Posted by
Maddie Saunders
You might have breakthrough science, strong funding and a capable sales team. But if your website is slow, confusing to navigate or hard to read, you’re creating needless friction that potentially disrupts every interaction. Too much and you could lose potential buyers or investors, and prevent patients from accessing important information.
Generic B2B website ‘wisdom’ is easy to come by, but its relevance for healthtech and life sciences is limited. That’s why we analysed 400+ websites in these sectors for our report: Spotlight - Top 100 Websites - Healthtech and Life Sciences. This article shares some of the factors we found that separated the top websites from the rest, including consistency, credibility signals and SEO fundamentals.
Strong visual identity that signals credibility in seconds
Design decisions matter more than marketing teams might realise. The best-performing websites in our analysis used a consistent and clear visual identity to reduce cognitive load and reinforce trust. No unnecessary decorations for the sake of trends or attention.
Legacy pharma brands lean on conservative colour palettes (lots of blue and white) and dense layouts to try to signal authority. Digitally native and challenger brands take a different approach, using warmer colours, clearer hierarchy and more expressive typography to humanise complex science. Legacy pharma brands don’t have to work as hard to maintain brand recognition, so we would always advise finding the sweet spot for differentiation, applied deliberately and consistently.
High-quality content that maps to user intent
Most top-performers structure their websites around real user needs:
- Education and guidance for patients
- Support for providers
- Proof of value for investors
Others default to press releases, corporate updates and thin pages that don’t answer any real questions. This presents a huge opportunity for emerging and challenger brands that invest in understanding their audiences’ needs across the buying journey. It’s not rocket science, but it requires more research and intention to get right (which is why clients partner with us on content strategy.)
SEO foundations that stand up to scrutiny
The starkest ‘split’ we saw among the top performers was in SEO. Big pharma and legacy brands often failed mobile Core Vitals on Google PageSpeed Insights, but their enormous brand equity means they can afford to. Newer, digitally native healthtech and life sciences brands had better report cards for speed and accessibility, because they know it’s essential for their discoverability and engagement.
Similarly, they were more likely to nail on-page SEO with stronger internal linking, 50+ word pages and descriptive call-to-actions (CTAs). Less ‘Read more’, more ‘Download the report’ or ‘Watch a demo’. These are fundamental SEO tactics, and because they’re still so overlooked, implementing them is one of the fastest ways to outperform competitors.
Want the full story? Download the report
If you want more detailed insights and expert recommendations from the Articulate Marketing team, you can download the full report: Spotlight - Top 100 Websites - Healthtech and Life Sciences.
