Types of CMS for Medical
Industry Websites
Having a well-designed, functional website is a must for any modern medical business. After all, its usability, aesthetics, speed, and simplicity of navigation may shape patients’ first impressions of the whole organization or business. Furthermore, with healthcare services increasingly being ordered online, it’s an efficient tool to improve awareness about medical brand and services.
Credible content allows you to build trust between a clinic or practice and patients. However, content delivery may be time-consuming and ineffective without a content management system (CMS). If you are not familiar with the nuances of web development, you may be unsure of what options you have for website building and content delivery. There are a couple of paths you could take.Convergine delivers both, allowing you to choose the most suitable one considering your budget, site complexity, and other business requirements.
1. WordPress (WP) Development for Healthcare and Clinics
Pros:
- Quick deployment. A wide variety of website themes and plugins allows you to usually find something to your taste. What is more, you may not even write a single line of code to launch a website (for example, if you use Elementor) and don’t need to think through workflows.
- Reduced development costs. Using one of these premade plugins is far cheaper than ordering a custom website or starting from scratch with Craft CMS. This makes sense, given how quick and easy the process is compared to custom web development.
- Affordable. WordPress is a free tool. Nonetheless, you may have to pay for plugins, demanding maintenance and support.
Cons:
- High risk of cyberattacks. Since WP is predominantly based on third-party plugins that are often outdated or inefficiently updated, your website is vulnerable to cyberthreats. The core system also isn’t that robust and accounts for 37% of attacks.
- Technical issues. Plugins can often be slow and unresponsive, using bloated codes that compromise your website’s security and accessibility. If you do encounter difficulties, it can be hard to get help, since not all web developers provide support for the plugins they’ve made.
- Laggy content management. Despite introducing Gutenberg that allows working with blocks rather than a single page, it’s still complicated to efficiently manage a lot of content. One major reason is the admin’s panel that lacks consistency and speed.
In short, website development for healthcare on WordPress may be a quick solution for healthcare businesses working on a budget, but it does come with significant drawbacks. When designing websites for healthcare, you must cater to your patients as much as possible. While WP offers a lot of premade plugins and templates for the sake of the required flexibility, you may fail to deliver a performant and personalized website that is easy to update.
Eager To Find Out More?
If you’re based in Canada and would like to find out more about any of the above options, or if you think you’d benefit from some professional advice, we’d love to hear from you! Convergine’s offices are based in Toronto, and we can guarantee a warm welcome to any visitors.
We hope to hear from you soon!
2. Craft CMS Development for Healthcare and Clinics
Pros:
- Intuitive content management. Matrix block architecture allows you to easily arrange, rearrange, add, and disable the site’s components. With live previews, you can ensure that everything is in its place or make quick adjustments if necessary. This facilitates creating custom workflows.
- Less bloated than WP. You benefit from faster load times and clean scripts. WP and other content management systems like it tend to use a lot of plugins, but unfortunately, the more plugins your website has, the more you increase the likelihood of website-breaking bugs.
- Better security. Creating websites with Craft CMS is more stable and secure than with WordPress, which, in turn, implies higher protection of patients’ data and improved user satisfaction.
Cons:
- The longer turnaround time. Since Craft CMS doesn’t provide templates to use, a lot of time will be devoted to setting up efficient workflows to manage content, while WP boasts already established workflows. Nonetheless, it’s still faster than front-end development.
- More demanding than WP. You can’t use some plugins and templates to build a healthcare website. Instead, you will need a sufficient web development and content management background to deliver credible content efficiently.
- Higher costs. The first year of support costs you $299 and can be optionally renewed for 59$/year, which is usually more expensive compared to WP.
When compared to WP, website development for healthcare on Craft CMS is the better, more intuitive option. It does come at a higher cost, but given the high quality of the end product, as well as the support you receive from Craft CMS’ development team, it’s well worth it. In fact, we were so impressed by the platform that we entered into a partnership with them last year.
Entrust Your Healthcare Website to a Reliable Vendor
While building a healthcare website with a CMS seems simple, you still can’t be sure the outcome will showcase your clinic’s expertise, deliver the content efficiently, and attract patients’ attention. Here’s why you should choose custom site and design development for healthcare from Convergine:
- Your website is designed with your specific goals in mind. At the very beginning of the website design process, our web developers will determine how best to unite your business goals and the needs of your patients through your site. We’ll research your customers’ needs and motives, carefully examining all the relevant analytics to ensure our design decisions are backed up by data.
- We design around your content. When creating a website with WordPress, you’ll often have to cater your content to whatever template you are using. At Convergine, we believe the content should always come first, so we design your web page around what you have to say.
- We use UX strategies in our web design. Here at Convergine, we know how important user experience (UX) is for website traffic and conversion rates. The content you post on your web page may be what convinces someone to try out your services. But for that content to have its full impact, an appropriate amount of attention must be given to UX.
- You’re guaranteed quality with our custom web development. Before launching your site, our team runs rigorous quality assurance tests to make sure your site runs as it should. This includes making sure it runs well on mobile and desktop browsers and ensuring that it is fully accessible.