A tutor website has one reader who matters, and it is not the child. It is a parent, on a phone, usually after nine at night, usually within a week of a disappointing mock result or a parents’ evening that went sideways. They have four tabs open and three of them are other tutors.
You get about twenty seconds.
What The Parent Is Doing Before They Message You
They type something like “gcse maths tutor wakefield” or “eleven plus tutor near me”. Or they ask in a class WhatsApp group, get two names, and then look those names up online. Not to read a teaching philosophy. To settle a few practical questions before they spend an evening writing emails:
- Do you teach the exact thing my child needs, which is Edexcel higher tier maths, not “maths”?
- What does it cost, and do lessons carry on through half term?
- Would I be comfortable with this person in a room with my daughter?
- Have you got any time left this term?
If the page cannot answer those in the time it takes to boil a kettle, they go back to the search results. A tutor website that opens with “welcome to my site, I am passionate about helping young people reach their potential” has spent the twenty seconds and answered nothing.
The Five Things A Tutor Website Has To Answer Fast
These belong at the top, visible before anyone scrolls on a phone:
- Subject and level, named properly. GCSE and A level chemistry. Eleven plus for the Kent test. Grade 1 to 8 piano and music theory.
- Exam board, where it matters. AQA, Edexcel, OCR, WJEC. A parent whose son sits AQA biology will pick the tutor who says AQA.
- Where lessons happen: online, at your house, at theirs, and how far you travel.
- Your hourly rate.
- What to do next, as one instruction. Text this number. Fill in these four boxes.
Get those five near the top and the rest of the tutor website is supporting evidence for a decision the parent has already half made.
Price: Put It On The Page
Plenty of tutors leave the rate off, worried it will scare people away before they have had a chance to explain themselves. It does the opposite. It filters out nobody and costs you your Sunday morning, because you end up typing “it’s £40 an hour” to six people who had £25 in their head.
A tutor website that hides the rate also makes the parent suspect the answer is “it depends how much I think you can pay”, which is not the first impression you want when the next tutor down the list has printed £35 in bold.
Say the number. Then say the things around the number, because that is where most of the awkward follow-up questions live:
- Whether you do a block of six at a slightly better rate.
- Your cancellation notice. Twenty four hours is standard and most parents expect it.
- Whether you charge travel beyond, say, five miles.
- Whether you teach in August, and what happens to a regular Tuesday slot over Christmas.
If you charge more than the tutoring agency in town, say why in the same breath. Eleven years teaching the specification, examiner experience, a subject nobody else locally covers. A higher price with a reason attached reads as confidence. A higher price with no reason reads as cheek.
Proof You Are Safe To Let Into The House
Private tutoring is not a regulated profession. There is no register a parent can check, which means the reassurance has to come from you. Self employed tutors cannot request an enhanced DBS check for themselves, because an enhanced check has to be applied for by an organisation. Many tutors get a basic certificate, which an individual can apply for, and say so plainly on the page. Check what applies to your situation on the government guidance on DBS checks rather than taking anyone’s word for it.
Alongside that, the basics matter more than tutors think. Your full name. A real photograph of your face, taken this decade, looking like a person rather than a corporate headshot. Where you trained and what you taught. A line about how sessions run: parent welcome to stay, lessons at the dining table rather than upstairs, online lessons on Google Meet with the link sent to the parent’s email rather than the pupil’s.
A tutor website with no photograph of you on it is asking a parent to invite a stranger into their home on the strength of some text. Some will. Most will pick the one with a face.
Reviews A Parent Will Actually Believe
“Brilliant tutor, highly recommended” is worth almost nothing. It could have been written by your mum.
What works is specific: the subject, the starting point, the finish, and enough detail to sound like a real family. A grade 4 in November turning into a grade 6 in the summer. A boy who would not open his maths book now doing the homework without being asked. A daughter who got into the grammar school her sister is at.
Ask for that detail when you ask for the review, get permission to use a first name and a town, and never write one yourself. Two or three on the page is enough, and put two of them next to the price on your tutor website, where the money question and the reassurance sit side by side.
Where Tutor Websites Quietly Leak Work
The page can be lovely and still lose the enquiry. Common leaks:
- A form with nine fields, including “how did you hear about us”. Name, contact, year group and subject is plenty.
- No phone number, or a number typed as plain text so it cannot be tapped.
- No hint of when you reply. “I answer the same evening, or by the next afternoon” removes the worry that the message vanished.
- A page that takes six seconds to load on 4G in a school car park. Parents do not wait.
- An email address like tutorlady247 at hotmail. It is free to look more settled than that.
- No mention of availability. “Two slots left on Tuesdays after school” gets a message today. “Contact me for availability” gets one next month, maybe.
Term time shapes all of this. September and early January are the two big rushes, and late April brings the GCSE panic wave. If your page still says “taking bookings for the autumn” in February, it reads as abandoned.
Online, In Person, Or Both. Say Which.
A lot of tutors now teach entirely over video, and a lot of parents specifically want somebody who will sit at the kitchen table. Both are fine. What loses you the enquiry is making them guess.
Put it near the top of the tutor website: online only, in person within a named radius, or both with a note on which you prefer. If you teach online, say what the child needs at their end, which is usually a laptop rather than a phone, and which platform you use. If you travel, name the villages, not just the city. A parent in Ossett searching for help does not know whether “Wakefield and surrounding areas” includes them.
What To Leave Off
- Stock photos of grinning children in an American classroom. Everyone recognises them.
- Your full CV. Two lines of relevant qualification beats a career history.
- A blog you will update twice and then abandon in October.
- Photographs of pupils, unless you have written permission from the parent, which is rarely worth the admin.
- Scanned certificates uploaded as unreadable grey images.
- A members area. A tutor website does not need a login for worksheets in its first year. Email the worksheet.
On booking, a simple rule: if you already use something like Calendly and it suits you, embed it and move on. Paying somebody to build a scheduling system from scratch for eight regular pupils is money set on fire.
One Page Or Several?
If you teach one thing in one town, say eleven plus preparation, a tutor website can be one good page that does everything: what you teach, the rate, the proof, the way to reach you.
Once you teach several subjects or several levels, split them. A parent searching “a level physics tutor st albans” wants a page about A level physics in St Albans, not a paragraph three quarters of the way down a general page. Separate pages also give Google something specific to match, which is most of the battle for a new site.
Either way, the writing should address the parent. That is the argument behind our website design for tutors: pages written for the person paying and worrying, not the person being taught. If you want a sense of how these pages look once they are built, there are examples here.
What A Tutor Website Should Cost You
Three routes, honestly compared. Build it yourself on one of the big platforms and you are looking at roughly £15 to £25 a month plus a weekend of your life, plus the second weekend when you rewrite it because the first version sounded like a brochure. Pay a designer a one-off fee and it is commonly £800 to £2,000, after which changing your term dates means finding them again and waiting.
Pay monthly sits in between: from £24.99 +VAT a month with the build, the hosting and the changes handled. Do the sums against your own rate. One extra pupil at £35 an hour, once a week through term time, is roughly £1,300 over a year. That covers a pay monthly tutor website three times over, and the same maths works at £28 an hour.
When A Tutor Website Is Not Worth Building
Sometimes it genuinely is not. If you are full, with a waiting list fed by one school’s parent grapevine, spend nothing and enjoy it. If every pupil comes through an agency that owns the relationship and bars direct contact, your page has nothing to sell. If you are trialling tutoring for one term alongside a teaching job, a free Google Business Profile and one decent directory listing will carry you until you know whether you like it.
The moment it changes is when somebody else takes a cut of every hour you teach, or when the grapevine goes quiet in a year with a small cohort. Then a tutor website of your own pays for itself quickly, because the enquiry comes to you at your full rate instead of arriving with a commission already deducted.
It will not rescue a tutor who takes four days to answer a message, and it will not create demand for A level Latin in a town where nobody studies it. It removes a barrier. It does not invent parents.
So, What Makes A Parent Stop And Book?
Specifics, mostly. The exam board written out. The price in numbers. A face, a first name, a real review with a grade in it, and one clear instruction about what to do next. The tutor website that wins the booking is rarely the prettiest one. It is the one that reads as though it was written for a worried parent at half past nine on a Tuesday, because that is exactly who is reading it.