Most of what a salon, spa or wellness studio sells is not a medicine. If you infuse or inject anything, though, read the third rule below first — on the advertising question you may be closer to an aesthetic clinic than to a salon.
For everything else, the rule that decides what you may say is a different one, and it turns on what you claim the treatment does.
The claim problem
Describing a treatment — what it is, how it works, what it feels like, who it suits — is safe ground. Asserting what it achieves is where sites get into trouble.
Any objective claim needs evidence behind it. Past that, which rule applies turns on what the thing is — not on what you call your business — and there are three.
- Treatments, spaces and experiences. Substantiation. Hold evidence for the claim you make.
- Food and supplements. Only claims authorised on the GB nutrition and health claims register — in force since January 2021 — or claims that mean the same thing to a consumer, may be used. That is CAP Code section 15. "Boosts your immune system" is not a description; it is a health claim, and it has to be one the register carries.
- Anything injected or infused. Medicines law, which is stricter than either. A medicinal claim is not permitted unless that specific product is licensed as a medicine for that purpose, and advertising an unauthorised medicinal product in Great Britain is a criminal offence under the Human Medicines Regulations 2012.
The third is the one that surprises people, because it is where an IV drip or a vitamin injection sits. The ASA has upheld complaints against IV clinics on exactly this point, over claims that a drip could prevent or treat COVID-19 when the product was not licensed to do it — and in those cases the MHRA's position was that any mention of that condition brought the product inside medicines regulation. On the advertising question an IV bar has more in common with an aesthetic clinic than with a salon.
This matters commercially rather than just legally, because the claim may be doing less work than it appears to. People book a vitamin drip, a facial or a recovery session because of how they expect to feel and how the place looks. A service page can sell the experience without carrying the claim that creates the exposure.
Reviews: the rule that changed in 2025
The DMCC Act 2024 applies here exactly as it does anywhere else. Since April 2025, commissioning or publishing fake reviews has been a banned practice, and the CMA can determine a breach and fine directly — up to 10% of global turnover or £300,000, whichever is higher.
The limb worth having exactly right is incentives: an incentive includes cash, a discount, a freebie or an event invite, and what the Act prohibits is concealing it. Under the Act, it is an undisclosed discount-for-review offer that carries the exposure, not the offer itself — but Google's Maps content policy does not allow businesses to offer incentives in exchange for posting any review. A review flow that asks every client at the right moment, with nothing attached, sidesteps the question entirely, and because it samples everyone rather than the people a discount motivated it is a more accurate reflection of the business.
When the economics are retention, the site should be too
This is the real difference between building for a wellness business and building for most other sectors. Where the money is in the second visit, the package, the membership and the rebooking, the site has a different job to do.
A brochure with a booking button attached is not built to carry memberships, packages or rebooking; a site built around them is, however good the brochure looks. What we build instead:
- Booking as the primary action, everywhere. Online booking that works in seconds on a phone, at eleven at night, without a phone call.
- Memberships, packages and gift cards as first-class features. Recurring billing, prepaid series, balances and renewals tracked automatically — not a note in a diary.
- Retention automation. Follow-up after a first visit and a review request that goes to every client, timed to the point in the visit cycle where asking makes sense; for clients you may lawfully message, a prompt to rebook and a win-back for lapsed clients.
- Missed-contact recovery. Calls during treatments and messages after hours are easy to miss. A voice agent can answer and book; messaging automation can capture and qualify late-night messages.
Built for a phone, with the images intact
Your site will be judged on a phone, and your brand is visual — which is an awkward combination, because images are what make sites slow.
Total page weight, layout shift and blocking time are budgets a build has to pass before it ships, so a gallery cannot quietly get heavier release by release. Load time itself we write against a two-second target and then watch in real visitor data, which is the only place it can be judged honestly. Your space and your work should look as good on a small screen as they do in person, and still load before someone gives up. That is an engineering problem with a known solution, not a trade-off you have to accept.
Local search
People find you by searching nearby. The work is a well-structured site, service and area pages mapped to real UK search demand, and a steady, compliant review flow.
It compounds over months rather than overnight. If you need volume sooner while that matures, we will say so and tell you that paid search is the faster lever — rather than selling you an SEO retainer and hoping you do not notice the gap.
Where to next
Start with a free audit — five prioritised findings on search, speed and conversion, sent as a recorded walkthrough. On a wellness site that means where the booking journey leaks; the audit also checks how health claims appear. The findings are yours either way.
For the rules in more detail, each quoting its sources with dates, see a page-by-page checklist for clinic websites.