A school site has two jobs: publish what the law requires where it can actually be found, and stay up on the morning half the parents check it at once.
Required information that has to be findable, and one unannounced morning a year when the whole parent body arrives at once.
A closure notice brings every parent to the site inside about twenty minutes, which is a larger spike than anything else in the school year and it arrives with no warning at all.
Policies, results, funding and admissions live at stable URLs in the structure inspectors and parents look for, rather than wherever the most recent redesign happened to put them.
Contrast, heading structure, keyboard navigation and document alternatives are part of the template rather than something audited in after somebody complains.
Policy PDFs and newsletters are served from the edge and keep their URLs across redesigns, because those links get emailed to parents and then sit in inboxes for years.
Teachers and office staff edit content on roles that cannot install, update or delete anything structural, and larger changes go through a staging copy first.
The predictable part of a school site is the calendar. The part that breaks it is a closure, an inspection or an admissions deadline turning up at the same time.
Every parent checks inside the same twenty minutes and they are all asking for the same page. Handled properly that is the easiest kind of surge there is.
These are the settings that differ from a standard WordPress site on the same plan. Each follows from statutory publishing duties and one unannounced surge a year.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Closure-day capacity | Homepage and notice banner served entirely from the edge | Every parent requests the same page inside twenty minutes, so the surge is fully absorbable provided the notice is not embedded in something dynamic. |
| Statutory page URLs | Fixed and carried through redesigns | Required information has to be findable by somebody who has never used your site before, including on the day an inspector goes looking for it. |
| Accessibility | Contrast, headings and keyboard order set in the template | Public sector accessibility requirements apply to schools, and retrofitting them after a complaint costs considerably more than building them in. |
| Policy documents | Edge-served with URLs retained across rebuilds | A newsletter link emailed to eight hundred parents gets opened for years afterwards, long after the site itself has been redesigned. |
| Staff roles | Content editing without plugin, theme or user-management rights | The office administrator updating term dates should not be able to take the site down the week before an inspection. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Free migration, accessibility in the template, and statutory pages that stay where they are.