Common School Website Mistakes and How to Fix Them

In this post, we’re going back to basics. We know that school websites play a huge role in families’ enrollment decisions, but you’d be surprised by how many common mistakes we see time and time again. 

We’ve compiled a list for you here so you can audit your own school or district’s website before the new school year starts. And the good news is that there are fairly simple fixes for all of them! 

1. The Bait and Switch
2. Outdated Admissions and Enrollment Information
3. Generic Mailboxes
4. Crazy-long Inquiry Forms
5. Unnecessary Barriers to Family Engagement
6. The Treasure Hunt for Tuition Information
7. Disruptive Pop-ups

#1: The Bait and Switch

In a recent post, we talked about putting yourself in a prospective parent’s shoes and we’ll do that again here. Imagine you’re searching for a new school for your rising ninth grader in Boston, Massachusetts, and you search for “best high schools near me.” You see an ad that says “Niche Academy – Best High School in Boston.” 

Ideally, that would take you to a landing page that explains why Niche Academy is (or might be) the “Best High School in Boston” with clear next steps for you to take to engage with the school. But instead, you’re taken to the home page. There’s no content to support the claim made in the ad you saw and there is no clear next step. 

We also see this often on Niche Profiles. I’ve seen everything from a school that linked all three calls to action (CTAs) on its Profile to the school’s main admissions page to another school where the “Learn more” button went to a page about making tuition payments. In all of these scenarios, schools are sending families to places they aren’t expecting or looking for. 

The Fix

Double-check your ads and calls to action to make sure they’re going to pages that will match a prospective parent’s expectations. A “How to Apply” button should go to a page that clearly outlines the steps for applying to your school. The same is true for district registration. Digital ads should take families to pages that match the claims that are made in an ad or the resources that are offered and give them something to do, whether it’s to download a resource, submit an inquiry, or register for an event. 

What you want to avoid is creating a sub-par user experience and frustrating parents by having CTAs that are misaligned with the information that they lead to. 

#2: Outdated Admissions and Enrollment Information

A second common mistake is linking to pages (or even worse, PDFs!) with outdated information about your admissions and enrollment processes, deadlines, or points of contact. We wrote a blog post about annual “housekeeping” for schools to do before the start of each school year — and updating this information should be a routine process for schools. 

The Fix

Even if you don’t know all of the dates and deadlines related to the enrollment process for the upcoming year, it’s important to give prospective families an idea of when to expect those timelines to be updated on your website. 

Even better? Give them the opportunity to be added to a mailing list so they can be notified when your revised admissions dates and deadlines are available (and receive other updates from you). 

Since most schools and districts have new hires and departures at the end of each school year, the summer is also a good time to make any updates to contact information that may be needed. 

#3: Generic Mailboxes

One thing that surprises me is that many schools are still relying on generic mailboxes for families to do everything from making an inquiry to registering for an event. Not only can this create a huge burden for marcomm and admissions/enrollment teams, but it can also create a frustrating experience for families as they wait for responses to basic questions or to move the enrollment process forward. 

Still, for large school districts in particular, generic mailboxes may be necessary so it’s important to consider ways to make them work for you and your families. 

The Fix

Families want and need a range of options to connect with you, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. The most basic one is an inquiry form and it’s exactly that—a way for a family to express interest in your school or district. It also gives you something to link to as a call to action in other marketing channels, like a profile on a school search platform.

The form submission should trigger a follow-up message to people who submit it so they can receive a response with next steps immediately instead of waiting for a member of your team to reach out. If you have a CRM system, that can make creating and managing forms like this exponentially easier, but if not, you can also achieve this with a simple Google form. 

If you’re at the mercy of generic mailboxes, make sure you have an autoresponder set up to manage families’ expectations around when to expect a response. It’s also important to make sure you have a team of colleagues monitoring the mailbox and a process for coordinating responses.

Email addresses can also come into play when you want to give families the opportunity to engage with specific members of your team. It’s definitely appropriate to have an “our team” page or something similar that puts faces to the names behind your admissions or registration processes and provides individual contact information if families need to connect with a specific person directly. 

Here are examples fo two different potential approaches, one for an independent school and one for a public school district:

One final thing to keep in mind is that with a form, an auto-response is not a substitute for human interaction—it simply buys you time. I would still plan to follow up with prospective families within 24 hours of a form submission or email.

Now, speaking of inquiry forms…

#4: Crazy-long Inquiry Forms

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before—school inquiry forms can be as long as CVS receipts. And yet, this is a mistake we still see all the time. 

The thing about inquiry forms is that they’re just that — inquiries. An inquiry is not an application — yet many admission offices insist they act as one. If your school is struggling to meet enrollment goals, removing this barrier is an absolute necessity. Why make it harder for families to learn more about you?

But, having a form in and of itself isn’t enough to allow prospective families at the top of the funnel to connect easily with your school—it also has to be well-designed. 

The Fix

Here are a few tips for creating an inquiry form that converts:

• Keep it brief and free from distractions
• Use friendly introductory language—show prospective families that you’re happy they want to engage with you
• Stick to the basics—what do you really need to know about a family this early in the process?
• Layout is everything—stick to one column
• Use white space. Lots of it. 
• Make sure it’s mobile-friendly
• Have a single clear, action-oriented CTA
• Keep the form to necessary fields — First and last name, email, and entering grade are essential

#5: Unnecessary Barriers to Family Engagement

In addition to completing an inquiry, there are a variety of actions you may want families to take on your website, including signing up for events, participating in a tour, and if they’re ready, completing an application or registering their student. However, many sites that we’ve encountered make it surprisingly difficult to complete some of these tasks. 

The Fix

Here are some do’s and don’ts based on common issues we’ve seen recently on school websites. 

Do:

• Have clear CTAs that take people to forms for completing actions like registering for an event or submitting an inquiry
• Make it easy to schedule tours with a tool like Calendly or Hubspot
• Put FAQs front and center
• Allow families to create profiles in your application system when they’re ready to take that step. Requiring families to create log-ins to complete simple, top-of-the-funnel tasks is becoming increasingly common, but creates unnecessary friction for families. 

Don’t:

• Ask people to send an email and wait for a response to complete common actions
• Require families to send an email to address frequent, basic questions about your community or admissions process
• Require families to create a login to access basic information or take simple steps

#6: The Treasure Hunt for Tuition Information

This is a big one because, for most of the websites we encounter at Niche for schools that charge tuition, the tuition page is among the highest-ranked pages for website traffic…when families can find it.

Researching schools is like any other financial investment, so one of the first questions parents have about a school during that process is how much it costs. Schools have different reasons for making this information difficult to find, but as a service to prospective families, it should be easy to find in the admissions or enrollment services section of your website. 

I would also advise against making tuition information available as a PDF on your website—it should have its own page. PDFs can create a jarring user experience, are bad for search engine optimization (SEO), and are inaccessible to website visitors who are visually impaired. 

In addition to being easy to find and accessible, you can also use a tuition page strategically, which I’ll break down below.

The Fix

A tuition page has the opportunity to be about more than numbers—it’s an opportunity to reinforce value, demonstrate the investment families are making in a student’s education, and show empathy for the sacrifice that many families make to pay tuition to begin with. 

In the example below, Oak Knoll School of the Holy Child’s tuition page checks all of these boxes. The tuition information is still there, but it comes after messaging that reinforces the value of the experience that students and families have with the institution. A brief video with parent testimonials drives the message home even further.

#7: Disruptive Pop-ups

Our 7th and final mistake is one that we see time and time again on school websites of all kinds and that is the disruptive pop-up. 

We aren’t against pop-ups entirely—they can serve a purpose in calling attention to a specific action you want families to take…if they are executed properly. 

But too often, pop-ups on school websites are jarring, intrusive, and out of sync with the actions that a prospective parent wants to take at different points in the school search process. 

The Fix

So let’s take a look at what separates an effective pop-up box from an ineffective or disruptive one.

Effective pop-ups:

• Appear on action-oriented pages like pages for admissions, registration, enrollment, or employment. 
• Appear to the bottom left or right—the center may be common, but that can create a frustrating experience for website visitors.
• Have a clear option for closing them 
• Only ask families to complete one action

Ineffective pop-ups:

• Assume intent or try to “close” too quickly—homepage pop-ups don’t need CTAs to “Apply” or “Enroll.”
• Appear on the center of a page, disrupting the user experience. How often have you clicked a link to read an article only to have the text obstructed by a pop-up (or five)? Your prospective families don’t enjoy that either. 
• Are difficult to close or have “X’s” that are difficult to see. 
• Have too many calls to action

Final Thoughts

Even the most sophisticated schools and districts can get tripped up on these common school website mistakes—you have a lot to juggle! Hopefully, this list gives you some ideas for things to review—and re-review— to make sure you’re providing the best possible digital experience for prospective families.