answers the phone about admissions should be able to correct a page themselves.
Check it holds up under load
Admissions traffic is spiky by nature. It is worth knowing before the rush whether your hosting can absorb a busy evening, and worth confirming that enquiry emails are actually arriving — a silently broken form is the most expensive failure on this list, because everything looks fine from the outside.
Prolink Digital Network
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Written by the team who does the work at Prolink Digital Network. Articles come out of real projects rather than general advice.