Web Hosting for Montessori Schools and Nurseries

Short answer: a nursery website is a conversion tool viewed almost entirely on a phone, usually by a parent comparing three or four settings in one evening. That makes mobile speed and a form that reliably delivers the two things worth getting right. Everything else is a small site on an entry-level plan.

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

Your photographs are what makes the site slow

Parents want to see the baby room, the toddler room, the outdoor space, where children sleep and eat. Those photographs do more persuading than any copy about your ethos, and they are also the heaviest thing on the site.

Taken on a phone and uploaded untouched, each is four or five megabytes. A room-by-room gallery of twenty is a hundred megabytes for a parent on mobile data during their lunch break.

• Resize to around 1600px wide before uploading, or use a plugin that does it automatically
• Use lazy loading so a gallery loads as the visitor scrolls rather than all at once
• Serve through a CDN, which converts formats and delivers from a location near the visitor
• Remember WordPress creates several resized copies of every upload, so storage goes further than the originals suggest

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

Photographs of children need a removal process

Consent is a policy matter. The hosting part is what happens when a parent withdraws it and wants an image down today.

Deleting the image from the page does not remove the file. It stays in the media library at its original URL, still reachable by anyone with the link, still in your backups, and possibly still cached by your CDN. Delete the file itself and clear the CDN cache.

Photographs of rooms rather than children sidestep most of this and are more useful to a parent anyway, since they are assessing the environment.

Your enquiry form is the whole point of the site

Everything on a nursery website is pointing at one action: arranging a visit. A silently failing form does not just lose an enquiry, it loses a place.

WordPress sends mail through PHP by default, which is frequently filtered as spam or rejected, particularly when your domain has no authentication records. The form submits, the parent sees a confirmation, the email never arrives, and nothing looks broken.

• Send form mail through authenticated SMTP rather than PHP mail
• Add SPF, DKIM and DMARC records to your domain
• Deliver to a shared setting address checked daily, not one manager’s inbox
• Test it weekly, not monthly, given what an enquiry is worth

Keep the form short: name, child’s age, when they need a place, phone number. Long forms get abandoned, and you do not need anything else to make contact. Our guides to contact forms not sending emails and SPF, DKIM and DMARC cover the causes.

Funded hours information changes, so keep it editable

Entitlement rules change, and an out-of-date page about funded hours generates complaints and wasted calls rather than enquiries.

Keep that content as plain text you can update in minutes rather than something needing a developer. Daily backups mean a mistaken edit is a five-minute restore.

Email on your own domain

Parents are handing over a child, so an address at your own domain rather than a personal webmail account matters. It also survives staff turnover, which is high in this sector, so correspondence does not disappear with an individual.

Our email hosting plans include unlimited mailboxes with 10GB each, so managers and room leaders can all have proper addresses without per-user charges.

Third-party systems should hold the data

Daily updates, photo sharing, invoicing and registers belong in a nursery management app, not on your website. Those systems hold information about children properly and your web server should not.

That keeps your hosting requirement small: the website explains, shows the rooms, and captures an enquiry.

What plan you actually need

Entry-level shared hosting with SSD storage, a CDN, free SSL and daily backups. Around £39 a year, with reasonable storage headroom for room photography.

If you run more than one setting, our multi-site plans run several sites from one account and one bill.

Check the renewal figure rather than the introductory rate. Our guide to cheap web hosting in the UK covers what should be standard.

Frequently asked questions

Why is our nursery website slow on phones?

Almost always unresized room photographs. Each is four or five megabytes off a phone, and a gallery of twenty is a very large download.

A parent withdrew photo consent. Is deleting it from the page enough?

No. The file stays in the media library at its URL, in your backups and possibly in your CDN cache. Delete the file and clear the cache.

Why do enquiries not reach us?

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

Should our website handle daily updates and invoicing?

No. Use a nursery management app. It handles children’s data properly and keeps it off your web server.

Can we run two settings from one hosting account?

Yes, a multi-site plan handles several sites from one account, which keeps them separate while keeping cost and admin down.

Explore more

Our guide to web hosting for schools covers the wider education requirements, and our local SEO guide covers being found locally, which matters more for a nursery than anything on the site itself.

Our education hosting plans start at £39 a year, with a free trial if you want to test your own room photographs for speed first.