Last Updated on September 8, 2026
The regulator sends families to your CQC profile. It is the page they land on before your website, and for roughly half the sector it is a dead end.
The measurement
On the CQC care directory file dated 26 August 2026, 27,551 of the 57,082 registered care services in England had no website recorded. That is 48.3 per cent. Among home care agencies specifically it is 7,078 of 14,509, or 48.8 per cent.
The interesting part is what happened when we spot-checked. Of ten home care entries with a blank website field, three had a working website that the register simply did not hold. So a meaningful share of that gap is not providers without websites. It is providers who have one and never told the regulator.
Why that matters more than it sounds
Consider the sequence a family actually follows. Somebody has a fall. The hospital says discharge in ten days. An adult child, often two hundred miles away, searches, is told to check the CQC register, and opens three or four profiles side by side.
Two of them link to a website with photographs, staff names, visiting arrangements and a fee range. Two of them do not link anywhere. The family is making a decision worth roughly a thousand pounds a week in under a fortnight, and they will spend their limited attention on the ones they can see into.
It is also a machine-readable question now. AI assistants answering “good care homes near me” work from what they can read. A register entry with no website gives them a name, a location and a rating. A register entry with a website gives them everything else.
What a family checks, in order
- The CQC rating, and increasingly what date it was given.
- The inspection report itself, usually the safe and well-led sections.
- Whether there is a website, and whether it looks current.
- Photographs of the actual place, not the garden.
- Fees, or the absence of them.
- Google reviews, particularly the ones from relatives rather than residents.
- Whether the manager is named anywhere.
Only two of those are things CQC controls. The rest are yours, and five of the seven cost nothing.
The rating problem nobody explains
At 1 August 2025, 3,062 adult social care services were rated under the Single Assessment Framework, and 20,467 still carried a current rating awarded under a previous framework. That is in CQC’s own State of Care 2024/25 ratings appendix.
So a family comparing two homes may well be comparing two ratings produced by different systems, years apart, and nothing on either profile tells them so.
The honest move is to publish the rating with the date it was awarded and a link to the report, and if it is an older one, say that plainly and say what has changed since. Providers tend to fear this. In practice a dated rating with an explanation reads better than a rating with no date, because the family has already noticed the year on the report.
Fixing the profile
Four fields, all free.
- Website address. The single highest-value field and the one half the sector leaves empty.
- Telephone number that is answered, including who answers it out of hours.
- Registered manager name, which is the one human name on the whole entry.
- Service types and specialisms, so the profile matches what you actually take.
Then make the three records agree: your CQC entry, your website and your Google Business Profile should carry the same trading name, address and phone number. A mismatch between the regulator’s record and your own site is the kind of thing a careful family notices and cannot explain away charitably.
What to put on the page they land on
Assume the visitor has been looking at care homes for four days and is tired. The page needs to answer, without scrolling for it:
| What they are asking | What answers it |
|---|---|
| Is it any good | Rating, date awarded, link to the report |
| What does it cost | Weekly range by room or care type, with a dated review note |
| Who looks after mum | Named manager, staff ratio, what happens at night |
| Can I visit | Visiting arrangements in plain sentences, not a policy PDF |
| What if something goes wrong | How you handle a fall, and how you tell the family |
| Is there a place | Current availability, or how quickly you will say |
Most care home websites answer two of those six. The two they answer are usually the rating and the visiting arrangements.
Common questions
Does adding a website to the CQC profile actually bring enquiries?
We have not measured a conversion effect and will not claim one. What we have measured is that 48.3 per cent of registered services have no website on the register, so doing it moves you into the half a family can click through from. It is free, so the threshold for doing it is low.
Should we publish an old rating?
Publish it with its date and a link, or a family will find it themselves with no context at all. Twenty thousand services are in the same position, so the older framework is not the black mark providers assume.
How many care homes are there in England?
We are not going to give you a number, because we could not open the CQC data files on the day we checked and we do not publish figures we have not read. What we can say from the file we do hold is that there were 57,082 registered care services in England on 26 August 2026, of which 14,509 were home care agencies.
