Circle Health
A lightning-fast, search engine optimised website that puts patients first
Circle Health website redevelopment
Reduced delivery time in months
Faster than competitor websites
Circle Health
Private healthcare provider, Circle Health, operate three hospitals in the UK, with a fourth under construction. They also run musculoskeletal triage and care services in a number of areas in the UK, and a specialist rehabilitation unit in partnership with VAMED.
This project took place over three months at the start of 2018. The website comprises around 400 treatment pages, 300 clinician profiles and around 100 additional pages.
Technical superiority
Optimised page speed
Having a website that is fast to load, technically correct, and accessible to all, is paramount in providing a first class user experience. These are also increasingly important SEO metrics for search engines such as Google. Take a look at this GTMetrix report, a tool to objectively rate the performance of Circle’s website compared to their competitors.
We were very proud of the results we achieved:
- the page load time was around 4x faster than the major competitors
- 100% accessibility score (based on W3C Accessibility Guidelines)
- Ranked higher in almost every measure of adherence to best practices
AMP enabled
Accelerated mobile pages (AMP) are Google’s latest project to speed up the web. With AMP ready pages on the website, Circle Health can deliver content instantly across multiple platforms, giving users a smoother, more engaging experience on mobile and desktop devices.
Progressive web app functionality
A progressive web app (PWA) is a website that uses new web capabilities to deliver an app-like experience to users. When patients use the new Circle Health website on a mobile phone they now get given the option to save the website to their phone’s home screens alongside their other applications. This functionality gives Circle Health the capability of sending push notifications to patients as well as other app like features as this becomes a business need.
What I like about Ollie, Rich and the team at Medico Digital is that they're responsive to our commercial needs, meet deadlines and deliver first-rate work - they're also a pleasure to work with.
Alex Singleton, Director of Marketing and Communications
Search engine optimised
With more than 175 million health-related searches made on Google each day, organic search played a key role in the development of the new website. This not only involved the page speed optimisation and location-specific features previously mentioned, but a whole raft of other technical SEO updates such as JSON schema markup and automatic alt text generation for images.
UX optimisation
Mobile first design
With a majority of Circle Heath’s website traffic coming from mobile devices, the new website was created based on designs by Circle’s in-house team to use the latest responsive technology, Bootstrap 4, to deliver an engaging and intuitive user experience on both mobile and desktop devices.
Location-specific
As each of Circle Health’s hospitals, their MSK services and rehabilitation unit operate semi-autonomously, it was a key requirement from stakeholders that each unit had its own differentiated area of the website, while at the same time making sure this didn’t negatively affect the user experience, particularly for visitors who may wish to make an enquiry. Our objective, therefore, was to make the content more relevant to users by displaying location specific content based on their location of interest.
Our solution was to implement several different headers and footers, containing business unit specific branding and presenting a different set of menu options, while always making it easy for a visitor to return back to the homepage. We encourage you to browse the sections of the website and judge for yourself if we achieved a ‘natural’ feel to the navigation.
Powerful backend functionality
Working closely alongside Circle Health’s marketing team we made sure the website CMS was tailored to their needs, enabling them to easily make use of the Umbraco framework. The website backend was designed specifically for Circle Health’s marketing team, allowing for fast, intuitive content edits and continued internal development.
Most importantly, by keeping discovery sessions and meetings to a minimum, we took the hassle out of the project and were able to deliver the redevelopment in under 5 months time.
