Free School Website Tools

Practical school website tools for the jobs that eat an office afternoon. Free, no sign-up, and nothing you put into them leaves your device. Built by people who look after school websites for a living.

Worth being clear about, because most website resources are written for people who do this full time.

Who actually updates a school website

Usually one person in the office, sometimes a teacher with a free period, occasionally a senior leader at nine at night. Very rarely someone with training in it. Tools that assume a designer are no use in education.

Teachers and office staff need different things

Teachers usually want to publish one thing quickly, a class page or a trip letter. Office staff carry the recurring jobs, admissions, term dates and policies. The resources below are aimed at both.

Working with what you have

Most schools have no budget line for website resources and no spare hour. Everything on this page is free, needs no install, and works on whatever computer is in the office.

Students and parents read differently

Parents skim for a fact. Students, particularly in secondary, arrive from a search or a link and want one page. Both are badly served by a homepage carousel.

Sharing what works

Schools rarely get to see how other schools solve these jobs. Most of what is on this page came from watching hundreds of them, so treat it as pooled learning rather than advice from outside education.

Pictures are where most of the time goes, and where most of the quality is won or lost.

Resizing photographs for the website

The most common job in a school office, and the one most often done five times over. Get the pixel dimensions right once and every slot on your website takes the same picture.

Cropping without losing the subject

Website and social slots crop from the centre by default. Choosing the focal point yourself is the difference between a class photo and a row of foreheads.

Keeping page weight down

Oversized images are the single most common cause of a slow school website. Resizing before uploading is the fix most school offices can apply without a developer.

Staff photographs

Square, consistent, head and shoulders. A staff page where every photograph is a different shape looks unloved, and it is the page prospective parents click first.

News thumbnails

The picture in a news list is seen at postage stamp size. Choose images with one clear subject rather than a busy scene.

Banner and hero images

The awkward ones, because they are cropped differently on every screen size. Design for the narrowest crop rather than the widest canvas.

A school website is mostly writing. These are the jobs worth doing deliberately.

Letters home

Aim for a reading age of nine to twelve, the range UK government guidance uses for writing aimed at the public. Long sentences push it up faster than long words.

Removing school jargon

EHCP, SENCO, provision map and age related expectations are everyday words in a staffroom and invisible to a parent. Use them if you must, but say what they mean the first time.

Newsletters

Short paragraphs, one idea each, and the point before the explanation. Parents skim on a phone between other things.

Policies

Policies can read harder than letters and that is usually fine, but the summary at the top should still be readable by a parent.

Admissions pages

The highest value page on most school websites, and often the least edited. Read it as a parent who has never heard of your school.

Web page content

Website content ages quietly. A page nobody has opened in two years is usually the one an inspector finds.

The part that gets attention once a year and needs attention all year.

Publishing what you must publish

There is a defined list, it is longer than most schools expect, and it does not change annually whatever anyone tells you in September.

The accessibility statement

Required, routinely missing, and one of the quickest gaps on this list to close.

Alternative text on images

Every photograph needs a text description, or the information in it is not available to anyone using a screen reader.

Documents and PDFs

Untagged PDFs are the most common accessibility problem on school websites, and the easiest to overlook because the page around them looks fine.

Checking your own website

Ten minutes with a keyboard only, no mouse, teaches an office team more than any automated report.

Keeping records current

Governance details, policies and staff lists drift. Compliance is a maintenance problem rather than a publishing problem.

Unglamorous, heavily used, and usually the oldest content on the site.

Term dates

Publish them as text on a page as well as a document. A PDF of term dates is the single most searched for and least accessible thing on a school website.

Staff lists

Names, roles and a route to contact them. Parents want to know who to ask, not the organisational chart.

Contact details

Address, telephone and the named person who deals with queries. Mainstream schools also need their SENCO.

Prospectus and print

Print needs far more resolution than the web. An A4 cover at 300dpi is 2480 by 3508 pixels, which most phone photographs will not reach.

A short list worth running through each term.

What parents actually look for

Term dates, uniform, admissions, contact details and absence reporting. Everything else is secondary, whatever the homepage says.

Where the website meets everywhere else parents look.

Sharing news to social accounts

The same picture rarely suits a website news item and a social post. Sizing both at once saves doing it twice, and keeps the school looking consistent across places parents see it.

Share previews

When somebody shares a page of your website in a message, a preview image is pulled from the page. If none is set, the platform picks something, and it is usually your logo on a white square.

Photo consent and social

The permissions that apply to your website apply to anything you repost. Worth checking before a sports day gallery goes out to several accounts at once.

The same work, multiplied, which is where a shared standard pays for itself.

Consistency across a trust

Central teams have the same jobs multiplied. Agreeing pixel sizes and a house style for letters once saves every school in the trust working it out separately.

Trust level publishing

Multi academy trusts have website duties of their own, separate from their schools, and they are easy to miss because they sit with finance rather than with the website.

Sharing tools with your schools

Nothing here needs a licence or an install, so a central team can send these round without asking anyone for budget.

Are these school website tools really free?

Yes. No account, no sign-up, no watermark and no limit. Nothing you put into them is uploaded, stored or seen by us, because they all run in your own browser.

Do we need to be a Schudio school?

No. They work with any school website. The image resizer includes the exact pixel sizes the Schudio system uses, which is useful if you are with us and harmless if you are not.

Can we share them with other schools?

Please do. Trust central teams are welcome to send them round, and there is nothing to license or install.

Will there be more?

Yes. A personalised what must my school publish checklist is next. These come from watching where the work actually goes on a school website.

Why do you give them away?

We build and look after school websites. These are the jobs we could hand over without a meeting. If they save you an afternoon and you never speak to us, that is a fine outcome.