The NHS GP website rules most suppliers quietly ignore

NHS England's guidance on creating a usable and accessible GP website is not a style opinion. It is the output of user testing with 102 patients with low digital confidence, a further 60 patients, and research with 165 practice staff. It tells you what patients actually did when they tried to complete tasks on real surgery websites.

I read it properly while rebuilding our own templates, and found that our sites were failing several of its recommendations. We fixed ours. Here is the checklist, so you can run it against yours.

1. Six menu items. Not twelve.

The guidance recommends a maximum of seven menu items, and names the six it wants: Home, Appointments, Prescriptions, Services, About the surgery, Contact us.

In testing, patients arrived with a keyword in mind, usually "appointment" or "prescription", and scanned for it. On sites with long menus they went in and out of several sections before finding anything. If Appointments and Prescriptions are not in your menu as words, you are making the two most common visits harder than they need to be.

2. News does not belong in the menu

This one surprises people. The guidance explicitly recommends against putting News in the main menu. Patients do not come to a surgery website for news; they come to do a task. News belongs under About the surgery, where someone looking for it will still find it.

3. The homepage is a list of tasks, not a welcome message

80% of patients look at the homepage first and scan it for what they came to do. The guidance is blunt: put all key tasks high on the homepage, and do not have paragraphs of text there. The eight tasks it identifies are making or changing an appointment, repeat prescriptions, sick notes, test results, registering, the phone number, opening times and the address.

Most practice homepages open with a welcome paragraph from the partners. It is warm, and almost nobody reads it.

4. A visible search box, with the word "search" on it

Search is one of the three ways patients look for things. The research found that when search was shown only as a magnifying glass icon, people used it measurably less than when the word "search" appeared. On mobile this matters more, not less.

5. No pop-ups and no overlays

Section 3.12 says to remove them. That includes the chat widget your supplier may be selling you as an upgrade. If a patient on a small screen has to dismiss something before they can read your opening hours, the overlay has cost you more than it earned.

We had to take our own medicine here: our chat widget is now off by default on NHS GP sites and only appears if a practice asks for it.

6. Write for a reading age of 9 to 11

Eleven million people in the UK have literacy challenges. The guidance asks for plain English at roughly grade 4 to 5, and recommends testing content in the Hemingway editor. Paste your appointments page in and see what grade comes back. Most practice pages I have tested come back two or three grades too high, usually because of sentences that began life in a policy document.

7. Do not use a website contact form for clinical requests

This is the one with real governance teeth. The guidance says online contact forms that are not online consultation tools should not be used unless the supplier has completed clinical safety assurance, meaning a hazard log and a clinical safety case report signed by their clinical safety officer. Email addresses should also come off contact pages for clinical use.

If your website has a "contact the doctor" form that emails reception, ask your supplier for their clinical safety case. The answer is informative either way.

8. Mobile first, and the menu says "Menu"

View your own site on a phone before you approve anything. The guidance also asks that the mobile menu not be a bare hamburger icon: use the word "Menu" or "More", because icons alone get ignored.

The statutory content people forget

Separately from usability, your contract requires your website to carry everything in your practice leaflet, reviewed at least annually. The items most often missing when I look at a practice site are the GP net earnings statement, the practice boundary, named accountable GP arrangements, whether the practice teaches or trains, and the policy on violent or abusive behaviour.

Run the check

Ten minutes with your own site and this list will tell you where you stand. If you would rather see it than audit it, paste your address into our mock-up tool: it rebuilds your site against this guidance so you can compare the two. It is free, and there is nothing to sign.

If you are on My Surgery Website and have to move anyway before March 2027, you may as well move to something that meets this guidance. We wrote the practical checklist for that move separately, including the questions to ask every supplier you speak to.

Source: NHS England, "Creating a highly usable and accessible GP website for patients". Some requirements referenced here, such as CQC registration, apply to England only; accessibility duties and the usability research apply across the UK.