A contact form on a practice site is not a contact form. It contains symptoms, a date of birth and a phone number, and it usually gets emailed in plain text.
Nobody attacks a small clinic site. It exposes information by accident, through defaults nobody chose.
An appointment request holds a name, a date of birth and a reason for visiting. It is stored encrypted and notified by alert, rather than sent as readable text through mail servers you do not control.
Query strings and POST bodies end up in access logs by default, which means personal details sitting in plain files for months. Those fields are scrubbed before anything is written.
Practices answer to regulators about where records are held. Storage and backups stay in the region you choose, and we will tell you exactly which one.
A form that silently fails is a patient who thinks they have an appointment. Submissions are stored on the site as well as notified, so a mail failure is not a lost request.
A backup of a site holding patient data is a copy of patient data. It is encrypted and retained under the same terms as the site itself.
The gap on a clinic site is rarely a missing certificate. It is a form plugin emailing everything in plain text, and a log file quietly keeping a copy.
A practice site is not a traffic problem. It is a small site where every single submission is somebody trying to be seen by a doctor.
None of this is exotic. It is the set of defaults that quietly turn an ordinary WordPress site into somewhere personal data accumulates.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Form storage | Submissions encrypted at rest, notification without content | An appointment request contains symptoms and a date of birth, and the default behaviour is to email all of it as readable text through servers nobody audited. |
| Access logging | Query strings and POST fields scrubbed before writing | Personal details land in log files by default and sit there for months, which is a disclosure nobody made a decision about. |
| Data residency | Storage and backup region fixed and stated | A practice has to answer where records are held, and an answer of “somewhere in the provider's network” is not one a regulator accepts. |
| Submission delivery | Stored locally as well as notified | A patient who fills in a form believes they have made contact, so an email that fails to deliver is worse here than on a site selling something. |
| Backup encryption | Applied and retained under the same policy as the site | A backup of a site holding patient information is another copy of patient information, and it usually gets less thought than the original. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Move the practice site across — migration is free, data handling reviewed.