Deploy your own GP practice website

A page and draft wording for each thing the NHS and CQC expect a practice website to cover, written in plain English at a reading age of 9 to 11:

• Appointments, prescriptions, test results, fit notes, registration, vaccinations, clinics, self-referral, proxy access
• Complaints, privacy notice, accessibility statement, named GP, GP earnings, freedom of information, practice policies
• The "You and your general practice" patient charter, a contractual requirement since 1 October 2025

If you already have a website, the admin panel can read it and bring your details across, so you are checking rather than retyping.

Plus the parts that keep it current without anyone writing anything: national NHS news pulled from NHS England hourly, notices that expire on a date you set, and closures that drop off the page once they have passed.

It is designed to NHS England's guidance on GP websites, which is based on user testing with over 160 patients. Six menu items, no sub menus, no PDFs, no pop-ups, and none of the words patients told them they did not understand.

You still have to review the wording so it matches your own services, and your practice remains legally and contractually responsible for what it publishes. What this saves you is the writing, not the checking.

• Node.js 20 or newer. Download it from nodejs.org and accept every default. Check it worked by running node --version in a terminal.
• A GitHub account. Free. This is where your website's code lives.
• A Vercel account. Free. This is what actually serves the website. Sign in with GitHub.
• An Upstash account. Free. This is where your content is saved.

You do not need to know how to write code. You need to be comfortable copying commands into a terminal and filling in forms.

If any of that already sounds like more than you want to take on, there is a link at the bottom of this page to have it done for you.

On the repository page, click Fork in the top right. That gives you your own copy under your own account, which is what you will deploy from.

Then in a terminal:

git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/simple-surgery-template.git my-practice-website
cd my-practice-website
npm install

npm install downloads the pieces the site is built from. It takes a minute or two and prints a lot of text. That is normal.

Create a file called .env.local in the folder you just made, containing one line:

ADMIN_PASSWORD=pick-something-long-here

That is the password you will use to edit the site. Then:

npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3001 and you will see a complete practice website, filled in with a fictional surgery. Open http://localhost:3001/admin and sign in with the password you just set.

Have a look around the admin panel before changing anything. Practice details and Opening hours are the two sections you will use most.

If you already have a website, start with Migration. Put your current address into the Migration section and it will read your existing site: your name, phone, address, ODS code, opening hours, online service links, CQC link and often your staff list. You tick what to bring across, and nothing is saved until you press Save.

It also offers the wording of any page this template already has. The compliance pages, your complaints procedure, privacy notice, accessibility statement and the rest, start unticked: those are written here against current guidance and kept up to date, and the version on your old site was usually written by your previous supplier rather than by you.

It will not get everything, and it will occasionally get something wrong, so check what it brings you. It saves most of the typing, which is the point. Then carry on below with whatever it missed.

Work through the admin panel in this order:

1. Practice details. Name, logo, address, phone, email, ODS code. Your ODS code is on your NHS profile page and looks like A81001.
2. Opening hours. Your hours, plus bank holidays and training afternoons under Closures. These remove themselves once the date passes.
3. Online services. Paste in the links to whatever you already use for appointment requests and prescriptions. Patients never see the supplier name.
4. Compliance. CQC rating, ICB, Primary Care Network, Data Protection Officer, GP earnings.
5. Team. Optional, but patients like knowing who they will see.

Everything else already has draft wording that follows the guidance. Read it through before you go live: it is a starting point written for a typical practice, not a statement of how yours works.

Changes save straight away. Refresh the site to see them.

The local version saves to a file on your machine. That cannot work once it is deployed, because hosting platforms have read-only filesystems that reset on every deploy. Your edits would silently vanish.

So, before deploying:

1. Sign up at upstash.com and create a Redis database. Any region near you.
2. On the database page, find the REST API section.
3. Copy UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL and UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_TOKEN. You will paste them into Vercel in a moment.

The free tier is 500,000 commands a month. A practice website uses a tiny fraction of that, because pages are cached.

1. Push your changes to GitHub: git add -A, then git commit -m "Our practice details", then git push.
2. Go to vercel.com, click Add New, Project, and pick your forked repository.
3. Leave every build setting alone. Vercel recognises what this is.
4. Before clicking Deploy, open Environment Variables and add:

ADMIN_PASSWORD=your-long-password
UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL=https://...
UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_TOKEN=...
SITE_KEY=my-practice

SITE_KEY can be anything short and lowercase. It tells the site it is serving one practice rather than many, which is what gives you clean web addresses.

1. Click Deploy. About two minutes later you have a live website at a vercel.app address.

Sign in at your-site.vercel.app/admin and check your content is there.

In Vercel, open your project, then Settings, Domains, and add your address.

Vercel will show you exactly which DNS records to create. Usually:

• An A record for the bare domain, pointing at 76.76.21.21
• A CNAME for www, pointing at cname.vercel-dns.com

Whoever manages your DNS makes those changes. For an nhs.uk address that is usually your ICB's digital team or your IT supplier. Send them the two records above; they will know what to do.

The certificate is issued automatically once the records resolve. Nothing changes for patients: the old address keeps working until you switch it.

The template gets updates as NHS guidance changes. Your admin panel tells you when one is out: open Updates and it shows your version, the latest one, and what has changed.

To take an update, open your fork on GitHub and press Sync fork, then Update branch.

Vercel redeploys automatically. Your content is untouched, because it lives in the database rather than in the code.

If you would rather use a terminal, this does the same thing:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/JLHITS/simple-surgery-template.git
git fetch upstream
git merge upstream/main
git push

Sometimes an update also brings new recommended wording for a page, because the guidance behind it changed. That appears under Updates too, next to your current wording, and nothing on your website changes until you choose it and press Save.

You do not have to do any of this. A site that never updates keeps working.

Practice websites must be reviewed at least once a year. The footer shows when content was last updated, which makes that visible to you, to patients and to inspectors.

Once a year, check:

• Opening hours and next year's bank holidays
• The team list
• Your GP earnings declaration, which changes annually
• Your CQC rating
• That the online service links still work

That is the whole maintenance burden.

"My edits disappeared." You deployed without setting up Upstash. Check Advanced settings in the admin panel: it tells you which storage is in use and warns you if changes are not being saved permanently.

"I cannot sign in." ADMIN_PASSWORD is not set on the deployment, or was changed without redeploying. Environment variables on Vercel only take effect after a redeploy.

"The news section is empty." NHS England's feed was briefly unreachable. It retries by itself. The rest of the page is unaffected by design.

Anything else, open an issue on the repository.