Your website’s content management system (CMS) plays an important role in its performance. It affects how easily you can update content, implement SEO, improve site speed and, increasingly, how well AI-powered search platforms understand your website.
For Patient Pulse 2025, we analysed 3,043 private healthcare websites to see which content management systems they use.
What we found
- WordPress: 75.1% (2,285 websites)
- Wix: 12.1%
- Squarespace: 6.3%
- Drupal: 2.4%
- Joomla: 1.3%
WordPress is by far the most widely used platform among private healthcare providers. That’s no surprise – it’s flexible, well supported and capable of delivering excellent performance. The platform itself isn’t the issue. What matters is how well it’s configured and maintained.
Why it matters
A well-configured WordPress website can provide an excellent foundation for SEO, performance and future growth. However, poorly maintained sites often experience common issues, including:
- Poor Core Web Vitals — slow-loading pages caused by too many plugins, unoptimised images or inefficient code. (Our research found that 48% of clinic websites fail Google’s performance assessment.)
- Weak SEO foundations — missing or poorly implemented structured data and metadata.
- Security vulnerabilities — outdated plugins and themes are one of the most common causes of website security issues.
- Limited integration — difficulty connecting smoothly with booking tools or CRM platforms.
- Reduced visibility in AI-powered search — missing schema markup, llms.txt and other technical elements that help AI platforms understand website content.
Many of the issues identified in our research stem from the same underlying problem: a powerful platform that hasn’t been configured or maintained to perform at its best.
The opportunity
For most clinics, there’s no need to replace an existing WordPress website or start again. In many cases, improving the technical foundations of the current site will deliver significant benefits.
This typically includes:
- Removing unnecessary plugins and keeping essential ones up to date.
- Optimising images and enabling caching to improve site speed.
- Adding structured data (schema) to help search engines and AI-powered search platforms understand your services.
- Implementing metadata and headings consistently across key pages.
- Integrating booking systems, enquiry forms and CRM software to create a smoother patient journey.
A well-maintained WordPress website can perform just as well as any other platform. The difference lies in how it’s configured, maintained and optimised over time.
Where to start
If your website runs on WordPress – and statistically, it probably does – the question isn’t whether you need a new platform. It’s whether your current site is set up to perform at its best.
Book a free website review to find out whether your WordPress site is supporting your SEO, performance and future growth.
This article draws on Patient Pulse 2025, Figment’s original research into marketing in UK private healthcare. Read the full report.
More from Patient Pulse 2025
- 48% fail Google’s performance test
- Are you ready for AI search?
- Booking & chat tools
- Read the full Patient Pulse 2025 report »
Book a free, no-obligation review of your clinic’s online presence »
