The homepage alert is useful to inform visitors to your site of essential information. 

The message can be changed and the popup enabled or disabled from the homepage edit screen.

From the Pages list view click on the homepage name (usually 'Welcome to...Practice name') or hover over the name and click edit. This will open the page editor. The homepage alert popup content is below the page content.

Enable or disable the alert

NOTE: NHSE research has shown pop ups are creating significant issues for patients

It was found that 27% of participants who visited a site with an overlay as the first thing they saw struggled to get past the overlay, especially on mobile.

An additional 5% of participants struggled to navigate overlays beyond the homepage.

The problems with using overlays are:

• They create a barrier which many users can’t get past.
• They force users to read information that often isn’t relevant to them.
• Once the overlay has been closed, the information is lost as it’s not stored anywhere else on the site.
• When there is a lot of content and links within an overlay, users find navigating away from the overlay fiddly, especially on mobile. Having a scrollbars within an overlay creates usability issues.
• These issues are often magnified on mobile.
• Overlays can create accessibility issues.

What you can do about it

It’s important that information on a website is placed in the most suitable location. If the information is important, it should be within the site, not on a temporary overlay that, once dismissed, is gone.

Different, unrelated pieces of information should be separated, and each put within the relevant pages on the websites, rather than put in one big section on an overlay or on the homepage.

The alert banner is an alternative solution for important information. Find out how to activate the alert banner.

Note: Remember when you make any changes to your site clear your browser cache to view the latest version.

Please see our FAQ:

I cannot see my changes after publishing