Fertility Clinic Website Design in the UK: A Practical Guide

Good fertility clinic website design helps an anxious, time-pressured visitor find honest answers quickly: who you treat, what treatment involves, what it costs and how to take the next step. It also has to present success rates and prices in a way that fits HFEA expectations and ASA rules, not just look reassuring.

This guide is about the website itself. If you want the search side, our fertility clinic SEO guide covers rankings and our IVF marketing overview covers the wider strategy. Here we look at what the pages should say, how they should be built and what to measure.

What should a fertility clinic website do for a patient?

Fertility patients rarely decide in one visit. They often research for weeks or months, compare several clinics and come back late at night. In our experience, the sites that work are built around that pattern rather than around a single "book now" button.

Think of the journey as a series of questions the site must answer, in roughly this order:

1. Am I in the right place? Who you treat, in plain terms, in the first screen.
2. What are my options? Clear pages for each treatment, written for someone who is not a specialist.
3. Can I trust you? Named clinicians, licence details, real photographs and honest information about outcomes.
4. What will it cost? A pricing page that explains what is and is not included.
5. What happens next? A short, specific description of the first consultation, so the step feels small.
6. How do I reach you? A form, a phone number and a callback option, with a realistic reply time.

The gap between the first enquiry and the consultation is where many clinics lose people. Our post on why high-price enquiries do not become consultations and the private patient journey look at that stage in more detail.

How do you write sensitive and inclusive content?

Tone matters more on a fertility site than almost anywhere else in healthcare. Visitors may be grieving, hopeful, frightened or all three. Copy that sounds like a sales page tends to land badly.

• Write for more than one kind of patient: heterosexual couples, same-sex couples, single parents by choice, people using donor gametes or surrogacy, and people preserving fertility before medical treatment.
• Use neutral, accurate language such as "you and your partner" or "you" rather than assuming a woman and a man.
• Avoid euphemism and avoid hype. Say what a treatment is, what it involves and what is uncertain.
• Use real photography of your clinic and team. Generic images of smiling babies can feel dismissive to someone who has had a loss.
• Offer more than one way to get in touch, including email, so people are not forced onto a phone call.

Our guides on marketing a sensitive specialty and tone of voice for worried and excited patients go deeper on wording.

How should treatment and pricing pages be set up?

Give each main treatment its own page: IVF, ICSI, IUI, egg freezing, donor treatment and diagnostic tests. Each page should cover who it is for, the steps, the time commitment, the risks and the questions to ask at consultation. Our treatment page architecture post shows how to map them.

What do regulators expect on prices?

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) says clinics should not advertise misleadingly low headline prices. Advertised prices should make clear which essential elements of treatment are included or excluded, such as whether medication is covered, and clinics should say whether patients will pay for anything extra, including other services such as ICSI or donor IVF (CMA consumer law guide).

In practice, that points to a pricing page with a table, a plain list of inclusions, a separate list of likely extras and a date showing when it was last checked. Hiding the real cost behind a "request a quote" form is the opposite of what these expectations describe.

How should add-ons be described?

According to the same CMA guide, a clinic that advertises add-ons should give the price, why the add-on might benefit some patients, any risks, the evidence base and the HFEA's information on add-ons. It also says add-on claims must not be false or misleading, for example by implying a better chance of a baby when that is not known to be true.

How should you present success rates on your website?

This is the area where clinic websites most often go wrong, and the one that deserves a clinical and compliance review before launch.

The CMA guide says clinics must not give the impression that success rates are better than they are. Its examples of what to avoid include promoting a strong past year instead of current results, highlighting selected patients as if they were typical, and showing only the best clinic's results across a group.

The ASA's December 2025 enforcement report adds specifics. Its monitoring of fertility clinic paid ads found the most common problems were unproven claims of superiority or being the "best", success rates given as percentages without saying how many patients were treated, and clinical pregnancy rates used instead of live birth rates (ASA, 2025). Those findings were about ads, but they are a sensible test for web copy too.

A defensible approach looks like this:

• Lead with live birth rates, state the number of patients or cycles behind each figure, and show the time period.
• Link to your clinic's profile on the HFEA's Choose a Fertility Clinic service rather than rewriting it, and make clear that clinic and national figures are not a prediction of any one patient's chances.
• Explain terms such as "per embryo transfer" in one plain sentence.
• Avoid "best", "leading" and "highest" unless you can evidence the claim.
• Show your own data and the HFEA data separately, with dates, and do not mix them in one headline number.

The HFEA published interim live birth statistics in May 2025, split by whether patients were under or over 38, while it reviewed which statistics should appear on clinic profile pages (HFEA consultation page). Check the current figures and wording on the HFEA site when you publish, because this area is still changing. This is general guidance, not legal advice.

What should clinical team and governance pages include?

Patients choosing a clinic are choosing people. A team page with names, roles, professional registration details, short factual biographies and real photographs does more for trust than a paragraph about "our commitment to excellence".

• Named consultants, embryologists, nurses and counsellors, with their roles.
• Your HFEA licence status and a link to your profile on the HFEA's clinic search.
• How decisions are made on treatment plans, and who a patient speaks to with questions or concerns.
• Counselling and support options, described without pressure.
• A complaints route that is easy to find.
• A clear review date on clinical content, with the name of the clinician who reviewed it.

These pages also support Google's quality signals for health content. See our guide to E-E-A-T trust signals on medical websites.

Why do accessibility and speed matter on a fertility website?

Visitors are often on a phone, at night, and under stress. A slow or confusing site adds friction at the worst time.

For speed, Google's Core Web Vitals give clear targets: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint within 200 milliseconds and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of real page loads (web.dev). Our plain-English checklist explains how to check them. Heavy images are the most common cause of slow clinic pages, and our Core Web Vitals and image weight checklist shows how to fix them.

For accessibility, build to WCAG 2.2 level AA. That standard, published by the W3C in October 2023, includes criteria such as minimum target size for buttons and keeping keyboard focus visible (W3C). Practical points for fertility sites include readable text size, strong contrast, captions on video, forms that work with screen readers and no autoplaying media. Our accessibility page explains our own approach.

How do you handle tracking and privacy on a fertility site?

A visit to an IVF page says something very personal about a person. Treat that data with care.

• Do not fire advertising pixels or non-essential analytics tags until the visitor has made a consent choice.
• Never pass form content, treatment names combined with identifiers, or email addresses into analytics or ad platforms.
• Keep enquiry forms short and explain what happens to the data.
• Use a privacy notice written in plain English, and record who is responsible for the site's data.

The Information Commissioner's Office lists tracking pixels alongside cookies as storage and access technologies, and finalised its updated guidance on them in April 2026 (ICO). Your data protection adviser should confirm what applies to your set-up. Our posts on GA4 consent mode for clinics and website privacy and GDPR cover the practical side.

You can still measure what matters. Track form submissions, calls and callback requests as events that do not carry personal details, and match them to booked consultations in your own system.

How to decide what your fertility website needs

Before commissioning a rebuild, run through this checklist against your current site:

• Can a visitor find the price of a first consultation and a full IVF cycle in two clicks?
• Does every success rate state its basis, sample size and date?
• Are add-ons described with price, evidence and risks?
• Does the language include single people and same-sex couples?
• Are the clinical team named, with a review date on treatment pages?
• Does the site meet the Core Web Vitals targets on mobile?
• Do ad pixels wait for consent?
• Can you see how many enquiries become consultations?

If several answers are no, the fix is usually a rewrite of key pages rather than a visual redesign. Our refresh or rebuild guide helps you decide, and our healthcare website design service page explains how we work.

Putting it together

Strong fertility clinic website design is mostly about honesty and ease: answer the real questions, show your numbers properly, treat visitors with care and keep the technical basics fast, accessible and privacy-aware. If you are weighing up partners, see our work for fertility clinics.