Design for the five questions. Put services, clinicians, locations and hours, insurance and booking within one tap of the home page, make the booking path work on a phone, and write each service page in the patient's words with a clinician's review. Then meet the three technical duties: accessibility to WCAG, speed to Core Web Vitals, and a patient side with no third-party tags without a BAA.
What to leave out: stock photos of actors in white coats, promised outcomes, before-and-after presented as typical, testimonials without written authorization, and a contact form that asks for symptoms.
The five questions, and the pages that answer them
Patients arrive with five questions. The site's structure is those five, one tap from the home page:
- What do you treat? A page per service line, in the patient's words, covering what the visit involves, who it is for, what to bring, how billing works where you choose to publish it, and how to book.
- Who treats it? A page per clinician with a real photo, credentials, training, languages, what they treat and a booking link; patients choose people.
- Where and when? A page per location with address, map, parking, hours including walk-in and holiday hours, and a phone number that is tappable.
- Do you take my insurance? A clear insurance and payment page, kept current, with a plain line on what to do if a plan is not listed.
- How do I book? A booking path that works on a phone in a few taps, with a phone option for those who want it, built on the patient side of the site as the HIPAA section below requires.
Booking on a phone is the page that matters
Most patients reach the site from a search on a phone, and the booking path is where the site earns its keep. Make the book button visible on every screen, keep the form to what scheduling needs, show available times where your system allows, confirm by text or email through an approved channel, and test the whole path on a real phone before launch and after every change. A redesign that improves everything except the booking path has improved nothing a patient can feel; our website redesign page explains how we protect that path while a site moves.
Accessibility: a legal duty, with a named standard
The U.S. Department of Justice's guidance on web accessibility says the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to businesses open to the public under Title III, that such businesses must provide full and equal enjoyment of their services and take steps to provide appropriate communication aids and services where necessary to communicate effectively with people with disabilities, and that existing technical standards, including the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the Section 508 Standards, provide helpful guidance on how to make website features accessible.
The World Wide Web Consortium's WCAG overview describes WCAG 2.2, published on 5 October 2023 and updated on 12 December 2024, with 13 guidelines organized under four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust, and 9 new success criteria over WCAG 2.1. For a practice that means readable contrast and text size, every image and control labeled, full keyboard operation, forms that announce their errors, captions on video, and no content that depends on color alone. Patients with low vision, motor and cognitive disabilities are over-represented among the people a practice serves, so this is also simply good design.
Speed, to Google's targets
Google's Core Web Vitals guidance sets three targets, each at the 75th percentile of page loads: a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, an Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds and a Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. Practice sites fail them with oversized photos, embedded maps and chat widgets on every page, and tag managers firing scripts a patient never sees. Compress images, load maps and widgets on demand, and keep the tag list short and documented, which also serves the HIPAA section below.
Content a clinician stands behind
Google's helpful content guidance asks whether a page shows first-hand expertise and is written or reviewed by someone who demonstrably knows the topic, and names trust as the most important quality. On a medical site that means each service and condition page is written or reviewed by a named clinician with credentials, dated, with sources, and free of promised outcomes. The FTC's Health Products Compliance Guidance is the limit for anything that reads as a claim: health benefit claims need competent and reliable scientific evidence, and before-and-after images and testimonials convey claims. Describe the condition, the options and the risks, and let the clinician's name carry the page. Our guide to medical practice marketing strategies covers the content plan around the site.
The HIPAA side: forms, tracking and the line through the site
The HHS Office for Civil Rights' tracking bulletin says that on pages where a person schedules an appointment, uses a symptom checker, or logs in or registers for a portal, tracking technologies may disclose protected health information, that a tracking vendor receiving PHI is a business associate needing a business associate agreement, and that a website banner asking users to accept cookies is not a valid HIPAA authorization. Design the site with a line through it: marketing pages with no health input on one side, which may carry ordinary analytics; appointment, symptom, portal, login and registration pages on the other, with no third-party tags without a BAA, secured form delivery and no plain email to a shared inbox. Keep the contact form free of health fields. Our guide to HIPAA-compliant website design sets out the whole map, including the June 2024 court order.
Local signals the site should carry
Google's guidance on local ranking rests local results on relevance, distance and prominence and says a complete, accurate profile is more likely to show. The site supports that with a location page per office that matches the Business Profile's name, address, phone and hours exactly, and with reviews handled within the rules. BrightLocal's 2026 survey, summarized by PinMeTo, found 74% of US consumers look for reviews from the last three months and 80% are more likely to use a business that replies to all its reviews. Show reviews only from the platforms that hold them, with no incentives and no filtering, and never confirm anything about a patient's care in a reply.
What to leave out
Six things that make medical sites worse:
- Stock photos of actors in white coats; use the real team and rooms.
- Promised outcomes, cure language and before-and-after presented as typical results.
- Testimonials or patient stories without the patient's written authorization.
- A contact form that asks for symptoms or a reason for visit; route health questions to a secured channel.
- Chat widgets, pixels and session recording on the patient side without a BAA.
- A PDF as the only way to read a form or a price list; it is rarely accessible on a phone.
If you want it designed and built with you
PromotEdge International is an international strategy, technology, marketing and design company, and our delivery team is in India. Our web design and development page explains how we plan, design, build and test, and for a practice we design the patient pages separated from the marketing pages and document every tag. We do not certify compliance and we do not call ourselves HIPAA compliant; we sign a HIPAA business associate agreement where our work touches patient data. This guide is general information, not legal advice.
Facts we rely on: see our company facts for what we state about ourselves and where each fact comes from.