Healthcare Website Design Best Practices (Complete Guide)

Key Takeaway

• Prioritize the needs and preferences of your target audience when designing your healthcare website. Focus on creating a seamless and intuitive user experience through clear navigation, relevant content, and user-friendly features.
• Optimize your website for mobile devices to ensure that it functions and displays properly across different screen sizes. With the increasing use of smartphones and tablets, mobile responsiveness is essential for reaching and engaging a wider audience.
• Ensure your healthcare website is accessible to individuals with disabilities by adhering to accessibility standards such as WCAG guidelines. Implement features like alternative text for images, keyboard navigation, and proper color contrast to accommodate users with different abilities.
• Create compelling and informative content that educates and engages your audience. Use a combination of high-quality visuals, videos, and patient testimonials to convey your message effectively and establish trust with your visitors.

In today’s digital age, patients increasingly rely on the internet to find healthcare providers, research medical conditions, and schedule appointments. Therefore, it is crucial for healthcare organizations to have a website that is user-friendly, informative, and secure.

With the increasing use of smartphones and tablets, it has become crucial for healthcare websites to be mobile-responsive. According to Statista, as of 2021, mobile devices accounted for over 50% of global website traffic.

Therefore, it is essential to optimize healthcare websites for mobile devices to provide a seamless user experience. In this blog, we will discuss some key elements to consider when designing a healthcare website.

Components of an effective healthcare website design
1. Clear Navigation

The first and foremost aspect of healthcare website design is to provide clear and easy-to-use navigation. A healthcare website should have a simple and straightforward structure that guides the user through different sections of the website. The navigation should be organized, with a clear hierarchy of pages, and provide easy access to important sections such as “about us,” “services,” “doctors,” “contact,” and “patient portal.”

2. Custom design

Custom design enables you to build a website that is scalable and adaptable to future growth. By considering your long-term goals, you can design a flexible architecture that can accommodate additional content, features, and updates as your business evolves.

With a custom design, you can implement specific functionalities and features tailored to your website’s objectives. Whether it’s e-commerce capabilities, interactive forms, content management systems, or integration with third-party services, customizing the website’s functionality ensures that it meets your unique requirements and provides the desired user experience.

3. Relevant and timely content

Creating relevant and timely content for your healthcare service or product involves understanding the current trends, advancements, and challenges in your industry. By staying informed and up-to-date, you can provide valuable information to your audience that addresses their specific needs and concerns.

This may include creating content such as blog posts, articles, videos, or infographics that educate and inform your audience about the latest research, treatments, preventive measures, or lifestyle tips related to your service or product. By offering timely and relevant content, you establish yourself as a trusted source of information, build credibility, and engage your audience, ultimately driving awareness and interest in your healthcare offering.

4. Security

Healthcare websites must be designed with security in mind. Patient information must be protected and secured to prevent unauthorized access. Healthcare providers must ensure that the website complies with the latest security standards and regulations such as HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA.

5. Responsive Design

Healthcare websites should be designed with a responsive layout that adjusts automatically to different screen sizes. With the growing trend of mobile-first, it is essential to have a website that is optimized for all devices, including smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers. The website should load quickly and have a user-friendly interface that is easy to navigate.

6. Accessibility

Accessibility is a critical aspect of healthcare website design. A healthcare website must be designed to cater to users with disabilities, such as visual and hearing impairments. The website should be compatible with assistive technologies such as screen readers, voice recognition, and keyboard navigation. By ensuring the website is accessible to everyone, healthcare providers can increase their reach and provide better care to a more extensive patient population.

7. Simple and Clear Language

Healthcare providers often use medical jargon and technical terms that patients may not be familiar with. It is essential to use simple and clear language that is easy to understand. The website should be designed to provide patients with the information they need in a clear and concise manner. This approach will help patients to understand their health conditions, treatment options, and medical procedures better.

8. Visuals

Visuals such as images and videos can make healthcare websites more engaging and informative. High-quality visuals can help patients to better understand their health conditions, medical procedures, and treatment options. However, it is important to ensure that the visuals are relevant and appropriate for the context in which they are used.

9. Contact Information

Healthcare websites should include contact information such as phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses. The information should be easy to find and accessible on every page of the website. Providing easy access to contact information can help patients to get in touch with healthcare providers quickly and easily.

Best practices of healthcare website design

Use some tried-and-true best practices if you want to create a healthcare website that stands out. Here are four that can help your website stand out and are simple for beginners to adopt.

1. Do your research and pick a healthcare website development company

When building a website for healthcare, custom website design is the ideal approach. Custom website design allows you to tailor every aspect of your site to suit the unique needs of your healthcare organization.

By partnering with a professional web design company like Arkenea, you can create a website that is specifically designed to meet your goals, provide an optimal user experience, and offer the necessary functionalities for healthcare services.

Whether you need appointment scheduling systems, telemedicine capabilities, or other custom features, our expert team will collaborate closely with you to understand your requirements and design a website that reflects your branding, engages your audience, and supports your healthcare objectives.

With custom website design, you can ensure that your online presence accurately represents your healthcare services and effectively serves your patients and visitors.

2. Determine which website resources your patients require and work to give them.

Determining the website resources your patients require and providing them is crucial for delivering valuable and user-centered healthcare information and services.

While a charitable organization would significantly rely on its donation page, a family doctor’s office may not need a donation button on their website. Another option is for a dentist who wants to engage their patients to post blogs and videos on how to clean their teeth and what foods are and aren’t suitable for eating while wearing braces.

In order to decide what resources to include on your website, you must first put yourself in the position of your audience. Work with the other experts at your company to identify the resources you can offer that will enable you to deliver better care, the information your patients need to have access to while using your website, and the questions they want answered.

You can start incorporating such materials into your website after you are aware of what your audience requires. The following materials are frequently offered by healthcare organizations to their patients or clients:

• Directions and contact information for various medical clinics
• Patient websites where you can make appointments, pay payments, or get medication refills
• An “About Us” page that includes practitioner biographies for your organization
• A “Services” page that lists the products and services your business provides to clients and patients

Plan to update them frequently as you expand these different resources. Your patients’ or clients’ perceptions of your practitioners and services may be negatively impacted by an outdated website.

3. Make sure the navigation on your website is clear.

Whatever resources you offer on your website, your audience should be able to easily access them. Making sure that your website is simple to use and browse is necessary. Here are some strategies for providing an easy-to-use browsing experience:

Keep the website simple and elegant. It can be challenging for your audience to determine which resources are most important or to locate the information they’re looking for if there are too many elements vying for their attention—that is, buttons, photos, links, blocks of text, etc. Keep your website uncluttered by choosing a minimalist layout.

You may achieve this by employing only the most crucial elements of your brand’s colors and visuals, and by putting white space between every element on your web pages. This will make it easier for visitors to navigate your website and help them find key resources and information more quickly.

Include a menu bar with a limited number of selections. A navigation bar acts as a map for your website, letting visitors know what resources are offered and facilitating rapid access to what they need. To organize your navigation bar, we advise starting with the most crucial resources and working your way down.

Embrace a search box. A website visitor may not want to search through your website because they already know the specific resource or information they’re looking for. The search bar is useful in this situation. Visitors to websites can quickly access the resources and information they require by typing keywords like “services” or “contact info” into a search box.

Ask volunteers at your organization to test out your website and provide feedback as you make adjustments to the navigation experience. Even informal input like this might help you understand what needs to be changed to make your website a more useful tool for the people you serve.

4. Include a website accessibility widget.

By making your website accessible, you make sure that anyone, regardless of ability, may use it with ease. This is crucial for healthcare websites since they frequently provide information that could make the difference between life and death.

How can you foresee the requirements of those with special needs who must use your website? Some people could have vision or hearing issues. Screen readers may be used by others to navigate your website.

By including an accessibility widget, you ensure that your website is accessible to individuals with disabilities, offering features such as text-to-speech, adjustable font sizes, color contrast enhancements, and keyboard navigation options.

This commitment to inclusivity enhances the user experience for all visitors, regardless of their abilities, and aligns with your healthcare organization’s goal of providing equitable access to information and services. By customizing the widget’s design to seamlessly integrate with your website’s aesthetics, you can create a visually appealing and accessible online environment that prioritizes the needs of every user.

Examples of well-designed healthcare websites

Looking at different websites as samples is the easiest approach to acquire inspiration. Therefore, to assist you, we’ve compiled the top healthcare-specific website design examples to serve as inspiration for your own!

1. Maven – Apply color theory

The colors you choose for your website matter, despite the fact that they might appear unimportant. Color psychology exists. Consider Maven’s eco-friendly website as an example.

According to research, the color green may have a positive psychological effect by reducing pain and anxiety. The monochromatic color scheme used by Maven appears to be deliberate—and a great decision.

Consideration should be given to the color scheme of your website.

2. One Medical – Appeal to the ideals of your audience

Understanding your patient is crucial in healthcare. Knowing your target market is important in healthcare marketing.

Consider the One Medical website. The language highlights the 24-hour access to medical guidance, the tagline promises a new experience, the photographs of young people suggest a pleasant encounter and a modern workplace, and the log-in option in the navigation bar emphasizes this. The lure to Millennials who are busy and connected is evident and constant.

And One Medical is aware that doubling down offers opportunity: 43% of Millennials anticipate changing practices in the foreseeable future.

You can make sure that your website design speaks to your audience directly if you are able to recognize their values, comprehend their problems, and explain how your service is perfect for them. This keeps them coming back to your website for more details and your office for additional appointments.

3. Mayo Clinic – Explanation

Because there are so many issues, there are a lot of searches for health-related queries. Whether it’s a gut check over taking medications at the same time as a cold or looking up more details about recent symptoms. However, as a healthcare professional, your potential patients have one important question: why should they choose you?

Make it very apparent from the start why you’re the best option for your patients, in addition to answering frequently asked questions and providing useful pages about the specialization of your clinic.

This provides further details about the clinic’s research, methodology, level of experience, and impact.

4. Use faces with Synergy Private Health

Research demonstrates that people enjoy social interaction. Users’ eyes are pulled to the people in the photographs on a page containing human faces by nature.

Using photographs effectively humanizes the experience and promotes trust. The most crucial element is to include personal shots rather than bland stock photography. Even better if you can include the medical professionals.

Conclusion

Designing a healthcare website is a crucial aspect of the healthcare industry. A well-designed website can help healthcare providers to reach out to patients, provide better care, and enhance patient engagement and satisfaction. By considering these key elements, healthcare organizations can create a website that is user-friendly, informative, and secure.

Arkenea, one of the industry’s pioneers of cutting-edge technology including artificial intelligence, offers creative healthcare website development solutions. Get in touch with one of our consultants right away to discuss your project.