Opening The Front Door: Senior Living Operators Upgrade Websites For New Customers 

When senior living prospects do their research online, they will usually end up on a website before long. What operators put online can make or break a move-in.

Making that tough is the fact that residents are bringing new and evolving preferences with them as they start their research. That is why senior living operators such as Harbor Retirement Associates regularly overhaul and update their websites, in addition to improving search viability and making the experience more user-friendly, according to Ginger Atwood, HRA’s national director of sales and marketing.

Optima Living last overhauled its website in 2025 to fit with modern user trends and better mesh with mobile devices. Optima spent the last 18 months refreshing websites for all 40 of its communities.

User behavior informs how Presbyterian Senior Living updates its website, according to Chris Holt, senior vice president of sales and marketing. The operator builds its website with videos and pages that load quickly and gears it toward AI searches and overviews.

“We pride ourselves on transparency,” Holt said. “We’re always adding content to increase our transparency with visitors.”

Website design for a new audience

Vero Beach, California-based Harbor Retirement Associates maintains its website with prospects’ adult children and offerings that appeal to baby boomers in mind, according to Atwood.

“Our goal has been to create a website experience that enables the prospects and the families to envision how they would live in our community,” Atwood said. “We’re really prioritizing the brand experience, because the brand is the emotional and psychological relationship that people have with us.”

Harbor Retirement Associates’ website includes a clear call to action for prospects on every page, which also helps exclude unqualified leads, she said. Between 2024 and 2025, the company’s website attracted fewer total visitors, but converted move-ins at a rate that was 51% higher than the previous year.

Operators don’t have to just appeal to prospective customers; they have to find ways to appeal to prospective employees as well. Vancouver, British Columbia-based Optima does this by framing pages in a way they can see themselves working in a community, in part through authentic content by using pictures and videos of current residents, their families and staff. The company can curate that experience so whoever is visiting the site can get its “full benefits,” said Karim Kassam, co-founder and principal. Between 80% and 90% of Optima’s prospect experience is digital, he added.

To make that experience better, Optima has leaned into transparency. What used to be a secret unless a prospect came in is now on display, from suite layout, unit pricing and care level pricing. The company partners with tech provider Further to provide a chatbot to allow prospects to ask questions on the website and get answers quickly too.

The decisions and changes on the website have led to a 78% increase in conversions.

“There’s nothing you can’t find by asking a question,” Kassam said.

Dillsburg, Pennsylvania-based Presbyterian Senior Living is taking things a step further in utilizing its website to focus on conversions, whether that is inquiry to tour or tour to move-in, by reducing the “friction of form filling.”

“We’re finding people jump out of form fills a lot more frequently than we would want, so reducing that friction is important,” Holt said. “We’re also looking at the speed at which things are loading … It’s probably more important than you realize in keeping your people engaged on your site.”

What comes next for websites

Harbor Retirement Associates wants to continue “pushing the envelope” of what it’s capable of with its website, according to Atwood. The company is looking to incorporate an app experience for the website that aims to not only benefit residents but staff as well, allowing them to find answers they may have easier.

Meanwhile, Presbyterian Senior Living is looking at the back end of the website, particularly with its customer relationship management system between the sales and marketing teams, to find ways to better engage with prospects, particularly those who fall out of the active sales cycle to get them interested once again.

Holt added the company is continuing to work on aligning digital messaging with its brand.

“If you look at your organization’s brand as a promise and then the values of your organization, how do they get activated in a digital space? How does that translate into a promise for people that we actually show up in the community?” she said.

Optima just started a new initiative across the company that realigned its marketing team to have lead generation reported to the sales team while digital and brand teams report to its communications department. The alignment, Kassam said, should lead to paying dividends by having more focus to get appropriate outcomes.

In the meantime, Optima is also building out content for the website that is built to be picked up by AI, which is changing the way these kinds of systems will have to operate.

“The world is shifting as we know it, and the way that we’ve used our digital platforms isn’t going to exist 12 months from now,” Kassam said. “We have to innovate … We’re all trying to find our space to be able to navigate and get there together.”

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