How to make a hospital website that patients can navigate

TL;DR: How to make a hospital website

This guide covers the site for a hospital, not a clinical system. It walks through the domain, a starting template, and the pages that do the wayfinding: a department directory carrying floors, hours and direct numbers, a patients and visitors page with parking, entrances and what to bring for an admission, and a page for finding a consultant. Yola website builder gives you ready-made Services and Galleries blocks, so a department row or a photograph of the emergency entrance is an edit your communications team makes the same day. The patient portal, the medical record and appointment scheduling stay with your clinical vendor, and the site links out to them.

The second half covers the wayfinding photo set, a contact form that asks for a name, a phone number and a general reason and never for clinical detail, the accreditations a hospital can show, and one page holding visiting hours by ward, clinic days, screening sessions and service disruptions. It finishes with a Google Business Profile set to "Hospital", accessibility information such as step-free access and interpreter services, and a named owner against every page that carries a date. Work through the ten steps and a family with somebody being admitted tomorrow can find the ward, the hours and the parking tonight without calling the switchboard.

What to include

Top features of a hospital website

How to make a hospital
website in 10 steps

Your domain is what somebody reads off an appointment letter, a discharge sheet or the sign at the turning. Use the hospital's name as it appears on the building and on your letterhead, and take the .com while it is free. Where two hospitals in the region share part of a name, putting the town on the end is what stops a family driving to the wrong one at seven in the morning.

Leave hyphens and numbers out of it. A relative repeats an address down the phone at nine at night and both of those disappear on the way. Whatever you register, spell it the same way on your Google Business Profile, on the signs at the approach roads and in whichever health system directory lists you.

Yola website builder lets you search for and register a domain in the same flow you build the site in, and annual plans include a free domain for the first year. Your patient portal already sits on your clinical vendor's own address, and it stays there. This name is for the public site, and the two were never meant to be the same thing.

Nothing here needs code, and nothing here needs a project plan. Yola website builder lets you edit text, swap photos and move sections yourself, the same way you edit a document, so the person in communications who gets asked on Tuesday to change a clinic's hours can change them on Tuesday.

Answer a few questions about the hospital and Yola's AI Website Builder puts together a first draft to work from. The free plan has basic AI and the full AI tools sit on the paid plans, so treat the draft as a starting point and read every line of it against what your departments actually do. A generated sentence can quietly offer a service you do not run, or word something so it reads as clinical advice, and that is the one thing this site must never do. Hosting, an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups come with the site, so there is nothing for IT to stand up and nothing new for anyone to maintain.

Starting from a template that already has a services grid, a team section and a contact form means you are editing a page rather than designing one. That matters for a site read mostly on phones, often by somebody who is worried and in a hurry.

Start from a template

Hospital website templates

A hospital site rarely fails because it looks dated. It fails because it is a maze. Somebody whose mother is being admitted tomorrow wants four things tonight: which building, which entrance, when they can visit and where to leave the car. If any one of those takes more than two taps, they call the switchboard instead, and you have paid for the page twice.

So plan the site flat rather than deep. Six pages carry nearly all of it, and every one of them should be reachable from the header on a phone. Resist the pull to mirror your organizational chart while you do it. Patients do not look for the Division of Musculoskeletal Services, they look for orthopedics, and a directory written in the words that are on your signs is the single biggest improvement most hospital sites could make.

Draw one line clearly while you plan. This is your public information site. The patient portal, the medical record and anything that schedules a clinical appointment stay with the vendor that runs them, on their own secure address, and this site links out to that with a plain label in the header. Nothing on these pages holds patient information, and nothing on them should look as though it might.

Build these six first, then add departmental pages once the structure is standing up:

Name the services the way people say them out loud, not the way they are commissioned. Somebody looks for the maternity unit, the x-ray department or the emergency room, and a heading that reads Women's and Children's Integrated Pathway sends them straight back to the search results.

Each service needs the same four facts and can then stop: where it is, when it runs, whether a referral is needed to be seen, and the number to call about it. That is what a service page on a hospital site is for. It is not the place to describe a condition, to explain what a symptom might mean, or to suggest what somebody should do next, and a page that drifts that way turns into clinical advice you never meant to give.

Appointments are the other line to hold. Outpatient scheduling runs in the system your clinical teams already work in, so the site links to it or publishes the booking office number with the hours that line is staffed. Yola's ready-made Services block puts a department name, a short description and a contact detail side by side, which is the right shape for this, and the Pricing block handles self-pay or elective figures where you publish them. Where a department carries real search demand of its own, and maternity and imaging usually do, give it a full page instead of a row.

A hospital has no portfolio, and the photographs that earn their place here are not there to impress anyone. They are there so somebody arriving for the first time recognizes the place before they get out of the car. Shoot the main entrance as it looks from the road, in daylight, with the sign readable. Then the parking lot and the drop-off, the reception desk, the corridor into a department, and the emergency entrance from the approach it is actually signed from.

Add photographs of the people a patient will meet, with names and job titles: the ward manager, the outpatient reception team, the consultants who run the clinics. A stock photo of a smiling doctor in a corridor helps nobody find the radiology department, and most readers spot one on sight. Name the files for what is in them, riverside-general-emergency-entrance.jpg and riverside-general-radiology-corridor.jpg rather than IMG_4402.jpg, and repeat that wording in the alt text so the photos can turn up in a local image search and a screen reader has something useful to say.

Shoot when the building is quiet, and check the frame before you press the button. No patient appears in a photograph on a public hospital site without written consent, and that includes somebody out of focus in the background of a waiting room, a name on a whiteboard, a chart left on a counter and anything readable on a screen. Staff photos need consent too, and they need retaking when somebody leaves rather than a former colleague sitting on your department page for a year.

Yola's ready-made Galleries block holds the set, and on a paid plan you can lay out a custom gallery with the Custom code block. Leave a slot empty until the real photograph exists. Yola does not host video, so a short walk-through from the parking lot to the outpatient desk, which is worth having, goes on your usual video platform and gets embedded on the page.

Start with the sentence that belongs on the page itself, in plain type, beside the form and on the contact page: in an emergency, call 911 or go to the emergency department, do not use this form. Then honor it by keeping the form incapable of being anything else.

A public website is not a secure channel for health information, and a form that collects it hands you a HIPAA problem the website builder does not solve. So this one asks for a name, a phone number or email, and a general reason for contact picked from a short list: a records request, feedback or a complaint, a billing question, a media inquiry, volunteering or donations, general information. Nothing about symptoms. No date of birth, no medical record number, no insurance or Social Security number, and no open box inviting somebody to describe what is wrong. You choose exactly which fields appear, because Yola's contact form is customizable rather than pre-made, and the Forms block help article walks through setting one up.

Say what the site is not, out loud, where people can read it. No symptom checker, no triage tool, no clinical advice, no test results, and no appointment that reaches your scheduling system. Those belong to your clinical vendor and your clinical teams. The value of writing it on the page is that a visitor stops hunting for them here, and a colleague stops asking for them to be added next quarter.

Medical records requests are the one route that needs spelling out. The page should name who handles them, which authorization form the requester signs, where to send or bring it, what identification is needed and roughly how long it takes. The form starts that conversation and the health information management team finishes it properly. Yola sends an automatic confirmation the moment somebody submits, so word it to say what a submission is: a message that will be read in office hours, not a clinical contact and not an appointment. Give the switchboard number for anything that cannot wait, and put a named owner on the inbox so it is not quietly somebody's third job.

A hospital carries more verifiable credentials than almost any other organization in town, and most hospital sites bury the lot on an About page. Put them where somebody is choosing: on the home page, and on the department page where the accreditation actually applies.

Write each one as what you hold, with the body named and the date given, so a reader can go and check rather than take a sentence on trust. Where your hospital is accredited by The Joint Commission, name it and give the date of the last survey. Where you are Medicare certified and CMS publishes a star rating for you, show the rating and the period it covers. Where your state department of health licenses the facility, give the license and name the department that issued it. Never write a credential you do not hold, and never soften one you do, because something you are working toward is not an accreditation yet.

Then the designations that decide where an ambulance goes and which hospital a patient picks. Where your emergency department holds a trauma center level designation, state the level and who designated it. Where your nursing service holds Magnet recognition, say so and give the year. Where a department is an accredited stroke, chest pain or cancer program, name the accrediting body on that department's own page rather than in a row of logos at the bottom of the home page. Teaching hospitals should name their residency programs and their university affiliation too, since that is the paragraph a patient reads as depth rather than marketing.

This is the page the rest of the site exists to support. A family driving in tomorrow needs to know when they can be on the ward, and a visiting hours line that was true last spring sends them across a city at the wrong time. No amount of good design elsewhere recovers from that.

Visiting hours are not one fact, they are a list. Wards differ, and the ones that differ most are the ones people most need to check: intensive care, maternity, pediatrics, the mental health unit, and any ward under an infection restriction. Give each one its own line with the hours, how many visitors are allowed at a bedside, the rule on children, and the ward's direct number so a relative can call and ask instead of guessing. Where there is an exception for a partner staying overnight or for end of life visiting, write it down, because the alternative is a nurse explaining it at a door to somebody who has already driven in.

The same page carries everything else the hospital does to a date. Department clinic days, screening and vaccination sessions, antenatal classes, support groups, community health talks and blood drives. Each entry needs the date, the time, the building and room, what it costs if anything, and how to reserve a place, which points at your contact form rather than any booking tool.

Service disruptions belong at the top of it, and they are the entries most often forgotten. An entrance closed for construction, a parking lot out of use, a clinic moved to another building for a month, a holiday closure. None of those change anything clinically and all of them change everything practically, and a visitor who finds a locked door at the entrance your own site named is the one who ends up at the emergency department desk asking for directions.

Yola has no events or calendar block, so this is an ordinary page kept current by hand, which for a hospital is less of a limitation than it sounds: a new line is a copied row with four words changed. The discipline is ownership. Put a named person against each page, visiting hours with the lead ward manager, clinic days with each department's administrator, disruptions with facilities, along with the date it was last checked, and review it in a meeting that already happens. A page with a name and a date on it stays true. A page that belongs to everybody goes stale inside a quarter.

Most people who need you type a place name, and a fair share of them are typing it in a car. The map pack, those three listings with the little pins at the top, is often the first thing a panicking relative sees, and what it shows them is your hours, your phone number and the pin on your emergency department. Yola's SEO Optimized Website capability covers the technical side of your pages. The wording is yours, and so is the work on Google.

Before anybody announces it, use the site the way the person you built it for will. On a phone, outdoors, on one bar of signal, at night. Tap the switchboard number and check it dials. Look up a department and time how long it takes to reach its floor, its hours and its direct number. Send yourself a contact form submission and read the confirmation that comes back.

Then test it the way a good share of your visitors will use it. Turn the text size up to the largest setting your phone offers and see whether the department directory still works. Open it on a five year old handset. Spend a few minutes with a screen reader, since the alt text you wrote for image search is also what a blind visitor hears. Put the accessibility information itself on the site while you are at it, because it is the same wayfinding job: step-free routes and which entrance has them, accessible parking bays and how many, hearing loops and where they are fitted, and how to request an interpreter, including ASL, ahead of an appointment rather than on the day.

Yola sites are mobile optimized and responsive, so the layout adapts on its own, and every site gets an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups. Check page speed on the pages doing the work, which are home, departments and patients and visitors, and resize those big entrance photographs before they go up.

After launch the job is upkeep, and for a hospital it is mostly dates and names. Visiting hours, clinic days, a consultant who moves on, a number that changes when a department relocates, a parking charge that goes up. Give each page a named owner and a review interval, keep the login with more than one person so nothing waits on somebody's vacation, and walk the site once a quarter against what the signs outside actually say. A site that stays accurate holds its search ranking, and more to the point it stops sending people to the wrong door.

Common hospital website mistakes to avoid

The same few things go wrong on hospital sites, and each one either lands work back on the switchboard or sends somebody to the wrong place.

How much does a hospital website cost?

First, what this figure covers. It is the public information site, not your electronic health record, not the patient portal and not the scheduling system, each of which is a separate contract with a clinical vendor and is priced nowhere near this. On Yola the site itself starts free, and a paid plan is $9.95/mo when you want your own domain, more pages and the full AI tools. Annual plans include a free domain for the first year.

Having it built for you costs a good deal more than the software does. A freelancer or a small agency building a comparable site often runs from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, and agencies that specialize in healthcare organizations usually sit above that and attach an annual support contract on top.

Neither number is the real cost for a hospital, though. The real cost is sign-off: the hours your clinical leads, your compliance officer and your communications lead spend agreeing what a department page may say. Building it in-house does not remove that, and it should not. What it changes is what happens after the review. A correction comes back, somebody in communications makes the edit that afternoon, and the page is right by the evening instead of sitting in an agency queue for a week with the wrong visiting hours on it.