Raffles Medical Group
Raffles Medical Group is Singapore's largest homegrown private healthcare provider, serving over two million patients across 14 cities in Asia. We rebuilt their corporate platform in 2020 and have run it ever since (through a pandemic launch, a security remediation and the group's 50th-anniversary refresh).
A ground-up WordPress rebuild launched mid-pandemic in 2020, then six years of hosting, maintenance and continuous improvement, carrying the platform into the group's 50th-anniversary year.
The Challenge
What we were solving
Raffles Medical Group has been caring for Singapore since 1976. Today it runs Raffles Hospital, a network of clinics across the island and facilities in 14 cities spanning Singapore, China, Japan, Vietnam and Cambodia, serving more than two million patients with a team of over 2,500. It is also a listed company on the SGX, which means its website answers to shareholders as well as patients.
The old site could not carry that weight. Booking a doctor or a health screening package took too many steps, the brand did not land with the audiences the group wanted to reach, and the marketing team had little ability to track which campaigns were actually driving appointments. Behind the scenes, legacy integrations made every change harder than it should have been.
Healthcare adds its own pressure. Someone booking a specialist appointment is often anxious and unfamiliar with the system, and they decide within moments whether they trust a provider. The site had to build that trust fast (credentials, accreditations, real doctors with real profiles) while never losing the person on their way to a booking.
Success looked like one platform that could serve four very different visitors (a patient finding a GP, a company arranging corporate healthcare, an investor pulling the latest SGX announcement, a nurse looking for a job) and a team at Raffles who could run it day to day.
Our Approach
How we tackled it
One platform, four front doors
We designed and built the new rafflesmedicalgroup.com as a custom WordPress child theme on the Beaver Builder framework, responsive and retina-ready, with booking as the spine of the patient journey. Every page carries a clear primary and secondary call to action, and the booking forms capture the doctor or health screening package the visitor was looking at, so an enquiry arrives with its context attached.
The scale sat in the structure. The build covered the hospital, accident and emergency, family medicine, dental, Chinese medicine, health screening and more than 20 specialist centres (from cancer and heart through to fertility and urology), each with its own team and treatment content. A searchable doctor directory gives every physician a profile. A clinic finder covers the Singapore network and the international clinics across five countries. Investor relations runs as its own section, with SGX announcements, financial results, annual reports and the live share price. Careers, corporate healthcare, insurance, government schemes and a health articles library round it out, with site search powered by Algolia so visitors can cut across all of it.
Small interactive tools do quiet conversion work throughout: a quiz that recommends a health screening package, a headache assessment for the neuroscience centre, a due date calculator for the maternity pages. Each one turns a browser into an enquiry.
Launching a hospital website in the middle of a pandemic
The build ran through 2020, which meant the site went live (September 2020) while Raffles was on the front line of Singapore's COVID-19 response. The platform had to absorb that in real time: a COVID-19 advisory section, campaign landing pages, and registration forms for everything from dengue vaccination appointments to student insurance schemes. Campaign and activation tracking was wired into the backend from day one, so the marketing team could finally see what each campaign returned.
The years after launch are the actual job
Chillybin has hosted and maintained the platform since the relaunch, with the site running on WP Engine. That work is mostly invisible when it is done well: security updates, uptime, incident response, and a steady stream of new sections and forms as the group's needs change.
It occasionally gets technical in ways that matter. When a 2026 penetration test flagged an end-of-life CSS framework loaded by the site's parent theme, patching was not an option (the vendor no longer maintained it, and updates would reinstate it). We replaced the parent theme with a lightweight, framework-free foundation purpose-built for Beaver Builder sites, ported every template and setting, and reworked the hero banners into prioritised responsive images to cut load times on mobile, all without visitors or content editors noticing a change. Ahead of the group's 50th anniversary, we also scoped a design refresh of the elements every visitor touches (header, navigation, hero, buttons, cards, footer) so the site meets the milestone looking current, not dated.
The Solution
What we delivered
Raffles Medical Group has run on the platform we built for six years and counting. The group's 50th-anniversary campaign is live on it now. Patients book doctors and screening packages with their context carried through, investors pull SGX filings from the same domain that reassures a nervous parent at 2am, and the digital marketing team manages all of it through WordPress.
That longevity is the result. Corporate platforms at this scale are usually rebuilt (by someone new) every three or four years. This one has instead been continuously maintained, hardened and refreshed, which is cheaper, safer and kinder to the search equity a healthcare brand spends years earning.
What we learned
A healthcare group's website is really four websites wearing one brand, and the information architecture has to be decided before any design survives contact with it. Mapping every specialist centre, clinic, doctor and investor document into one structure was the hardest and most valuable work of the build.
Launching during COVID taught us to treat a CMS as an emergency channel. The sections we could stand up in days (advisories, vaccination forms, campaign pages) mattered more that year than anything on the original sitemap, and a page builder the client's own team could drive was what made that speed possible.
The 2026 theme remediation confirmed a quiet conviction: the cheapest security fix is the one that removes the vulnerable layer entirely. Replacing a framework-laden parent theme, rather than patching around it, means that class of pentest finding cannot come back.
