Web Hosting for Infant and Primary Schools

Short answer: a primary school website is quiet for months and then, at seven in the morning on a snowy Tuesday, every parent in the catchment loads it at once. That single event is the reason hosting matters, and it points at caching, a light site and someone being able to post a closure notice from a phone.

Looking for plans rather than guidance? Our education hosting plans start at £39 a year and renew at £39, with caching, free SSL and daily backups included.

The snow day is your capacity requirement

Nothing else your school website does is demanding. But a closure announcement produces a concentrated surge: three hundred families refreshing the same page inside twenty minutes, on phones, before work.

Page caching is what makes that survivable, because everyone is requesting the same page. Serve it as static HTML rather than rebuilding it per visitor and a modest plan absorbs the whole catchment without difficulty.

Two practical points that matter more than the plan:

• Whoever is up at 6am must be able to post the notice from a phone. If it needs a laptop, a VPN or a call to an agency, the system has failed. Test it before winter, not during it.
• Cache the notice properly. Aggressive caching can serve the old page for an hour after you post. Make sure your cache clears on publish, or you will announce a closure nobody sees.

Our plain English guide to Core Web Vitals covers how load speed is measured.

Statutory documents are a file-handling problem

The Department for Education specifies what maintained schools must publish, and an inspector will check. Most schools get the content right and the delivery wrong.

Publish as web pages, not scanned PDFs. A scanned policy is an image as far as a screen reader is concerned, which puts you in breach of the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018. It is also invisible to search and slow to download. This is the single commonest accessibility failure on school websites and it costs nothing to fix.

If a PDF is unavoidable, generate it from a document rather than a scanner, so the text is real text, and keep it under a megabyte.

Delete superseded versions rather than uploading new ones alongside. Old policies stay at their URL and stay indexed, and an inspector or parent finding last year’s safeguarding policy is a bad look.

One clearly labelled section holding everything beats a tidy structure nobody can navigate.

Term dates should be text on a page

Your busiest page, ahead of the curriculum and ahead of the homepage. Parents look them up repeatedly.

Put them in plain text rather than in a PDF or an image, so they are readable on a phone, findable in search, and copyable into a calendar. Publish next year’s as soon as they are agreed.

Photographs of children need a removal process, not just consent

Consent forms are a policy matter. The hosting-relevant part is what happens when a parent withdraws consent and wants an image taken down today.

That needs someone in school who can edit the site the same day, without raising a ticket with an agency. It also needs you to know that deleting an image from a page does not remove the file: it stays in the media library at its original URL, still reachable, and still in your backups. Delete the file itself, and clear any CDN cache holding it.

Resize images before uploading too. A school gallery of unresized phone photographs is the main reason school websites are slow.

Let third-party systems do the heavy lifting

Your website does not need to be a parent portal. Arbor, SIMS, ParentPay and similar handle payments, attendance and messaging far better than any plugin, and they hold the pupil data rather than your web server.

That is the right division: the website explains, publishes and links out. Resisting the temptation to build a login area you then have to maintain and secure is usually the correct call for a primary school, and it keeps your hosting requirement small.

Forms, and who sees them

Contact forms on school sites collect enquiries from prospective parents and sometimes concerns from current ones. Two things follow.

Free SSL is a baseline, and any decent plan includes it. And do not let submissions accumulate indefinitely in your WordPress database, which most form plugins do by default. Route them to a monitored school address and retain nothing on the site.

Forms also fail silently: they submit, the sender sees a confirmation, the email never arrives. Send form mail through authenticated SMTP rather than PHP mail, add SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, and test monthly. Our guides to contact forms not sending emails and SPF, DKIM and DMARC cover both.

Build for the person who actually maintains it

Your site is updated by an office manager or a teacher in the gaps between everything else. That is the real constraint.

Keep it simple enough to update without training, and make sure more than one person can log in. Daily backups mean a mistaken edit is a five-minute restore rather than a call to an agency.

Register the domain in the school’s name with a shared contact address, and set auto-renew. Our complete guide to UK domain names covers registration and renewals.

What plan you actually need

Entry-level shared hosting with good caching. SSD storage, a CDN, free SSL, daily backups, email on the school’s domain. Around £39 a year.

Cost predictability matters more in a school than almost anywhere, because budgets are set a year ahead and a renewal price that doubles is a genuine problem rather than an irritation. Check the renewal figure, not the introductory rate. Our guide to cheap web hosting in the UK covers what should be standard.

If you are part of a trust running several school sites, our multi-site plans run them from one account and one bill.

Frequently asked questions

Will our website cope with a snow day?

With page caching, yes, because everyone requests the same page. Check the cache clears when you publish, or the notice will not appear.

Can we publish policies as scanned PDFs?

You should not. A scan is an image to a screen reader, which is an accessibility failure under the 2018 regulations, and it is invisible to search.

A parent has withdrawn photo consent. Is deleting the image from the page enough?

No. The file stays in the media library at its original URL and in your backups. Delete the file itself and clear any CDN cache.

Should our website handle payments or attendance?

No. Use Arbor, SIMS, ParentPay or similar. They do it better and they hold the pupil data rather than your web server.

Why do enquiry emails not reach the office?

Usually WordPress sending mail through PHP and being filtered. Authenticated SMTP plus SPF, DKIM and DMARC fixes most cases.

Explore more

Our guide to web hosting for schools covers the requirements common to all school types, and our guide to SEND schools covers accessibility in more depth.

Our education hosting plans start at £39 a year and renew at £39, with a free trial if you want to test first.