School Website Hosting in Kenya, from Primary to College

The questions parents bring to a school website

Almost every parent who visits a school's site wants the same few answers, usually in the same order. On most school websites in Kenya those answers come last, hidden beneath a welcome message from the administration.

1. What will it cost? The fee structure, both as a page that reads well on a phone and as a PDF they can save and forward to a spouse.
2. How do we apply? Entry requirements, what to bring, when intakes open and whom to call.
3. When are the terms? Opening and closing dates, half term and reporting days.
4. Who can I talk to? A phone number someone actually answers, plus an email address on the school's own domain.
5. Is the school any good? Results, facilities and photos of your real pupils and classrooms, not stock pictures.

Answer those five on the first screen and most enquiries are dealt with before anyone rings the office. That is a decision about content, not technology, and it costs nothing.

Results day and admissions put the site under pressure

Traffic to a school site does not arrive evenly. Nothing much happens for months, and then, in the week results are released or admissions open, visits can jump to many times the usual level in a single day, with every parent downloading the same fee structure PDF.

Two habits keep this manageable. First, keep PDFs a sensible size: a fee structure saved straight from a scanner may be 15MB, while the same document produced properly is under 500KB, thirty times less to send each time a parent opens it. Second, rely on the caching your plan already has, so returning visitors get the page without it being rebuilt for them.

A portal where parents sign in to check results or balances puts a different kind of load on the server, so let us know if you run one. A busy portal belongs on a VPS, not on shared hosting.

Questions from Schools