How to read this benchmark
Each item names what it is, why it matters, and who it serves: patients, sponsors and CROs, or both. Check items off as you review your own website. Every statistic on this page is sourced and dated. The scoring rubric we apply in Sponsor Lens reviews sits behind this framework and is not published.
Group A
What do sponsors and CROs look for on a research site's website?
Feasibility today is largely a desk review. Before a questionnaire is sent, someone on the sponsor or CRO side opens your website. These are the signals they check.
Named principal investigators with credentials
Degree, board certification, specialty and research experience for each PI. Reviewers verify investigator qualifications first; a website with no named PI stalls the review before it starts.
Serves: Sponsors and CROs
Therapeutic areas and phase experience
State which therapeutic areas the site runs and which phases, I through IV. This is protocol fit, answered without a phone call.
Serves: Sponsors and CROs
Facility capabilities in detail
Beds or infusion chairs, on-site lab, pharmacy and investigational product storage, monitored minus 80 freezers, imaging access. The pre-study visit checklist, answered in advance.
Serves: Sponsors and CROs
Track record
Studies completed, enrollment and retention performance. Publish only what is true and specific; a sourced number beats a vague superlative.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Certifications and memberships
GCP training, ACRP or SOCRA certification, SCRS membership, relevant accreditations. Trust shorthand for a reviewer moving fast.
Serves: Sponsors and CROs
A dedicated sponsor and CRO contact path
A distinct route in the navigation, separate from patient inquiries, with a named business development or feasibility contact. Frequently missing on independent site websites.
Serves: Sponsors and CROs
Locations and PI coverage
For networks, a clean directory with per-location PI, address and therapeutic focus.
Serves: Sponsors and CROs
Quality and regulatory infrastructure
eSource and eRegulatory capability, central IRB relationships, quality oversight model. Signals a site that starts up fast and delivers clean data.
Serves: Sponsors and CROs
Recruitment infrastructure
Patient database, referral partnerships, dedicated recruitment staff. Evidence the site can actually enroll, not just operate.
Serves: Sponsors and CROs
Group B
What do patients need before they contact a site?
Most patients meet a research site online before they meet it in person. In CISCRP's 2025 Perceptions and Insights study, 22 percent of past participants first learned about their study online. What they find decides whether they raise a hand.
Current study listings, kept current
A live and visibly maintained list of enrolling studies. A stale list signals an inactive or careless site.
Serves: Patients
A detail page for every study
Condition, plain-language purpose, basic eligibility, location and time commitment. Enough for a patient to self-select before the phone rings.
Serves: Patients
An online pre-screening step
A short eligibility questionnaire that starts the funnel and protects coordinator hours. Because it collects identifiable health information, it carries privacy and IRB obligations; see the trust group below.
Serves: Patients
A visible next-step pathway
A clear sequence of what happens after applying: screening, consent, visits, follow-up. Patients consistently report the process is confusing; explaining it builds confidence.
Serves: Patients
Real photography
Authentic photos of the team and the physical site, not stock imagery. Patients look for people; reviewers look for a real facility.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Educational content
Plain-language explainers on what a clinical trial is, patient rights, IRB oversight and the right to withdraw. General education sits outside IRB advertising scope.
Serves: Patients
Spanish language support
Meaningful Spanish content, not a translation widget. A baseline for the US market and for enrollment diversity.
Serves: Patients
Low-friction contact with a stated response time
Phone, form and ideally text, with an explicit expectation of when the site responds. An unanswered hand-raise is a lost participant.
Serves: Patients
Voluntariness, and no promise of benefit
Patient-facing copy states that participation is voluntary and never implies certainty of cure. An ethics requirement and an IRB compliance line at once.
Serves: Patients
Group C
How does a research site website earn trust and stay compliant?
A research site website handles health information and speaks to a regulated process. The trust layer is not decoration; it is infrastructure.
A specific, current privacy policy
A real policy describing what the website collects, including through pre-screen forms, and how it is used. A generic template erodes trust.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Consent language on every form
Each pre-screen and contact form states what happens to the data and obtains appropriate consent.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
HTTPS everywhere
Baseline security for a health property and a basic search signal. Non-negotiable.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
HIPAA-aware analytics and tracking
No advertising pixels on pre-screening or condition-specific pages; analytics covered by business associate agreements where identifiable data is touched. US regulator guidance on tracking technologies remains legally unsettled, so the defensible posture is the conservative one.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Cookie transparency and consent
A functioning consent mechanism and honest disclosure of what runs on the page.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
No unsourced claims
Every statistic and superlative on the website is substantiable. This protects credibility with sponsors and stays inside truthfulness expectations.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
IRB scope discipline
Study-specific recruitment content, including risk and benefit language, payment emphasis and pre-screen instruments, is IRB approved. General institutional content, such as team pages and education, is not over-submitted. Knowing the boundary avoids both compliance gaps and needless review cycles.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Group D
How do patients and sponsors find the website in the first place?
Discoverability decides whether any of the above is ever seen. This group covers classic search, local search and the structured data that makes a website legible to search engines and AI answer engines.
Indexability hygiene
No stray noindex or nofollow directives, a correct robots.txt, a valid XML sitemap. A single misplaced noindex can make an entire website invisible.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Title and meta structure
Unique, descriptive titles and meta descriptions on every key page, carrying condition and location terms.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Local SEO
A claimed, complete Google Business Profile for each physical location, with name, address and phone identical across the website, the profile and directories.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Indexable study and condition pages
Every active study and every major condition gets its own crawlable page. These are the pages that rank, and the pages AI engines cite.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Organization and place schema
JSON-LD MedicalClinic or MedicalOrganization markup on the homepage and location pages, with address, geo, hours, phone and medical specialty.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Physician schema for investigators
Structured markup on each PI profile, carrying credentials and organizational membership. Feeds search engines' understanding of expertise.
Serves: Sponsors and CROs
Study schema with registry IDs
MedicalTrial markup for interventional studies and MedicalStudy for observational, with study location, sponsor and status, and the ClinicalTrials.gov NCT ID in the code property. The most differentiated and most-missed structured data opportunity on research site websites.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
FAQ schema, repositioned
Google removed FAQ rich results in May 2026, so no search snippet is earned. Valid FAQ markup on genuine questions remains useful as machine-readable structure for AI answer engines. Do not manufacture FAQs for a feature that no longer exists.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
JSON-LD quality
Markup in Google's preferred JSON-LD format, validated, connected through relationship properties, and maintained at the template level rather than page by page.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Answer-engine structure
Question-format headings with a direct answer in the first sentences beneath each, sourced statistics and clean structure. AI answer engines cite extractable, well-supported content.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Group E
Is the website usable by the patients most likely to enroll?
Many study populations skew older. Accessibility is enrollment infrastructure before it is a legal checkbox. The target standard is WCAG 2.2 level AA, published by the W3C in October 2023. The legal exposure is real as well: plaintiffs filed 3,117 federal website accessibility lawsuits in 2025, a 27 percent increase over 2024, per Seyfarth Shaw. Overlay widgets are not a fix; in January 2025 the FTC ordered an overlay vendor to pay 1 million dollars over compliance claims.
WCAG 2.2 AA as the baseline
Conformance targeted in code, audited on real templates, not asserted by a widget.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Color contrast
At least 4.5 to 1 for normal text. Older patients with reduced contrast sensitivity depend on it.
Serves: Patients
Legible type and zoom
A readable base size, and content that survives text resize and zoom without breaking.
Serves: Patients
Keyboard navigation with visible focus
Every control reachable and operable by keyboard, with the focused element never fully hidden behind sticky headers or chat widgets.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Touch targets of at least 24 pixels
The WCAG 2.2 minimum. It matters for older hands filling out forms on a phone.
Serves: Patients
Alt text on meaningful images
Every informative image described.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Form labels and clear errors
Programmatic labels, inline error messages and concrete suggestions for fixing them. This is where pre-screen completion is won or lost.
Serves: Patients
Accessible sign-in for portals
No memory puzzles or cognitive tests as the only way in; allow password managers and email-link login.
Serves: Patients
No redundant entry, help in a consistent place
Multi-step intake never forces re-typing information already given, and help sits in the same place on every step.
Serves: Patients
Plain language
Patient-facing content written at roughly a 6th to 8th grade reading level, consistent with health literacy guidance.
Serves: Patients
A published accessibility statement
The conformance target stated, with a contact for accessibility issues.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Group F
Does the website hold up technically?
Performance is measured against Google's Core Web Vitals at the 75th percentile of real visits. The thresholds below are Google's published targets.
Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds
The main content loads fast enough that a patient on a phone does not leave first.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds
The page responds when tapped. INP replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital in March 2024.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less
Nothing jumps while a patient is reading or reaching for a button.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
A flawless mobile experience
Most patient traffic arrives on mobile. Layout, study pages and every form are built mobile first.
Serves: Patients
Conversion measurement
Form starts, completions and call clicks measured, within the privacy constraints in the trust group, so the website can be improved on evidence.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
No broken links or broken forms
Every study link, pre-screen and contact form tested end to end. A silently broken form is invisible lost enrollment.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Hosting and security basics
Reliable hosting, uptime monitoring, current SSL and basic hardening.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Group G
Does the design carry the site's credibility?
Design is the fastest judgment either audience makes. It either confirms the quality of the site behind the website, or quietly contradicts it.
Visual currency
A design that looks maintained and current. A strong site behind a dated website reads, unfairly, as a dated site.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
A consistent system
Typography and color applied consistently across every page. Consistency is what attention to detail looks like from the outside.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Dual-audience navigation from the homepage
A patient path and a sponsor path, both visible without scrolling. The clearest single structural signal that a site understands who its website is for. Frequently missing on independent site websites.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Authentic photography as brand
Real people and the real facility, treated as a brand asset rather than a compliance chore.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Freshness signals
Recent news, dated content and current study lists that show the site is alive.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Group H
What do most research site websites overlook?
Items that rarely appear on any checklist, and separate a complete website from a merely presentable one.
ClinicalTrials.gov linking
Every study page links to its registry record, and the NCT ID lives in the page's structured data. Registry linkage is a credibility signal for both audiences.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
A physician referral pathway
A dedicated route for community physicians to refer patients. A distinct, high-value enrollment channel most websites ignore.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
A real careers page
Staffing depth and coordinator capacity are feasibility signals. A live careers page also signals a stable, growing site.
Serves: Sponsors and CROs
Testimonials within compliance limits
Participant stories with written permission, voluntariness intact, and no implied promise of benefit.
Serves: Patients
Languages beyond Spanish
Matched to the site's actual catchment demographics.
Serves: Patients
Study results and publications
Lay-language results honor participants; publications signal scientific credibility to reviewers.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Community engagement content
Documented community presence supports the diversity narratives sponsors increasingly require.
Serves: Patients, sponsors and CROs
Email capture between studies
A newsletter or interest list that keeps prospective participants warm until an eligible study opens.
Serves: Patients
Portal and scheduling links that work
Patient portal and appointment links present, functional and accessible.
Serves: Patients
