How many small care homes have an outdated or broken website?

In an October 2026 review of 565 licensed California care homes with 4 to 16 beds, 136 (24 percent) had a website that was dead, stale or missing. 84 were stale, meaning the footer was stuck years in the past. 43 were dead, and the link on file didn't load at all. 9 had no website, and Google lists the home with no link.

How can a care home owner check their own website?

Open your website on your phone and check three things. You want a site that fits a phone, shows the lock and dials when tapped.

What should a care home fix first on its website?

Fix a dead site first, because a broken link is worse than no link. With no website at all, start with a free Google Business Profile that has the right phone number, hours and a few real photos. If the site works but looks old, run the three phone checks before paying for a redesign.

One in Four Small Care Homes Has a Website a Family Can't Use

There's a six-bed care home in Riverside whose website footer still says 2001.

That's six years before the first iPhone. And the family looking for a bed tonight is reading it on an iPhone.

Before the story, here's the check. It takes about a minute, and all you need is your own phone.

The one-minute phone check

Open your website on your phone. If you have to pinch and zoom to read it, a family will leave before they finish the first line.
Look at the address bar. If Chrome says "Not secure," that's the first thing a nervous daughter sees about the place she might trust with her mom.
Tap your phone number. If it doesn't start a call, you just asked a stressed person to memorize ten digits and type them in by hand.

Three yeses and you're ahead of a lot of your neighbors. Here's how many.

What we found when we looked

We graded the websites of 565 licensed care homes in California with 4 to 16 beds. Here's how they came out:

399 were current.
84 were stale, meaning the footer was stuck years in the past. Most of those were 2021 or older.
43 were dead. The link on file didn't load at all.
9 had no website. Google lists the home with no link.
30 we couldn't match to any site.

Leave out the ones we couldn't find, and 136 of 565 are dead, stale or missing. That's 24 percent. About one home in four.

One fair warning about "stale." We judged it by the date in the footer, so a stale site might still have the right phone number and the right address. The family doesn't know that. Think about what they're weighing. They're about to spend close to $6,000 a month to place their mom or dad in this home, and the website looks like nobody has touched it in 20 years. "Am I going to trust my family member with these people?" No.

The unfair part

I care about small homes for one reason. The people who run them genuinely care about the elderly. Most of them got into this work to help people, hands-on and one-on-one. They don't want to deal with the website, the marketing, the phone calls and the paperwork. They want to be with the residents.

That's exactly why the website is the last thing that gets done. And that's the unfair part, because small homes win on care and lose on Google. A six-bed home can give a resident a kind of attention a hundred-unit building can't, and none of that shows up on a website that stopped in 2001. The big building with the marketing team gets the click.

A dead website doesn't send you a bill. The family just calls the next home on the list, and you never find out they looked.

This isn't only a care home problem. It blows me away how many restaurants, especially ones that have been around a long time, have sites that don't even work. You can't place an order. You can't see the menu. Then the owners wonder why business is dropping. Think about it from your own seat. If a restaurant's website looks neglected, how do you feel about spending your money on their food? Now raise the stakes from dinner to your mother.

Before I started Elevyr, I built another business, and it taught me that the website is the tip of the spear. People search, then they click your site. If it doesn't load, they hit the back button and go to the next one. If it looks dated, a lot of them go too.

What to fix first

If your site is dead, fix that before anything else, because a broken link is worse than no link. Call whoever built it, or whoever pays the hosting bill. A lapsed hosting bill or an expired domain is a common reason a site that used to work stops loading, and that one is a quick fix.

If you have no website at all, start with your Google Business Profile. It's free, and it's what shows up when someone searches your home's name. Make sure your phone number is right, your hours are right and there are a few real photos. For a lot of families, that listing is your website.

If your site works but looks old, run the three checks above. A site that fits a phone, shows the lock and dials when tapped will do more for you than a fancy redesign.

Once the site works, test your phone the same way. The 9pm Sunday Test shows what a family hears when they call after hours. The rest of the plan for filling beds in a six to sixteen bed home is in assisted living marketing for a small care home.

The site gets the family to call. Then someone has to pick up.

Sources, checked October 2026

Website grades: Elevyr review of 565 licensed California care homes with 4 to 16 beds, October 2026. A site counted as stale when its footer date was years old, dead when the listed address did not load, and missing when Google listed the home with no website.
Cost: Genworth and CareScout, 2024 Cost of Care Survey (opens in a new tab), released March 4, 2025. The national median for assisted living was $70,800 a year, about $5,900 a month.