Your practice website is the front door to your services—the place patients go to book appointments, order repeat prescriptions, register, and work out how to get help. But how do you actually know whether it measures up? The standards a GP website is expected to meet are scattered across the GP contract, NHS England guidance, accessibility law, and plain-language recommendations. Very few practice teams have the time to check them all.
That is why we have launched a free website audit for GP practices. It checks your whole public website against the standards that actually apply to UK general practice, then sends you a clear, jargon-free report within one working day. It is free, there is no obligation, and every request is reviewed by a person before anything runs.
Why We Built It
NHS England’s own GP website benchmarking and improvement tool contains 50 evidence-based criteria, and NHS England estimates that a manual audit takes between 45 and 90 minutes—for that one standard alone. Add accessibility testing, reading-age checks, page speed, link checking, and security, and a proper review becomes a full day’s work that most practices simply cannot spare.
So we built an audit engine that does the heavy lifting. It applies the same checks, the same way, to every page of a website—which means the findings are consistent, comparable, and complete. A member of our team then reviews the results before anything reaches your inbox.
The Six Areas We Check
1. NHS England Benchmarking
Your site is scored against all 50 weighted criteria in the NHS GP Website Benchmarking Tool—from appointments and prescriptions to complaints signposting—plus the 9 contractual compliance checks. This area applies to practices in England; for practices in Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland, the other five areas still apply in full.
2. Reading Age
The NHS recommends that health content is understandable at roughly a reading age of 9 to 11. We score the pages patients actually use—appointments, prescriptions, registration—not a single cherry-picked page.
3. Accessibility
Automated WCAG 2.2 AA checks—the legal baseline for public-facing NHS services. Findings are split into confirmed failures, things to check yourself, and things to test by hand. We never inflate the count.
4. Speed and Performance
Google’s own Lighthouse scores for performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO—the same numbers Google itself uses when it looks at your site.
5. Link Health
Every link on your site, checked. “Broken” means confirmed dead—a 404, a server error, a domain that no longer exists. Links that merely timed out are listed separately and never counted as broken.
6. Security
HTTPS quality, browser protection headers, email anti-spoofing (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC), cookie safety, and trackers that fire before consent. Each finding is tagged with who can fix it—web agency, hosting provider, or domain owner—so nothing sits in the wrong inbox.
Thorough, and Honest About It
A quick scan of your home page tells you very little. Our audit loads your entire public website—every page, in a real browser, politely and rate-limited—so the report reflects the site your patients actually use, not a sample of it.
Just as importantly, we hold the findings to a high standard of proof:
- Unverified findings are excluded. Anything the audit cannot confirm is marked “needs review” and left out of your scores—it is never dressed up as a failure.
- A person reviews every request. Audits are run by our team, not fired off automatically the moment a form is submitted.
- Real comparison, real data. Your report includes a side-by-side comparison with a live practice website we built, audited by the same engine on the same day—and labelled as exactly that.
What You Will Receive
Within one working day of your audit running, you will receive a secure private link and a PDF containing headline grades for each of the six areas, the key problems explained in plain English, and what each one means for your patients. We never need logins or access to anything—the audit only looks at the public pages any patient can see.
If Your Website Is Already With Us
This is the same audit engine we run against the websites we build and look after. Every audit gives us exactly what we need to find and fix issues—a benchmarking criterion that is not fully met, an accessibility failure, a slow page, a link that has quietly died. And when NHS England updates its guidance, we know precisely where every site stands against the new standard. Your website is not just built to the standards—it is checked against them.
How to Request Your Audit
Requesting an audit takes about a minute: your practice name, your website address, and where to send the report. Head over to our free website audit page to get started. It is completely free, and there is no obligation to do anything with the findings.
And if you would like to talk through what your report means for your practice, get in touch—we are always happy to help.
