What LegitScript actually requires on your website
Certification reviews your website, not just your paperwork. Here is what has to be on the site, page by page, and which of it is expensive to add after the build is finished.
Most guides to LegitScript certification treat it as paperwork: gather your licences, fill in the application, wait. That is half of it. The other half is a review of your website, and it is the half that gets built wrong, because by the time anyone reads the standards the site is usually finished.
Sixteen certification standards apply. They fall into three groups: registration and compliance, internal practices, and external practices. The third group is the website. This is what it asks for, in the order you would build it.
The physical address, conspicuously
The site must conspicuously disclose the physical address of the facility or facilities where services are rendered. Two words in that sentence do the work. Conspicuously rules out burying it in a privacy policy or a footer nobody reads at 12px. And where services are rendered rules out publishing a head office or a mailing address while treatment happens somewhere else.
If you run several facilities, each needs its address shown. A single locations page listing all of them satisfies this, and it is also the page that does the most work for local search, so it earns its place twice.
Photographs of your own building
All photographs on the site must truthfully and accurately depict your facilities. This is the requirement that quietly kills a lot of otherwise good design work, because the default move on a treatment centre site is a calm stock interior, a stock exterior with trees, and a stock group therapy circle.
Budget a photographer into the build, at the start rather than as a change request. Practically this means the design has to be drawn around photography that does not exist yet, which is a different exercise from designing around a stock library, and it is the single most common reason a treatment centre site gets rebuilt twice.
Scope and location, stated accurately
Website content must not misrepresent the scope or location of services provided. In practice this is where most sites fail, and rarely on purpose. It fails through the ordinary machinery of marketing pages.
- Condition pages for things you do not treat. A page on a condition you refer out for reads as a service you provide.
- City pages for places you do not have a facility in. The programmatic location page, generated for every town within a radius, is the exact pattern this standard is written against.
- Levels of care you do not license for. Listing detox, residential, PHP and IOP as a full continuum when you operate two of them.
- Accreditation badges you no longer hold, or that belong to a partner organisation rather than to you.
The programmatic location page is a standard SEO tactic and a certification failure at the same time. If you cannot put a real address on it, it should not be a page.
The five policies, and where they live
Operators are generally expected to have five categories of policy ready: patient privacy, code of ethics and professional conduct, marketing conduct including anti-brokering, admissions and intake, and discharge planning. Not all of these have to be public pages, but privacy does, and building the site with a route that can hold the others is cheaper than adding one later.
Anti-brokering deserves its own note, because it reaches further than a document. Co-ownership with a lead generator is disqualifying outright. If your site's enquiry form posts to a third party that sells leads, or your paid traffic runs through an intermediary that owns the phone number, that is a structural problem the site cannot paper over. The certification and cost detail is in which healthcare businesses need ad certification.
What this costs you if you find out late
Three of these are cheap during a build and expensive afterwards. Photography, because the layout has to be designed around real rooms. The locations architecture, because deciding late that half your city pages cannot exist means rebuilding the internal linking and losing whatever those pages had started to earn. And the enquiry routing, because moving off a lead-generation arrangement is a commercial decision with a notice period, not a form change.
None of this is difficult to satisfy if it is known at the start. All of it is a rebuild if it is not. Read the standards before the design is signed off, not before the application is submitted.
