HEADLESS WORDPRESS
Facilitating Healthcare
Access Without Bias
Wide Eye Creative develops a comprehensive directory of LGBTQ+-friendly healthcare providers
using WP Engine Headless WordPress as the foundation.
Industry:
Healthcare
“Headless WordPress can introduce complexity and configuration challenges. However, the maturation within the WordPress headless ecosystem over the past few years has significantly reduced these barriers.
Particularly, the availability of Headless WordPress, the Faust.js framework, and the WP GraphQL plugin have really improved the developer experience when building headless WordPress sites."
— Ben Ostrower, Founder & Creative Director, Wide Eye Creative
5,500+
Provider Referrals
9%
Conversion Rate
100+
Patients Connected with Providers,
and Counting
The Client
Wide Eye Creative is a digital-first creative agency specializing in design, branding, and websites for change-makers and visionaries. A WP Engine Agency Partner, Wide Eye helps people doing the most good to catalyze positive change and drive measurable impact.
This project was created with the support of two organizations: GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ Equality and the Tegan and Sara Foundation.
GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ Equality is a national organization committed to ensuring health equity for LGBTQIA+ patients and equality for LGBTQIA+ health professionals in their work and learning environments.
The Tegan and Sara Foundation’s mission is to improve the lives of LGBTQ+ women and girls, with the primary goals of raising awareness and funds, fighting for equality and justice, and supporting grassroots organizations, activists, and communities that often go unrecognized by major funding institutions.
The Challenge
Build a fast, responsive directory of healthcare professionals focused on connecting LGBTQIA+ individuals with safe and credible providers.
The Solution
WP Engine Headless WordPress provided a performant foundation on which agency professionals at Wide Eye could build the visually engaging and emotionally resonant directory site they imagined. The site design is intentionally crafted for comfort, speed, and ease of use for both patients and providers.
The Results
Members of the LGBTQ+ community often face bias and negative attitudes, when accessing needed health services, leading to deferred medical treatments and detrimental health effects.
GLMA and the Tegan and Sara Foundation recognized that a simple way to remedy this issue would be to find providers with a track record of successful treatment of LGBTQIA+ patients—some of whom may even be members of the community, themselves—and make it easier for potential patients to connect with them.
This idea was the catalyst for creating the LGBTQ+ Healthcare Directory: a free, searchable database of doctors, medical professionals, and healthcare providers who are knowledgeable and sensitive to the unique health needs of LGBTQ+ people in the U.S. and Canada.
Using WP Engine’s headless WordPress platform as the foundation for the directory, agency experts at Wide Eye were able to quickly create a fast-loading directory site that is accessible to all users.
In addition to speed and scalability, the three main technical requirements for the site included a membership platform for providers, a publishing platform for health resources, and an extensible API to enable headless development and robust search functionality.
WordPress offered some of these capabilities out of the box, while WP Engine Headless WordPress and the Faust.js framework provided an easy pathway forward for headless WordPress development.
“Headless WordPress removed nearly all of the technical burden often associated with headless development, so that we could focus on things like information architecture, UX and visual design, and front and back-end development,” said Wide Eye Creative Founder and Creative Director Ben Ostrower.
“We were able to utilize the standard WordPress deployments we typically use for our WP Engine sites paired with Headless WordPress’ integrated Git Sync for the headless application. Our decision to go with Headless WordPress has been validated since launch, both in the ease of management and the continued upgrades WP Engine is bringing to the service.”
Leveraging headless WordPress made it possible for Wide Eye to create a highly interactive, API-driven experience that effortlessly integrates with a cloud search provider. Creating a Javascript application enabled the team to seamlessly handle the site’s data needs while continuing to use many of the same processes they use to develop traditional WordPress sites.
Since launching the live site, the directory has had more than 5,500 provider profile referrals and boasts a 9% conversion rate connecting patients to the directory’s more than 2,100 providers—impressive metrics given that a conversion rate between 2–5% is typically considered “good.”
The organizations hope that by continuing to promote this directory in their work, they’ll continue to find success connecting patients and providers who can administer the best possible care.
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