School Website Checklist: What Every School Site Needs, From Design to ADA Compliance
The pages, the design decisions, and the accessibility deadline that most published checklists still get wrong.
Most school website checklists are a list of pages. That part is easy, and it is not where school sites actually fail. They fail because the calendar is a PDF, the closure notice is only on social media, and nobody has looked at whether a screen reader can read any of it. This checklist covers the structure, the design decisions that decide whether a hurried parent finds what they came for, and the accessibility rule that now applies to public school districts in the United States. That last part matters more than usual right now: the compliance dates were extended in April 2026, so most checklists still in circulation quote a deadline that has passed and been replaced. It is a practical checklist, not legal advice. If you would rather start from a working structure than a blank page, see our school website builder.
What This Guide Covers
- The pages every school site needs, and the two that are quietly most visited
- Design decisions that decide whether parents find anything
- The ADA Title II standard for public schools, in plain terms
- Both compliance dates, extended in April 2026, and which applies to you
- The five exceptions, including the PDF one that is narrower than it looks
- Photo consent, staff directories, and what belongs behind a login
Check the date on any other checklist you read: the ADA Title II compliance dates for web content were extended in April 2026, to April 26 2027 and April 26 2028. Anything published before then states a deadline that no longer applies.
Get Started FreeTL;DR Quick Summary
A school website has three audiences and one of them, current families, generates most of the visits and almost none of the design attention. Build the structure first: homepage carrying closures and the next key date, calendar and term dates, admissions, contact, staff directory, policies, news, lunch menus, curriculum and results, and vacancies. Calendar and menus are consistently among the most visited pages and are usually published as downloadable files, which is the most common way a school site creates work for its own office. Then fix the design: utility above identity, navigation labelled the way parents speak, link text that survives being read out of context, and no rotating hero carousel. Then accessibility, which is the part that has genuinely changed. In April 2024 the Department of Justice adopted WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the standard for websites of state and local government entities, which includes public school districts. In April 2026 it extended the deadlines to April 26 2027 for populations of 50,000 or more and April 26 2028 below that, so any checklist written earlier states a date that no longer applies. A school district is not a special district government, and the population figure is the city, the county, or the 2022 Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates, never the pupil roll.
Build a School Website Free →Table of Contents
Jump to any section: who a school website is really for, the pages every school site needs, design that works, what parents look for first, the ADA rule now applying to public schools, which compliance date applies to you, the five exceptions, mobile and speed, safety and privacy, keeping it current, design ideas that hold up, and how to put the checklist to work, plus an FAQ.
- Who a school website is actually for
- The pages every school website needs
- School website design that actually works
- What parents look for first, and where schools bury it
- Accessibility: the ADA rule that now applies to public schools
- Which compliance date applies to your school
- The five exceptions worth knowing about
- Mobile, speed, and the parent-on-a-phone test
- Safety and privacy: photos, directories and data
- Keeping it current, which is where most school sites fail
- School website design ideas that hold up
- Putting the checklist to work
- Frequently Asked Questions
Who a school website is actually for
Most school websites are built for the school. The checklist below assumes they are built for three groups of people who arrive with very different questions, usually on a phone, usually in a hurry.
Getting this order right is what separates a site that reduces front-office phone calls from one that generates them. A prospective parent and a current parent want almost nothing in common, and the current parent is the one who visits fifty times a year.
| Audience | Arrives asking | Visit pattern | What they need on screen |
|---|---|---|---|
| Current families | Is school open tomorrow? When is the concert? | Highest frequency by a wide margin | Calendar, closures, term dates, lunch menu, contact |
| Prospective families | Is this school right for my child? | A handful of deep visits, then a decision | Admissions, catchment, results, ethos, visit booking |
| Staff and community | Where is the form? Who do I email? | Steady and task-driven | Staff directory, policies, vacancies, governor papers |
The order that matters
Current families generate the overwhelming majority of visits, and almost none of the design attention. Prospective families generate the decisions that affect enrolment, and get the hero image. The resolution is not to choose between them: it is to give current families a fast utility layer at the top of the homepage and prospective families a clear route into depth from the same screen.
The pages every school website needs
This is the structural core. A school site can be beautiful and still fail an inspection, a parent or a screen reader if one of these is missing or buried three clicks deep.
The two that are quietly the most visited
Calendar and lunch menus feel trivial and are almost always in the most-visited handful, because the same families check them repeatedly through the year. Both are frequently published as a downloadable file, which is the single most common way a school site creates work for its own office. Publish them as pages.
The ones an inspector looks for first
Policies and statutory documents feel like filing. They are the pages an inspector, a prospective parent doing diligence, or a solicitor will go to before anything else. A single plain-language index page listing every statutory document with a date solves this permanently and takes an afternoon.
School website design that actually works
School website design has a narrow brief: get a hurried person to a specific fact fast, and make a prospective family feel the place is well run. Almost every design failure below comes from treating a school site like a marketing brochure.
Why the carousel keeps coming up
The rotating hero is the most common element on school homepages and the one that most reliably hurts them. It occupies the most valuable screen space, moves content away from people mid-read, and is awkward to operate by keyboard, which is an accessibility problem as well as a usability one. If you remove one thing after reading this, remove the carousel and put quick links in the space it frees.
Write links that survive being read alone
Screen reader users often navigate by pulling up a list of every link on the page. In that list, “click here” appears six times and means nothing. “Download the uniform policy” works in both contexts, and costs nothing to write that way.
Do this
- Put utility above identity in the first screen
- Use navigation labels parents recognise
- Write link text that stands alone out of context
- Keep colour contrast high enough to read outdoors
- Date everything you publish
- Design the search box in from the start
Avoid this
- A full-screen rotating hero carousel
- Key information locked inside PDFs
- Auto-playing audio or video
- Stock photography of other people’s children
- A separate mobile site that will drift
- Text baked into images
What parents look for first, and where schools bury it
The gap between what schools put on the homepage and what parents open the site to find is the single biggest source of avoidable front-office calls.
| What the visitor wants | Where it usually lives | Where it should be |
|---|---|---|
| Is school closed today? | A news post, or only on social media | A banner on the homepage, added in under a minute |
| Term and holiday dates | A PDF inside Parents and then Information | Its own page, linked from the homepage, as text |
| Who do I speak to about my child? | A generic office email address | Named roles with a route to each |
| What is on the lunch menu? | A photograph of a printed menu | A text page, updated weekly |
| How do I apply, and by when? | Spread across three pages | One admissions page with the deadline stated |
| What did the last inspection say? | Absent, or hard to find | Linked plainly; parents will find it regardless |
The underlying pattern
Schools organise by who owns the information internally. Parents search by the question they walked in with. Reorganising navigation around the questions is usually free, needs no redesign, and is the highest return change on this list.
Accessibility: the ADA rule that now applies to public schools
This is the part of a school website checklist that has actually changed, and the part most published checklists now get wrong.
In April 2024 the US Department of Justice issued a rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act setting a technical standard for the websites and mobile apps of state and local government entities. Public school districts are covered. The standard adopted is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1, Level AA.
In April 2026 the Department issued an Interim Final Rule extending the compliance dates. That matters more than it sounds: a checklist written any time before April 2026 tells you the deadline is April 2026, and that is no longer correct.
What WCAG 2.1 Level AA asks for, in plain terms
Text a screen reader can read in a sensible order. Meaningful alternative text on images. Colour contrast high enough to read. Everything operable by keyboard alone. Captions on video. Form fields that are labelled. Nothing that flashes. None of it is exotic, and most of it is ordinary good design, which is why the design section above and this one overlap so heavily.
The two failures that are specific to schools
Scanned PDFs are the most common. A scan of a printed letter is an image: it carries no readable text at all, so a screen reader gets nothing. And accessibility overlay widgets, the floating button that offers to adjust the site, are not a substitute for an accessible site. They change what a sighted visitor sees without changing what assistive technology receives.
This post is a practical checklist, not legal advice. For how the rule applies to your district, read the source at ada.gov and take advice from your own counsel.
Which compliance date applies to your school
There are two dates, and which one you get depends on population, not on the size of the school. This trips up almost everyone, so it is worth working through carefully.
| Entity | Compliance date |
|---|---|
| State and local government entities with a population of 50,000 or more | April 26, 2027 |
| Entities with a population of 0 to 49,999, and special district governments | April 26, 2028 |
Which population figure a school district uses
Not the number of pupils. A city school district uses the population of the city. A county school district uses the population of the county. An independent school district uses its own population in the 2022 Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates.
A school district is not a special district government
The Department says so explicitly. It is an easy assumption to make, and making it would hand you the later date when you may not be entitled to it. If you are unsure which category your district falls into, that is the question to take to counsel first, because everything else on the timeline depends on it.
The five exceptions worth knowing about
The rule carries five specific exceptions. They are narrower than schools tend to hope, and none of them covers having a lot of old PDFs and a tight budget.
Read the document exception carefully
It exempts conventional electronic documents already posted before the compliance date. It does not exempt documents you post after it. And it does not help if that old file is still the only place a parent can get current information such as a term calendar or an admissions form, because then it is not really archived material at all.
The practical response
Cataloguing exceptions is slower and less useful than it sounds. The move that actually reduces the problem is to stop producing inaccessible PDFs from today, and to convert the handful of documents that carry live information into pages. The archive can stay an archive.
Mobile, speed, and the parent-on-a-phone test
School websites skew more heavily to mobile than almost any other category, because the typical visit is a parent checking one fact between other tasks. Design for that visit and the desktop version takes care of itself.
The test itself
Hand your phone to someone who does not work at the school. Ask them to find tomorrow’s finish time, the head teacher’s name, and how to report an absence. Time it. Anything over about ninety seconds is a navigation problem rather than a content problem, and no amount of new content will fix it.
Safety and privacy: photos, directories and data
A school website is a public document about a building full of children. A few decisions on this page carry more weight than the rest of the checklist combined.
| Decision | The safe default | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Photographs of pupils | Consent recorded per pupil, checked before publishing, easy to withdraw | Consent changes over time, and a photo published once stays indexed |
| Naming pupils | First name only, or no name, unless there is a clear reason and consent | Full name plus school plus photograph is more identifying than it looks |
| Staff directory | Role-based addresses rather than personal ones | Reduces harvesting and survives staff turnover |
| Live streams and events | Decide who can see it, and for how long | A stream is a broadcast, and archives outlive the event |
| Forms collecting pupil data | Encrypted in transit, minimal fields, stated retention | Collect only what you will actually use |
| Third-party embeds | Know what each one sets before you add it | Embeds can place tracking on pages that minors visit |
The two frameworks behind most of this
In the United States, FERPA governs education records and COPPA governs the online collection of personal information from children under 13. Neither is a website checklist as such, but both shape what belongs on a public page and what belongs behind a login. Your district or trust will have its own policy, and that policy wins over anything here.
Keeping it current, which is where most school sites fail
Almost every school website is accurate on launch day. The checklist that matters is the one that runs afterwards, because an out-of-date school site actively misleads the people relying on it.
Name the owner, not the task
The single reliable predictor of whether a school website stays current is whether one named person can update it without raising a ticket. If every change needs an external developer, the site will be out of date by half term whatever the maintenance schedule says. When you evaluate platforms, weight this above almost everything else on the feature list.
School website design ideas that hold up
Rather than a gallery of screenshots that will date, here are the patterns that consistently work on school sites, and which you can copy without commissioning a redesign.
Where to look for inspiration
If you are looking at other schools, look at ones roughly your size and phase rather than at the flagship redesigns. A large multi-academy trust site solves problems a two-form primary does not have, and copying its structure usually produces navigation with more levels than your content justifies.
Putting the checklist to work
The checklist is deliberately platform-neutral. Everything above applies whether the site runs on a specialist school platform, a general website builder, or a bespoke build from an agency.
What actually differs between the options
Specialist school platforms handle statutory document structures well and tend to carry an annual licence. Agencies produce the best-looking results and the slowest updates, because every change is a request. General builders put editing in the school’s hands, which is the variable that decides whether the maintenance section above ever happens.
If you want to start from a working structure
Our school website builder generates a school site with the page structure above already in place, and leaves editing with whoever is going to maintain it. It is free to start and does not need a developer.
Build a School Website That Covers the Checklist
Start from a school site structure that already has the calendar, admissions, policies and contact pages in place, with editing left to whoever is going to maintain it.
Build a School Website Free Or start with the basics of making a websiteFrequently Asked Questions
What should a school website include?
At minimum: a homepage carrying closures and the next key date, a calendar and term dates page, admissions, contact and directions, a staff directory, statutory policies, news and letters, lunch menus, curriculum and results, and vacancies. Calendar and lunch menus are consistently among the most visited pages because the same families check them repeatedly.
Do school websites have to be ADA compliant?
Public school districts in the United States are state or local government entities, so they are covered by Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In April 2024 the Department of Justice adopted Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard for their websites and mobile apps. Private schools are not covered by this particular Title II rule. This is a practical summary, not legal advice.
When does my school have to comply with the ADA web rule?
There are two dates, and the Department extended both in April 2026. Entities with a population of 50,000 or more must comply by April 26, 2027. Entities with a population under 50,000, and special district governments, have until April 26, 2028. Note that checklists published before April 2026 will state the older date of April 2026, which no longer applies.
Which population figure does a school district use?
Not the number of pupils. A city school district uses the population of the city. A county school district uses the population of the county. An independent school district uses its population in the 2022 Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates. A school district is not a special district government, so it cannot claim the later date on that basis.
What does WCAG 2.1 Level AA actually require?
In practical terms: content a screen reader can read in a sensible order, meaningful alternative text on images, sufficient colour contrast, full keyboard operation, captions on video, labelled form fields, and no flashing content. Most of it overlaps with ordinary good design, which is why an accessible school site is usually also an easier one to use.
Are old PDFs on our website exempt?
Partly, and less than schools usually hope. Conventional electronic documents such as PDFs and Word files posted before the compliance date fall under an exception, as does clearly identified archived content. But that does not help if the old document is still the only place a parent can get current information, and it does not cover anything you post after the deadline. The practical response is to stop producing inaccessible PDFs now.
How much does a school website cost?
It ranges from nothing to several thousand a year. Specialist school platforms typically charge an annual licence and handle statutory document structures for you. Agency builds carry a larger one-off cost plus change requests. General website builders, including free tiers, cost least and put editing in the school’s hands. The bigger cost is usually maintenance time rather than the platform.
How often should a school website be updated?
Weekly for menus, news and upcoming dates. Termly for term dates, staff changes and clubs. Annually for policies, results and photo consent. Broken links and new document checks are ongoing. The reliable predictor of a current site is whether one named person can publish a change without raising a ticket.
Can a school build its own website without a developer?
Yes, and for most primary and single-site schools it is the better option, because it removes the delay between needing a change and getting one. The trade-off is that structure, accessibility and consent decisions become the school’s responsibility rather than a supplier’s. The checklist above is written to make those decisions explicit.
What is the best platform for a school website?
There is no single answer, and be wary of any list that gives one. Judge candidates on four things: can a non-technical member of staff update it, does it produce accessible markup by default, does it handle a large library of statutory documents, and what happens to your content if you leave. Weight those by who will actually maintain the site.
Structure First, Then Design, Then Access
Get the ten pages in place and publish the calendar and menus as pages rather than files. Reorganise navigation around the questions parents actually arrive with. Then work the accessibility list, starting by not creating any new inaccessible PDFs from today, and check which of the two compliance dates applies to your district before you plan the work. If you would rather begin from a structure that already reflects this than from an empty page, our school website builder is free to start and leaves editing with the school.
Build a School Website Free →A School Website Your Office Can Actually Keep Current
Calendar, admissions, policies and contact pages generated as a working structure, editable by a member of staff without raising a developer ticket.
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Aasif Khan
Head of SEO and Growth Marketing Lead at Appy Pie AI with 17+ years in digital marketing, AI-powered optimization, and scalable growth strategies.
Abhinav Girdhar
Founder and CEO of Appy Pie AI. Builder of one of the world’s largest no-code and AI platforms, with 10M+ apps and websites created.