How to choose a web designer for your medical practice

A practice website is not a brochure. It is where a patient decides whether to trust you, where they type their phone number and sometimes why they are calling, and where Google decides whether to show you at all. Get the builder wrong and you do not just get an ugly site. You get a slow one that Google buries, a form that sends symptoms through somebody's inbox unencrypted, and no one to call when it breaks.

Most of that is decided before any code is written, in the conversation where you pick who builds it. Here is what that conversation should contain.

What does a medical practice website have to do that other sites do not?

Three things, and they are the three most often skipped.

It has to handle patient information carefully, because some of what patients type into a website is protected health information. It has to be usable by people with impaired vision, hearing or motor control, which for a healthcare provider is not only good practice but a compliance question under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act. And in Florida, it usually has to work in Spanish, written for Spanish speakers rather than run through a translator.

A designer who has only built restaurant and gym sites will not raise any of these on their own. You have to ask.

What happens to the information a patient types into my site?

Ask this first, and listen for a specific answer.

A contact form on a practice site is not neutral plumbing. If a patient writes "I need an appointment about a lump I found", that is protected health information the moment it exists, and it is now travelling through whatever service the designer wired the form to. If that service is a generic form provider with no business associate agreement in place, the practice is exposed, not the designer.

The safe pattern is simple and it is what you should hear back: the public website collects the minimum needed to make contact, it says plainly not to send medical details through it, and anything clinical happens in the patient portal or on the phone. If instead you hear "we just use the standard form plugin", that is your answer about how much thought went into it.

Can I see three sites you built, and can I open them on my phone?

Not a gallery of mockups. Three live URLs, on your own phone, right there.

Look for how fast the first screen appears, whether the phone number is tappable without pinching, whether anything jumps around while it loads, and whether you can find the appointment action in under five seconds. A designer's own portfolio being beautiful tells you about their taste. Their clients' sites being fast on a phone on cellular tells you about their engineering. It is a fair test to run on anyone, including me: the work page names every site I have built.

Ask what the Core Web Vitals are on those sites. This is the set of speed and stability measurements Google uses in ranking, and there is a free public tool, PageSpeed Insights, that anybody can run on any URL. A builder who does not know the term is not measuring, and what is not measured tends not to be true.

Who is actually going to do the work?

In a lot of agencies the person who charmed you in the meeting is not the person who writes your copy, who is not the person who builds it, who is not the person who answers when something breaks two years later. Every handoff is a place where the reason behind a decision gets lost.

Ask directly: who designs it, who writes it, who codes it, who answers the phone in eighteen months. If the answer is four different people, ask what happens when one of them leaves.

What happens after launch?

This is where most practice websites quietly die. Not with a crash, but with an expired certificate, an outdated plugin, a doctor who left two years ago still listed, and a domain that lapses because the renewal email went to a staff member who no longer works there.

A website is a running system, not a delivered object. Ask what the ongoing arrangement is, what it includes, and what it does not. Ask specifically who the domain is registered to. It should always be the practice, never the designer. That single question has saved more practices from hostage situations than any contract clause. On the sites I build, that ongoing arrangement is a monthly maintenance plan covering updates, security, hosting, uptime monitoring and the domain, which stays registered to the practice.

Will the site be in Spanish, and who writes the Spanish?

In Florida this is a revenue question, not a courtesy.

There is a large difference between a site translated by software and a site written in Spanish. A patient can tell in one sentence which one they are reading, and the one that reads like a translation quietly signals that they were an afterthought. Ask whether the Spanish is written or converted, and ask to read a paragraph of it.

Ask also whether the Spanish version is a real page with its own address that Google can index, or a widget that swaps the text after the page loads. Only the first one can ever rank for a Spanish search.

What about accessibility?

Ask whether they build to WCAG 2.1 AA and how they check it. The honest answer includes a method: keyboard navigation tested, colour contrast measured, images described, headings in order, and automated checks run on every page rather than once at the end.

Beware anyone who offers to solve accessibility with an overlay widget, the little accessibility icon that floats in the corner. Those have been the subject of a large share of US accessibility lawsuits, and disability advocacy organisations have been consistent that they do not fix the underlying problems.

Who owns everything when we are done?

The domain, the code, the content, the images, the analytics account, the hosting account. The answer should be the practice, for all of it, in writing, before work starts.

What should this cost in Florida?

Enough to be built properly and not so much that you are funding an office.

A serious custom site for a practice generally starts in the low thousands as a one time build, with a monthly arrangement after that for maintenance, hosting, domain, updates and the changes you actually ask for. Under about a thousand dollars, something is being skipped, usually the speed work, the accessibility work, or the follow up. Far above it, you are often paying for account management layers rather than for your website.

What matters more than the number is that it arrives in writing, with the scope written next to it, before anything starts.

The nine questions, in one list

1. What happens to the information a patient types into my site?
2. Can I open three sites you built, on my phone, right now?
3. What are the Core Web Vitals on those sites?
4. Who designs, who writes, who codes, who answers in eighteen months?
5. What is the arrangement after launch, and what does it include?
6. Who is the domain registered to?
7. Is the Spanish written or converted, and is it its own indexable page?
8. How do you test accessibility, and do you use an overlay?
9. Do I own the domain, the code, the content and the accounts, in writing?

If you get specific answers to those nine, you are no longer choosing on taste. You are choosing on evidence, which is the only way this decision goes well.