What a Childcare or Nursery Website Costs

en 2026-09-18 6 min read

If you run a nursery or a childcare centre and you want a site parents can judge you on, you are looking at step 03, a business website, EUR 1.500 to 3.500, live in 3 to 6 weeks. If parents also need to sign in to see their place, their invoices or their child's day, that is step 04, EUR 3.500 to 7.500, because there is a login, a database and an integration behind the screen rather than a page.

Step 03 buys pages your own team can edit: the age groups, the day, the team, the building, a request to visit. Step 04 buys software: accounts, permissions, a dashboard, a link into the system you administer the nursery in. Decide which one you are buying before you compare quotes.

What the site has to answer before anyone fills in a form

A parent on your site is deciding whether to hand over a person. Four things belong in plain sight, on the page, not inside a downloadable PDF and not behind a form:

• Who looks after the children. Names, faces, qualifications, languages spoken, who leads each group.
• That you are registered and inspected. Your registration number and your latest inspection outcome, linked to the public source so nobody has to take your word for it.
• What a day looks like. Hours, meals, outdoor time, sleep, settling in, what a parent packs.
• Whether there is a place, and from when. Per age group, with the date the answer was last updated.

Those four are why step 03 is the honest starting point. Four to seven pages covers them without cramming, and a CMS keeps the fourth one true after launch.

Availability is the page people come back to

A page that tells parents to contact you for availability turns every visitor into an email your manager answers by hand, and says nothing at the moment somebody is comparing you with the nursery two streets away. Two honest ways to fix it.

Inside step 03, availability is a CMS field per age group that your manager edits directly, shown with the date it was last changed. No login, nothing to maintain, and it stays true because the person who knows is the person editing it. In step 04 it becomes a waiting list with a dashboard: a parent submits a preferred start date, you see the queue per group, and places move without a spreadsheet. That is a database, roles and an admin screen, so it sits at EUR 3.500 to 7.500 over 6 to 12 weeks, built the way our Next.js development page describes.

Privacy in the enquiry form, and what it adds

A nursery enquiry form is not a contact form. It collects a child's name, an age or date of birth, a start date, sometimes an allergy or a care need, and a parent's phone number. That is personal data about a child, and handling it carefully is a design decision before a legal one. Five things we build into the form at step 03:

• Ask for less. Parent name, email, age group, preferred start date, one free text box. A date of birth is not needed to answer whether you have a place in September.
• Say where it goes. One line under the button naming who receives the enquiry and how long it is kept.
• Keep it in the EU. Form handling, and hosting where the quote includes it, inside the EU, with a processing agreement you can show a parent who asks.
• Do not store what nobody reads. An enquiry emailed to the manager and answered by phone does not also need a permanent database record.
• Filter spam without tracking parents. A privacy-friendly check, not an advertising network's widget on the page where children's details get typed.

All five sit inside the step 03 range. They are not an add-on and we do not price them as one. What moves the number is the step after them: enquiries stored as records, assigned to a staff member, with access control and a history of who opened which. That is a login and a permission model, so step 04 work at EUR 3.500 to 7.500.

The steps, priced

Every step is defined in full on packages. A fixed quote always follows scoping, never precedes it.

How the build runs

Scoping comes first: a call, then a written scope covering pages, who edits what and whether parents log in, with the quote fixed against that document. Then structure and copy, then a few screens designed properly with the rest built on the same system, which is how design and engineering works here. Then the build itself: CMS fields, the enquiry form, analytics, the availability block.

Step 02 runs 2 to 3 weeks, step 03 runs 3 to 6 weeks, step 04 runs 6 to 12 weeks. Photographs, bios and the wording you are allowed to use about inspections are the part that waits on you, so gather them the day the scope is signed.

When to spend less

• You are full and the list is closed. The site is then a front door: directions, hours, a phone number. Step 01, EUR 600 to 900, in 1 to 2 weeks.
• Your childcare administration software already gives parents a portal. Link to it. Rebuilding a portal you already pay for is what turns a step 03 project into a step 04 one, for nothing a parent can feel.
• Nobody has written the pages yet. A step 02 mini-site at EUR 900 to 1.500 gets you live with 2 to 3 pages and a basic CMS, on the same codebase, so the rest is added later as add-ons rather than started again.
• Hold the monthly SEO. SEO foundation is a one-off at EUR 450 to 750: Search Console, analytics, indexation, technical hygiene, titles, internal links, a 3 to 6 month plan. Take it at launch. SEO growth at EUR 500 to 800 per month is for the neighbourhood searches later, once there are pages to work with.

After launch

Care is EUR 100 to 300 per month for updates, monitoring, backups and small fixes. It is not a redesign and not new features; those get scoped and quoted separately. You own the code, the repository and the database, so another studio can take the site over. We can host it, and that is agreed per project rather than assumed.

Common questions

Can we show photographs of the children?

Only with the consent you hold, and the site should make that easy to honour. We build galleries so images are swappable by your own team, which makes a withdrawn consent a short edit rather than a call to us. Where consent is thin, the rooms, the garden and hands at work carry the same warmth without a recognisable face.

Do we need a parent login?

Only if there is something behind it worth paying for. If parents need invoices, daily reports or a visible place in a queue and your current software cannot show them, step 04 is right. If they mainly need hours, groups and whether there is space, step 03 answers that faster and cheaper.

Can our manager update availability without calling us?

Yes, and that is the point of the CMS at step 03. Availability, news, team changes and the day rhythm are editable fields with limits, so nothing breaks when somebody pastes from a document. Templates, navigation and legal pages stay in code, where we change them.

Tell us the age groups you run, the pages you think you need and whether parents will log in, and you get a scope and a fixed quote against it. Start the conversation here.