What makes a good website for a (medical) practice?

For a general practitioner, dentist or other healthcare practice, the website is often the first point of contact with patients: for opening hours, what to do in an emergency, repeat prescriptions or simply the address. That is exactly why a practice website has different requirements than an average business site. We recently rebuilt two healthcare practice websites and summarised the key requirements.

1. Essential information immediately findable

Patients visit a practice website with a concrete question, often on a phone and sometimes under stress. The core information therefore belongs at the top, reachable within one click:

• Opening hours and phone number(s), including what to do in an emergency
• Address and directions
• How to make an appointment or request a repeat prescription
• Cover arrangements during holidays or absence

2. Fast, even on an older phone

A practice website is visited mostly on mobile, including older devices and slow connections. A statically generated site (without a heavy CMS building pages on every visit) loads almost instantly, is hard to overload and carries fewer security risks — there is no admin environment to hack. Speed is also a ranking factor at Google.

3. Accessible to everyone

Healthcare is for everyone — so the website should be too. Think sufficient contrast, scalable text, clear headings, keyboard operability and plain language. Formal guidelines exist for this (WCAG); for practices it is simply good service to visually impaired and older patients as well.

4. Findable locally

Patients search for “GP + town”. A good practice website works the town and region into page titles and copy, uses structured data (schema.org) so Google understands the practice, opening hours and location, and connects to an up-to-date Google Business Profile.

5. Privacy taken seriously

A healthcare website should not track visitors with advertising trackers. Avoid unnecessary cookies and third-party scripts; then a cookie banner is often not even needed. Forms that may contain health information deserve extra caution: send them encrypted and never keep data longer than necessary (GDPR).

6. Easy to keep up to date

Changed opening hours or a new colleague must be online quickly. That does not require a heavy CMS: in practice this information rarely changes daily, and a low-maintenance setup — with changes going through the builder or a lightweight admin — prevents outdated plugins and security issues.

How we approach this

The practice websites we build are statically generated: fast, secure and low-maintenance, with the information structure and local findability above as the starting point. Have a look at our projects or get in touch if your practice website is due for renewal.