In short and in plain language
A home care service looks after people in their own homes. Its website speaks to relatives and to care staff.
Relatives ask if you serve their part of town and take on new clients right now. Say this openly on the site.
Explain your services in plain language. You can add the legal term next to it.
The care level is health data. Only ask for it in the form on a voluntary basis and with consent.
Care staff look for the area, the rota and part-time work. That needs its own jobs page. We go through what your site needs with you first.
An evening phone call, right after the ward round: the mother will be discharged from hospital in three days, and the daughter sits on the hallway chair with her phone, looking for a home care service in town. She wants to know two things straight away: do you even drive to this part of town, and are you taking on new clients right now? Three days later the same page is opened by a qualified nurse who would like to change employer. She is looking for something entirely different: the round area, the rota model, whether part time from eight hours a week is possible and who handles the induction. Both land on the same small website, both decide in less than a minute whether to stay, and both would feel turned away by a text written only for the other group. This article shows how a home care service can lay both routes side by side without doubling the size of the site, using figures from official statistics and the service terms that appear in the law itself.
Key takeaways
- A home care service advertises to two audiences on the same page. In December 2023 close to 5.7 million people (Destatis) in Germany were in need of long-term care, and 86 percent of them were cared for at home.
- 1.1 million people in need of care (Destatis) lived in private households and were looked after together with, or entirely by, outpatient care services. 3.1 million received care allowance only and were cared for mainly by relatives - that is the pool the next enquiry comes from.
- Write for the relatives, not for the person in need of care: at the end of 2023, 78 percent (Destatis) of people in need of care were 65 or older, and roughly a third were at least 85.
- The jobs page is the second half of the site, not an appendix. At outpatient services the part-time rate stood at 68.1 percent (Destatis) in 2021, against 30 percent across all economic sectors. Anyone who mentions part time for the first time in the interview has already lost half the application.
- Services belong on the page in plain language with the legal reference beside them: Section 36 SGB XI names body-related care measures, nursing support measures and help with running the household. Medical treatment care is something different and runs under Section 37 SGB V.
Two readerships, one page
Most industry websites have one audience. A home care service has two, and the two groups put opposite questions to the same text. Relatives search under time pressure: the discharge date is fixed, the appointment at the care advice centre is not, and the question is not "what can you all do?" but "will you take us?". Care workers search without time pressure but with experience: they know what a round looks like, they spot an empty job advert in ten seconds, and they read the services page as well, because it tells them how the business actually works. Write for one of the two groups and squeeze the other in later, and you end up with a page on which neither feels addressed.
Service area with place names
Not "the Hildesheim region" but the towns and districts your rounds actually drive to. A place name someone recognises answers the first question without a phone call.
Capacity with a date
Whether you are currently taking on new clients, and since when that sentence has said so. One line touched once a month saves both sides a phone call.
Call-back instead of a form journey
A number where somebody picks up or an announcement with a call-back time, plus a short form for everything that can wait until tomorrow.
Services in plain language
What you actually do in the morning, in words a daughter understands. The legal reference sits beside it as a footnote, not above it as a headline.
Who comes into the house
How many different people ring the doorbell as a rule and whether there is a fixed key worker. That is the most frequent question on the phone.
Who pays for what
The difference between benefits in kind, care allowance and the relief amount in three sentences, with a pointer to statutory care advice rather than advice of your own.
These six points sound obvious and are still missing from many websites in this field, because the mission statement comes first there and the list of towns sits in the footer. Then there is the question of who is reading: often it is the wife or the husband, themselves over seventy, with a tablet on the kitchen table. What a page has to do differently for those readers - type size, line length, phone number as the first element - is set out in customers over 65. Those measurements are at the same time half the way to accessibility; which obligations apply to small businesses and which do not is covered in accessible website.
Naming capacity and service area honestly
The market is large, and that is precisely the problem for the page: it is so large that nobody on the outside can tell whether you still have a place free. According to the Federal Statistical Office, close to 5.7 million people (Destatis) in Germany were in need of long-term care within the meaning of the long-term care insurance act in December 2023. Close to nine out of ten of them were cared for at home. The group your page is about is smaller than that total and larger than your own client list: it is the part of the home-cared population where the relatives reach their limit. That transition is exactly the moment when somebody starts searching.
What the figures show
One very practical decision for the website follows from those figures: the service area belongs on the page as a list, not as a map image. A map section does not answer the question "do you drive out to us?", because nobody carries district boundaries in their head. A list of the towns answers it immediately, and it is at the same time the raw material for location pages later on - when those are worth the effort and when they are not is covered in one page per town. As long as it is only a list, an overview of the regions is model enough: name the towns, add the driving time, done.
| Detail on the page | What relatives read into it | What happens when it is missing |
|---|---|---|
| Towns and districts on the rounds | "We are inside the area" - the decision is made without a call | The call comes anyway, costs you time and often ends in a refusal |
| Capacity with a date | "Worth asking" or "not today" - both are an answer | Every enquiry starts from zero, even when you have had no capacity for weeks |
| Availability in the evening and at weekends | When somebody answers the phone and when they call back | The search carries on while your announcement plays |
| Care grades you look after | Whether their situation fits your profile | At the end of 2021 only 16.5 percent of people in outpatient care (Destatis) had care grade 4 or 5 - without a note, both sides are guessing |
| Waiting time until the first meeting | Whether there is enough time before the discharge | The family picks the service that named a number |
Services under SGB XI in plain language
On many home care websites the list of services is written in the language of the benefits catalogue. That is understandable, because billing demands that language, but it helps nobody dealing with it for the first time. The legal text itself is shorter and clearer than its usual paraphrases: under Section 36 SGB XI, people in need of care in care grades 2 to 5 are entitled, in the case of home care, to body-related care measures and nursing support measures as well as to help with running the household, as a benefit in kind. Those three terms are the framework. Everything you offer can be sorted under them - and each of the three can be translated in a single sentence.
- Body-related care measures. Washing, showering, dressing, help getting up and going to the toilet. On the page it is better to call this "the morning round" or "the evening visit", because that is how people talk about it.
- Nursing support measures. Company through the day, orientation, structure, conversation. This is the part relatives expect least and need most urgently once dementia is involved.
- Help with running the household. Shopping, laundry, cleaning, meals. Here the page should say what you actually take on and what you do not - otherwise that line gets renegotiated at the kitchen table.
- Medical treatment care. Changing dressings, administering medication, injections, compression stockings. This is home nursing care under Section 37 SGB V and therefore a different payer: it is prescribed by a doctor where it is necessary to secure the aim of the medical treatment. In practice, one sentence about this saves you the single most frequent follow-up question.
- Relief benefits. Under Section 45b SGB XI, people receiving care at home are entitled to a relief amount of up to 131 euros a month, earmarked among other things for services provided by outpatient providers. Explaining that amount on the page also reaches the families who do not yet feel ready for a care arrangement.
On top of that comes the decision every family makes before they even call: care allowance or benefits in kind. Section 37 SGB XI puts it briefly: people in need of care in care grades 2 to 5 may apply for care allowance instead of home nursing assistance. Many relatives do not know that the two can be combined, and so they never start searching. A short paragraph on the services page that names this combination and points to the statutory care advice is one of the few texts that turn pure information into an enquiry. If the wording is hard going, the framework for it is in website copywriting.
The neighbour test
The call-back form with a care grade field
The contact form of a home care service has a job that sets it apart from every other one: it is meant to prepare a phone call, not to replace it. Nobody arranges care through a form, but almost everybody is glad to be able to hand over the three details you would ask for first anyway. That is why the button should read "request a call back" rather than "submit", and why a phone number set larger than the form itself belongs beside it. That short forms bring more enquiries than long ones applies here as everywhere - the reasoning is in contact form: more enquiries with fewer fields.
Four fields are enough
Name, call-back number, town and a time window for the call. Everything else is settled faster and more kindly by the conversation than a form could manage.
One field for urgency
"Discharge coming up" as an option, with a date. That is the only detail that genuinely changes your order of work the next morning.
Care grade optional only
As a selection with a "don't know yet" option, and explicitly not as a required field. Many enquiries arrive before a grade has been assessed at all.
With the care grade, however, the question stops being one of design. Under Section 15 SGB XI, people in need of care are assigned a degree of need (care grade) according to the severity of the impairments to their independence or abilities - so the entry describes a state of health. That makes it health data within the meaning of Article 9 of the General Data Protection Regulation, and such data is subject to a processing ban in the first instance, with the explicit consent of the data subject as one of the exceptions. For the form this means: a separate tick box with a clear purpose, no pre-selected consent, and a section of its own in the privacy notice. The groundwork for that is in GDPR basics for a small website.
A care grade is health data
A home care website is not judged by how complete it is, but by whether an exhausted daughter at ten in the evening knows within two minutes whether to call tomorrow. Everything that stretches those two minutes is effort without return.
The jobs page for care staff
The second half of the site decides whether you can deliver on the first half at all, because an admission rarely fails on willingness and often on staffing. The labour market is large and tight at once: at the end of 2021, according to the Federal Statistical Office, 442,900 people (Destatis) were employed by outpatient care providers, and the number of outpatient services rose within twenty years from 10,600 to 15,400 (Destatis). Anyone applying therefore has a choice and reads your jobs page critically. One figure steers almost every application in the background: in 2021, 68.1 percent (Destatis) of staff at outpatient services worked part time; among female staff the rate was 71.5 percent and among male staff 49.1 percent. Across all economic sectors the part-time rate in the same year was 30 percent (Destatis).
- Part time belongs in the headline, not the small print. If two out of three people in the sector work part time, part time is the normal case and not an exception you have to ask for. "From eight hours a week" in the heading is a stronger sentence than any description of the working atmosphere.
- The round area belongs on the page. The same list of towns that reassures relatives answers the commute question for applicants. Somebody who knows the round starts ten minutes from home is more likely to apply.
- Rota in numbers rather than adjectives. How many weekends a month, how far ahead the plan is fixed, how often people have to cover. Being honest here loses you two applications and wins one that stays.
- Induction with a name and a duration. How many days are accompanied and by whom. For people returning after family leave this is often the deciding criterion.
- A route without a covering letter. A call-back request with a number and a time window, an application form as the second option. A specialist in a full-time post does not write a covering letter simply to look around.
These points apply to small businesses in any sector and are simply more visible in care; the basic structure of such a page is described in careers page: finding applicants through your own website. The difference from a trade or a restaurant is that your applicants read the client-facing pages too. A services page that takes support and everyday company seriously is therefore also a staffing argument - and one that only lists per-minute prices is too, just in the other direction.
How to build the site
The scope is smaller than the two readerships suggest: six or seven pages carry a home care service, and more of them makes maintenance harder rather than the effect bigger. A starter package covers that scope; which profiles exist per sector is set out in the industry overview, and what each scope costs is shown on the packages page. If you have only just registered the business and are still short of the first line of text, the order of the first few weeks is described in business registered, website missing.
- Home page: one sentence on the service area, the capacity note with its date, phone number and call-back. No mission statement above the fold.
- Services: the three terms from Section 36 SGB XI in plain language, plus medical treatment care under Section 37 SGB V and the relief amount as a section of its own.
- Service area: towns and districts as a list, with driving time from the base and a note on where the round ends.
- Team: who rings the doorbell, in which role, with photos only where those pictured have consented - and without claims you cannot back up.
- Jobs: a page of its own with part time in the title, the round area, rota figures and a call-back route without a covering letter.
- Contact and legal pages: a call-back form with four fields, a privacy notice with its own section on health data, an imprint naming the responsible supervisory body.
What comes after that is the real work: the capacity note goes stale within four weeks, the round area changes with every new client, and a job advert that has stood unchanged for a year reads to applicants like a warning. That is exactly what ongoing website maintenance is for - a capacity note is worth only as much as the date beside it. Whether the whole structure carries shows in the end in two numbers: call-back requests per month and applications per quarter. How to count those without much effort is described in is your website bringing in enquiries?.
The next step
Sources and studies
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