The NHS England practice website benchmarking and improvement tool is designed to help practices improve key online journeys for their patients. All practices in England are expected to audit their websites using the tool.

At first glance, working out how to use the tool can be daunting. It’s worth getting to grips with it, though, as an improved, simplified website can be transformative for your patients.

Tim Green* offers five tips for getting started:

Don’t panic!

You don’t need any technical skills to use the tool. It’s not about how your website works ‘under the bonnet’ (which your website provider should be looking after), it’s about how the content is written and presented, which marks practices down if not done well.

The tool is well written and clear about what you’re supposed to do. Set aside a couple of hours for some focused work, and take a deep breath before you dive in.

Read everything through before you start

The tool is on an Excel spreadsheet, with a helpful introduction and instructions on the first sheet. Take your time to read everything through before you start trying to use the tool.

There are 50 benchmarking criteria which the practice website can meet ‘well’, ‘adequately’ or ‘inadequately’.

Make sure you read through the whole row of information for each criterion before deciding whether you should mark your website as ‘well’, ‘adequate’ or ‘inadequate’. Sometimes issues that disqualify a practice from achieving a ‘well’ score are only mentioned as disqualifying factors in the ‘adequate’ or ‘inadequate’ boxes.

Audit your site on a mobile

You should be able to carry out almost all of the audit by testing it on your mobile. This is important as most patients use their mobiles to look at a GP website, rather than a desktop computer or other device.

Many GP websites, especially older ones, aren’t set up to work well on smaller screens. Auditing the site on your phone will give you a more honest picture of how your patients use the site, as well as revealing issues you might not spot on a desktop computer.

Use the search box

The search box is one of three key ways in which patients navigate GP websites. Using the search box during the audit will make it quicker for you to find things. It may also reveal additional issues if key information that you know is on the website doesn’t appear when you search for it.

Check each section

The first section of the benchmarking tool focuses on the most important online tasks that patients use a website to complete, such as booking an appointment or ordering a repeat prescription. The second section looks at areas important to practice managers – for example, patient registration and practice boundaries.

Don’t skip over the last section which relates to compliance requirements. Making sure your website meets these requirements will boost your patients’ experience of your website and improve your score.

Using the benchmarking tool to audit your practice website could bring big rewards for your patients. Once you’ve worked your way through the tool, you’ll be able to prioritise the improvements that can be made to the website’s wording and presentation. This is particularly important for patients with lower levels of literacy or who aren’t digitally confident.

Key to creating a highly usable website is simple language and short sentences. Get it right and there will be benefits for your patients and the practice team.

*Tim Green is the co-founder of GPsurgery.net, provider of compliant, easy-to-use websites for NHS GP practices.

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