Pharmacy Price Comparison & Community Platform
Consumer medication price comparison and community platform, rebuilt from the ground up as a bespoke WordPress application and hosted entirely within my managed infrastructure. The business has since pivoted towards B2B market intelligence, with the original platform forming the foundation for that evolution.
From High-Fidelity Design to a Bespoke WordPress Build
The website was rebuilt from scratch in WordPress, taking high-fidelity UI designs for every major page template and translating them into a bespoke production environment.
Rather than implementing the designs through Elementor or another visual page builder, I built the interface entirely in PHP, CSS and JavaScript, with every component developed around the project's design system and a bespoke visual component library I created during the build.
The page templates are driven through Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), allowing the client to retain the flexibility of WordPress as a CMS while keeping the frontend lightweight and predictable.
This approach deliberately avoids the additional markup, dependencies and rendering overhead associated with page-builder implementations. Components are rendered directly through the theme and built as reusable code, giving the site a much tighter relationship between the original UI designs and the production interface.
The result is a WordPress environment that retains the content management benefits of a CMS while behaving much more like a purpose-built web application.
Data-Driven Pricing Platform
The platform aggregates medication pricing data from 100+ UK online pharmacies and clinics, turning disparate external pricing information into a single searchable and comparable interface.
Rather than requiring consumers to visit multiple providers individually, the platform allows them to filter, sort and compare pricing within one experience.
The primary UX challenge was presenting a large and constantly changing dataset in a way that remained simple and approachable.
The interface was therefore designed around comparison and decision-making, allowing users to quickly narrow available options, understand pricing differences and identify relevant providers without having to navigate multiple websites.
Data & API Integration
The platform receives pricing information through an external Azure-based pricing API, with the WordPress application acting as the consumer-facing layer of the wider data platform.
I developed the custom frontend and supporting WordPress functionality required to consume and present this information, alongside integrations for supporting services and data workflows.
The wider system also incorporated:
- Custom REST API endpoints
- Azure Functions
- Google Sheets and Apps Script data synchronisation
- Brevo transactional email
- GA4 analytics
- Cloudflare infrastructure and edge functionality
Design System & Component Architecture
A core part of the project was developing a visual component library alongside the website itself.
Rather than treating each page as an isolated design, I established reusable PHP, CSS and JavaScript components that could be combined across the site's templates.
This created a consistent relationship between:
UI design → component library → WordPress template → production page
The approach also makes the platform easier to extend. New pages and functionality can be assembled from established components without repeatedly recreating the same interface patterns.
This was particularly important given the number of templates and different content types required across the platform.
Performance-Focused WordPress Architecture
The site was deliberately built without Elementor or another page builder.
Instead, the frontend is rendered through bespoke PHP templates, with ACF providing structured content and the component architecture controlling how that content is presented.
This keeps the rendering layer lightweight and avoids the additional DOM complexity and frontend dependencies often introduced by visual page builders.
The architecture was designed with speed, maintainability and predictable rendering in mind, while still giving the client a familiar WordPress editing environment.
Hosting & Infrastructure
The entire website and supporting infrastructure were hosted and managed by me.
This included the VPS environment, web server configuration, caching, DNS, deployment and ongoing technical maintenance.
The original product was developed around a B2C community and consumer-facing pricing model, combining medication price comparison with a broader community forum experience.
The business has since changed direction towards B2B market intelligence, moving away from the original consumer community proposition and towards commercial data and intelligence, to which I have now become part of the team as CTO.
The platform therefore represents an earlier stage of the product's evolution, while the underlying data infrastructure, interface architecture, design system and technical foundations provide a useful demonstration of the work undertaken before that strategic pivot.
Conversion Metrics Dashboard
Alongside the consumer-facing platform, I built custom analytics and reporting dashboards for the business, combining website, user engagement and Meta advertising data into a single view.
The dashboards track interactions across the platform's business tools and marketing activity, giving the team visibility over how traffic and engagement connect to advertising spend and on-site behaviour, rather than relying on separate, disconnected reporting tools.
This sits alongside the consumer-facing platform as part of the same body of work: the pricing and comparison interface for users, and the reporting layer the business uses to understand how that platform performs.