School Website Hosting in Kenya

What parents actually look for on a school website

Parents arrive at a school site with a short list of questions, and they are nearly always the same ones in nearly the same order. Most school websites in Kenya answer them last, buried under a welcome message from the administration.

1. What does it cost. The fee structure, as a page they can read on a phone and a PDF they can download and send to a spouse.
2. How do we join. Admission requirements, what to bring, when intakes open and who to call.
3. When does term start and end. Term dates, half term, closing and reporting days.
4. Who do I speak to. A phone number that is answered and an email address on the school domain.
5. Is this a good school. Results, facilities, photographs of real pupils and real classrooms rather than stock images.

Put those five in the first screen and you will answer most enquiries before the office phone rings. It is a content decision rather than a technical one, and it costs nothing.

Admissions season is when the site gets tested

School traffic is not steady. It is flat for months, then in the week results come out or admissions open it can be many times the normal level within a day, with everyone downloading the same fee structure PDF at once.

Two things keep that comfortable. Keep the PDFs sensible: a fee structure exported straight from a scanner can be 15MB, and the same document produced properly is under 500KB, which is thirty times less to send every time a parent taps it. And use the caching that is already on your plan, so repeat visitors are served without rebuilding the page each time.

If your school runs a portal where parents log in to see results or balances, that is a different kind of load and worth telling us about, because a busy portal belongs on a VPS rather than shared hosting.

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