Most pharmacy website disappointments are not design problems. They are contract, ownership and maintenance problems that only show up a year in. These ten questions surface them before you sign. Ask every provider the same ten, write down the answers, and the comparison makes itself.
1. Who owns the domain, and in whose name is it registered?
The domain is your pharmacy's address on the internet. It should be registered to your business, at your email address, with the provider added as a technical contact if they need to manage DNS. If the provider owns it, you cannot leave without their cooperation, and you have no leverage if the relationship sours. Ask to see the registrant details.
2. Do you understand what a community pharmacy actually does?
Ask them to explain the difference between an EPS nomination and a repeat prescription request, or what a patient needs to know before booking Pharmacy First. A generalist web designer will build you a contact form and a gallery of stock pill photos. A pharmacy specialist will build service pages that reflect the way patients search and the questions they ask at the counter. This matters more than any design portfolio.
3. Where do form submissions go?
The most common failure on pharmacy websites is a nomination form that emails a shared inbox nobody checks after 6pm. Ask whether submissions land in a dashboard with a status (new, in progress, done), whether more than one member of staff can see them, and whether anything is stored securely rather than sitting in an email account. Patient data on a form is health data; it needs handling accordingly.
4. Who writes and updates the content?
There are three answers: you do; they do at an hourly rate; or they do as part of the plan. Opening hours, bank holidays, new services, staff changes, seasonal campaigns — a pharmacy website needs changing several times a year. If the answer is "you log into WordPress and do it", ask yourself honestly who in the pharmacy will.
5. What does the price include, and what is extra?
Get an itemised answer: build, hosting, SSL, domain renewal, content changes, form storage, shop payments, support. Our pharmacy website cost guide lists the usual components and price bands so you can tell whether a quote is complete.
6. Is there a minimum term, and what are the exit terms?
Twelve- and twenty-four-month contracts are common. So are "cancel any time" plans. Neither is wrong, but you should know which you are signing. Ask specifically what you receive if you leave: your content as an export, your domain transferred, your form data deleted or handed over.
7. Will the site be built around my services or a template with my logo on it?
Templates are not bad; a good template is how a provider keeps a £50-a-month price sustainable. The question is whether the template has a page per service with real eligibility information, or one generic "Our Services" page with six icons. Ask to see a live site they built for a pharmacy with a similar service mix to yours.
8. How does it perform on a phone?
Most pharmacy website traffic is mobile, and most nomination and repeat forms are completed on one. Open a site they built on your phone and try to complete the repeat prescription form. If it takes more than a minute or asks for information the pharmacy does not need, patients will abandon it too. The free website check gives you speed and mobile scores for any site in about thirty seconds.
9. What do you display for GPhC and company requirements?
A pharmacy website should show the pharmacy's registered name and address, the GPhC premises registration number, the superintendent pharmacist's name and registration number where the owner is a company, and the trading disclosures that apply to any UK company website. A provider who does not know this will not build it in. Our guide to what a UK pharmacy must display on its website lists the specifics with sources.
10. Can I see it working before I commit?
The single most useful test. A provider confident in their product can show you a working site with your pharmacy's name and services on it before you pay. A provider selling from a slide deck cannot. This is how PharmGrowth works: we build the demo first, you look through it properly, and you decide.
What the answers reveal
Lay the ten answers side by side and the pattern is usually obvious. Providers cluster into three groups:
- Generalist designers — strong on visuals, weak on questions 2, 3 and 9. Fine for a restaurant; risky for a pharmacy.
- Agencies — strong on 7 and 8, expensive on 4 and 5, and often long on 6.
- Managed pharmacy platforms — strong on 2, 3, 4 and 10; the questions to press are 1 and 6.
Whichever you choose, get the answers in writing. If you are moving from an existing provider, our guide to switching pharmacy website provider without losing rankings covers the migration itself, and the switching page explains how we handle it.