Website design for healthcare and medical practices
Clinics, dental and medical practices, and care providers. Sites that hold up to the rules the rest of the web does not have to think about.
A clinic site is not a brochure site with nicer photos
Most websites can say what they like. A healthcare site cannot. What you name, what you claim, what you show and where the enquiry lands are all constrained, and the constraints come from several directions at once: the advertising codes, your professional body, medicines regulation, and data protection law that treats a sentence about a symptom as special category data.
The practical result is that a designer who has not worked in the sector will hand you a beautiful site full of things you have to take down. We have built in this sector, including a full bilingual clinic site, and the guardrails are part of how we work rather than something added at the end.
One thing to be clear about from the start: we are not your regulatory adviser. We build to the constraints, we flag what looks risky, and we put checks in place so a risky phrase cannot quietly return in a later edit. Your clinical or legal lead signs off what is published.
What actually catches practices out
Naming prescription-only medicines
Prescription-only medicines cannot be advertised to the public in the UK. In aesthetics that catches the brand names everybody uses in conversation, and it catches them on service pages, price lists, image alt text, page titles and meta descriptions. The fix is not to stop offering the treatment, it is to write about the consultation, the concern and the treatment area instead. On the builds where this matters we run an automated check over the built site that fails the build if a banned term reappears, so a rushed edit in eight months cannot undo the work.
Claims you cannot evidence
Regulator registration, professional body membership, accreditations, clinician titles, outcome claims, and superlatives such as leading or best. Every one of those needs a source before it ships. Titles are worth particular care: a clinician described a grade above their actual registration is a real risk, and it usually gets there through nobody checking rather than anyone intending it.
Testimonials and before and after imagery
Both are powerful and both are restricted, differently depending on the treatment and on which body regulates you. Consent needs to be documented, imagery needs to be representative rather than the best case, and testimonials about conditions requiring professional advice are constrained under the advertising codes. We will build the pages to carry this content properly. What is publishable is your call.
Enquiry data is health data
The moment a patient types a symptom into your contact form, you are processing special category data under UK GDPR. That means knowing which processor receives it, where it lives, what the agreement says, how long it is kept, and who can open the inbox. Keeping the public form minimal and moving the clinical detail into the system built for it is usually both safer and better for the patient.
The pages patients expect to find
Complaints procedure, privacy notice, terms, fees, and clear detail on who the clinicians are. These are not filler. They are among the pages a cautious patient checks before booking, and a complaints page that names no route of escalation is a gap worth closing rather than a formality.
Accessibility
Healthcare sites are read by people who are unwell, older, in pain, or using assistive technology, which is a stronger case for accessibility than most sectors ever have. Real text rather than images of text, contrast that survives a bright waiting room, keyboard-navigable menus, sensible headings, and labelled form fields.
The integration is the product
For most practices, the website is not where the work happens. The diary, the clinicians and often the records already live in a practice management system, and the website's job is to get the right patient into the right diary without a phone call.
We integrate with what you already run rather than asking you to move. On the clinic build described below, services route across two separate booking systems, with the routing defined once in data rather than hardcoded into thirty pages. Two consequences follow from that, and both matter more than they sound.
- →A service with no diary configured shows no booking link at all, rather than a link into the wrong diary. Failing quietly beats failing wrongly when it is someone's appointment.
- →Patients never see a vendor name. Buttons say what the patient is booking, not which software company is behind it.
The other decisions worth making early: whether each service deep-links to its own booking page or everything points at one generic diary, whether the widget is embedded or linked, what an embedded widget does to page speed on a phone, what it sets in the way of third-party cookies, and what the fallback is when a patient would rather ring you.
Credibility is built from specifics
Patients choosing a private clinic are making a decision about their body with incomplete information, and they are checking you against two or three others. What settles it is rarely the design. It is whether the site answers the questions they are too polite to ask.
- →Named clinicians, with their actual titles and registration details where appropriate, not anonymous team photos
- →Photographs of your real premises and real people, because stock photography reads as evasion in this sector
- →Published fees, or a range with what moves it, because an unanswered price question loses the patient quietly
- →A clear account of what happens at the appointment, how long it takes and what it involves
- →Plain English on every service page, written for a worried person rather than a colleague
- →An address, a phone number and opening hours that are correct and easy to find
- →No hype. In healthcare, restraint reads as competence and overclaiming reads as risk
Work in this sector
Real client builds, not demos. The demo library on our work page is labelled separately and honestly.
A 46-page bilingual build: 23 English pages and 23 Arabic pages, mirrored node for node, so every page has a real counterpart and the language switch takes a patient to the matching page rather than back to the home page. The Arabic side is right-to-left in its own right rather than a flipped copy of the English, with hreflang across the pair so search engines serve the correct version.
Services route across two separate booking systems, defined once in data so the routing cannot drift page by page, and a service with no diary configured shows no booking link rather than the wrong one. Patients never see a vendor name. Fee tables, service pages and the training academy's course pages are all generated from the same structured data in both languages, which is what makes a site this size maintainable.
Content compliance is enforced by automated checks that run before every commit and fail the build on banned terminology, on vendor names leaking into patient-facing text, and on English leaking into the Arabic pages. Static build, canonical host, redirects from the alternate hosts, and a sitemap covering all 46 URLs.
Care-adjacent rather than clinical, and a useful example of the same discipline applied to a different audience. We built and shipped a standalone Specialised Supported Housing page on the live production site, with a working enquiry form, spam handling, and a submission flow that confirms success to the visitor rather than leaving them guessing.
The page was then folded into the main navigation across the English and Arabic sides of the site, which meant handling right-to-left link order, a label that could not be allowed to wrap mid-phrase at awkward widths, and an accessible mobile menu with keyboard and escape handling rather than a hamburger that only works with a mouse.
What a healthcare build usually includes
- →A page per service, written in plain English and checked against the advertising constraints
- →Clinician profiles with accurate titles and registration detail
- →Published fees, driven from structured data so one edit updates every page showing that price
- →Booking integrated with the system you already run, routed by service
- →A minimal enquiry form, with the clinical detail moved into the system built for it
- →Privacy notice, complaints procedure and terms, treated as real pages rather than filler
- →Structured data for the practice, its location and its services
- →A second language where you need one, built as a mirrored site rather than a plugin translation
- →Static hosting, handed over on your own account, with the code yours to take anywhere
Scope and price are set per practice, because a single-site dental practice and a bilingual multi-service clinic are not the same job. Our standard build pricing is published on the services page and is the right starting point for the conversation.
See pricing →Related reading
Common questions
Can we name treatments like Botox on our website?
Prescription-only medicines cannot be advertised to the public in the UK, and brand names of injectable toxins fall under that. In practice this means writing about the consultation, the concern being treated and the treatment area rather than naming the medicine. It is one of the most common reasons a clinic site needs rewriting, and it is easy to get wrong because so many competitor sites get it wrong too. We build the copy to that constraint and your clinical lead signs it off.
Should we display our regulator registration on the site?
Only where it is current and you can evidence it. Registration details, professional body membership and clinician registration numbers all build trust when they are accurate and all create risk when they are stale or aspirational. Our rule on a healthcare build is that any regulatory claim needs a source before it ships, and where a project warrants it we add an automated check so the claim cannot reappear in a later edit without someone deciding to allow it.
Can we use patient testimonials and before and after photos?
It depends on the treatment and on which professional body you answer to, and the rules are stricter than most clinics assume. Testimonials that refer to conditions a patient should be seeing a qualified professional about are restricted under the advertising codes, and imagery for cosmetic procedures carries its own conditions around consent, representativeness and context. We will build the pages to hold this content properly, with consent handling and captions, but the decision on what is publishable is your responsible person to make, not ours.
Where does a website enquiry form send patient data?
Wherever the form provider decides, which is why it matters. An enquiry describing a symptom is health data, and health data is a special category under UK GDPR. That means knowing which processor receives it, where it is stored, what your agreement with them says, how long it is kept and who can read the inbox it lands in. The safest pattern for most practices is to keep the form deliberately minimal and move the clinical conversation into the booking or records system that is already set up for it.
Can you work with our existing booking system?
Yes, and that is usually better than replacing it. Your diary, your clinicians and often your records already live there. We integrate around it: the right service links to the right diary, the booking route is defined in one place rather than scattered across the pages, and where a practice runs more than one system we route by service so nobody books into the wrong one. If a service has no diary configured, it shows no booking link at all rather than a link that goes somewhere wrong.
Can you build the site in more than one language?
Yes. We have delivered bilingual English and Arabic builds, including a right-to-left layout rather than a mirrored afterthought, a language switch that takes the patient to the matching page instead of dumping them on the home page, and hreflang so search engines serve the right version. Treat a second language as close to a second site for budget and maintenance: every page needs a counterpart, and every future edit needs making twice.
Talk to someone who has built one.
Fifteen minutes. Bring your booking system, your service list and whatever the last agency told you was fine.
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