My Surgery Website is closing: what your practice needs to do before March 2027

If your surgery website is on My Surgery Website, you have a deadline whether you have thought about it or not. MSW is winding down. Its notice sets out two dates: it stops providing site updates and support beyond the later of your agreement expiry or 1 September 2026, and hosting continues until 31 March 2027.

I am a GP partner, not a neutral observer, and my company builds practice websites. So let me be straightforward about the conflict: I would like your business. This article is written so that it is useful even if you never contact us, because most of what follows is work you have to do regardless of who you choose next.

First, check your own agreement

Every article about this, including this one, quotes the headline dates. Your contract is what actually governs your practice. Find it, and check three things: when your agreement expires, what notice period applies, and whether you have paid for a period that extends past the dates above.

That last point matters financially. At least one practice has shown a letter in which MSW agreed to refund the unused months of an annual payment once the new website was live and the domain had moved, and waived its usual notice. I cannot tell you that everyone will be offered the same, and I would not plan around it. Ask MSW in writing what applies to you, and keep the answer.

What actually happens when a website stops being updated

Practices tend to read "no more updates" as an inconvenience. For a GP website it is a compliance problem, because a practice website is not a brochure. It carries contractual information that is required to be correct.

Under the GMS regulations your website must publish everything in your practice leaflet, and the practice must review that information at least once every twelve months. That includes your clinicians, your opening hours, your practice area, your complaints process, how to register, your named accountable GP arrangements and your GP net earnings statement. If a partner leaves in November and your website cannot be changed, your site is wrong in a way a CQC inspector or an ICB digital review can see from their desk.

Accessibility is the other one. Public sector websites must meet WCAG 2.2 AA, and an accessibility statement that has not been reviewed in two years is itself evidence of a gap. If your provider cannot make changes, you cannot fix anything an audit finds.

What you own, and what you do not

Three things are commonly confused at this point, so it is worth being precise.

Your domain name belongs to the practice. It identifies the surgery, not the supplier. If you hold a .nhs.uk domain, it is administered through NHS Digital, and it is repointed to a new provider's servers when you are ready. If a supplier administers your domain on your behalf, that administration can be moved by instructing whoever currently holds it. On the 1 September deadline, where MSW had no instruction, its notice says domain administration transferred to a named provider. That moved the administration and your contact details; it did not sign you up to anything. You can still instruct that provider to hand the domain on.

Your content belongs to the practice. The words about your clinics, your policies, your team. A reasonable provider migrates it for you and gives it back if you leave. Ask any prospective supplier, directly, what happens to your content if you leave them in three years.

The template and platform belong to the supplier. This is the part you do not own and should not expect to, which is exactly why the exit terms matter more than the design.

The questions to ask any provider, including us

If you are going to be asked to decide between suppliers this autumn, these are the questions I would ask in your position. They are deliberately the questions that are awkward to answer.

1. What is the total price in year one and in year three? Not the headline. Setup, migration, training, and the renewal figure.
2. Show me your contract's price-increase clause. If there is no clause, ask what has happened to existing customers' prices over the last three years.
3. What is the notice period, and what happens to my content when I leave?
4. Who writes the content and who checks it clinically? A supplier that hands you an empty site is handing you weeks of practice-manager time.
5. Can you show me a site you have built that meets the NHS England guidance? Ask specifically about the six-item menu, the top tasks on the homepage, and the absence of pop-ups.
6. What is your accessibility evidence? "WCAG 2.2 AA" is a claim. An audit report is evidence.
7. Are you Cyber Essentials certified and have you completed the DSP Toolkit?
8. How long does an urgent change take? A closure notice at 7am on a Tuesday is the real test of a provider.

You will notice that we do not currently score top marks on every one of these. We do not yet hold Cyber Essentials, and our accessibility position is a build standard rather than an independent annual audit. I would rather you knew that from us than discovered it later.

The NHS England guidance most practices have not read

Whoever you choose, the site they build should follow NHS England's guidance on creating a usable and accessible GP website. It is based on user testing with patients, and a few of its recommendations are unexpected enough that many suppliers quietly ignore them:

• Six menu items, no more than seven. Home, Appointments, Prescriptions, Services, About the surgery, Contact us.
• News should not be in the main menu. Patients do not visit a surgery website for news; it belongs under About.
• The homepage should be tasks, not prose. 80% of patients look at the homepage first and scan for the thing they came to do.
• A visible search box, with the word "search" on it. A magnifying glass alone measurably reduces use.
• No pop-ups or overlays. That includes the chat widgets suppliers like to sell.
• Reading age of 9 to 11. Run your key pages through the Hemingway editor and see what grade they come back as.

If you want to check your current site against this quickly, read the benchmarking tool walk-through, or paste your address into our mock-up tool, which rebuilds your site to this standard so you can see the difference side by side. It is free and does not ask for your details.

A realistic timetable

March feels far away. It is not, once you account for the way practices actually make decisions.

• October: check your agreement, ask MSW about refunds, shortlist two or three providers.
• November: get written quotes, see a site each has built, take it to a partners' meeting.
• December and January: build and content review. This is the part that takes practice time, not supplier time.
• February: switch the domain, with the old site still live until the moment you approve.
• March: contingency. Do not plan to use it.

The single mistake I would avoid is leaving it until the deadline is close enough that you take whichever provider can move fastest rather than the one that fits your practice.

If it helps, we will show you rather than tell you

We are a small team of practising NHS clinicians and practice managers in North Wales. Our websites are £399 a year with the price fixed for five years, Welsh and five other languages as standard, and a GP signs off every clinical page.

Rather than ask you to take that on trust, paste your current web address into our mock-up tool and we will build a complete version of your new site, with your team, hours, services and patient information already in it, and send you the link. There is no charge and no obligation, and if you use it to brief a different supplier, that is a fair outcome too.

Practice Digital is independent of My Surgery Website and FPM Group. Dates and arrangements described here are taken from MSW's discontinuation notice as shared with us by practices, and from the NHS England guidance linked above. Check your own notice and agreement before acting on any of it.