How We Doubled ECG Training PGD Sales – Without a Single Marketing Campaign

ECG Training provides essential training to healthcare professionals across the UK. Among their services, they supply Patient Group Directions (PGDs) – legal documents that allow pharmacists, nurses, and paramedics to administer specific medications without requiring an individual prescription. Getting these documents right isn’t optional. They’re a legal requirement, and any error has real-world consequences for the professionals relying on them in clinical settings.

We’ve worked with ECG Training for over three years. The relationship started when James, Pixelish’s founder, was looking after their site at a previous agency. Within a month of James leaving to start Pixelish, ECG Training had tracked him down and asked him to take over their websites. They’d been having issues with the previous agency not fully understanding how their site worked.

That says everything about how we approach client relationships.

PGDs are a legal requirement for many healthcare professionals. Before we stepped in, here’s how the process worked:

• A customer would purchase a PGD through the website
• Staff would manually reach out to collect required information (registration numbers, superintendent details, etc.)
• The customer would respond (eventually)
• Staff would manually create the PGD using internal systems
• The completed PGD would be emailed within 3 working days

One full-time staff member was dedicated to processing PGDs, supported by a wider team. Customers would regularly chase up orders before the 3-day window was up, creating even more work for staff answering queries.

For customers buying the All Inclusive PGD package, the experience was particularly poor – they’d receive a single 150+ page document and have to hunt through it to find the relevant PGD somewhere inside it.

The process worked, but it didn’t scale. It created unnecessary stress for staff, and it certainly wasn’t the experience customers deserved – especially given the professional and legal nature of what they were purchasing.

We built PGD Docs – a custom WordPress system that automates the entire PGD generation and delivery process end to end.

Here’s how it works now:

• Customer selects their PGD(s) from the online catalogue
• A custom form captures all required professional details before checkout – registration number, superintendent information, premises details
• Customer completes their purchase through the WooCommerce checkout
• Within minutes, their PGD appears in their account area, ready to download as a PDF
• We email them confirmation with instructions on where to find their documents

For All Inclusive customers, instead of one unwieldy document, they now get 50+ individual PGDs – each one clearly labelled and easy to find in their account.

The system also handles the full paperwork lifecycle. PGDs expire after just over 12 months, so we built in automatic expiry management. When a PGD is approaching its expiry date, customers receive a reminder email. When it expires, it’s automatically removed from their account – keeping everything current and compliant.

We launched carefully – starting with a couple of popular PGD products, monitoring closely, ironing out edge cases, then expanding across the full range. The system now runs across two ECG Training websites, handling thousands of documents each year.

PGD Docs is built entirely on WordPress with custom development – no third-party document generation SaaS, no off-the-shelf plugin. The system is built on PHP 8.2 with WooCommerce, using custom hooks into the order lifecycle to trigger document generation at the point of purchase.

The checkout flow uses a custom pre-purchase form built on WooCommerce’s order processing hooks, capturing the professional’s registration number, role, and superintendent details before payment completes. Once the order is confirmed, the document generation runs automatically – no queue, no delay.

PGDs are stored against the customer’s account and flagged for expiry approximately 30 days before the 12-month window closes, triggering an automated reminder email. When the PGD expires, it’s removed from the account automatically.

The system was designed to handle edge cases from the start – customers who don’t complete checkout, orders with multiple PGD types, and bulk All Inclusive purchases generating 50+ individual documents simultaneously.

The legal accuracy requirements made this technically demanding. Each PGD contains specific fields that must be precisely correct – these are regulatory documents used by healthcare professionals in clinical settings. Getting the document generation logic right, and making sure it stayed right across 50+ different PGD types, required careful custom development and thorough testing.

We launched carefully – starting with a couple of popular products, monitoring closely, ironing out edge cases, then expanding across the full range. The system now runs across two ECG Training websites.

PGD sales doubled during peak season, processing time reduced from 3 working days to under 3 minutes, and the equivalent of 3 full-time staff freed from manual document processing – with zero changes to marketing spend.

100% increase in PGD sales

Comparing peak season (August-November) year-on-year, PGD sales doubled.

Here’s the thing: we haven’t even mentioned the new system on the website yet. No marketing. No announcements. No email campaigns. The only thing that changed was the customer experience.

We think the growth comes down to two things: customers finding the process so straightforward that word spread, and the frictionless checkout converting more browsers into buyers.

3 working days to under 3 minutes

That’s the new processing time. Customers get their PGDs almost instantly after completing their purchase.

Staff freed up for higher-value work

The equivalent of three full-time staff worth of processing time has been eliminated. That team can now focus on customer service and other parts of the business rather than manually creating and chasing documents.

Zero room for human error

The customer provides their details. The system generates the document. No manual data entry means no transcription mistakes on legally sensitive documents that healthcare professionals rely on in clinical settings.

What started as a few hours a month tidying up a messy WordPress backend has grown into something much bigger. We inherited a site with outdated plugins, 2,000+ lines of tangled code in functions.php, and years of work from multiple developers who’d each left their mark.

We stripped it back and rebuilt it properly. Then we built PGD Docs. Now we manage four websites for ECG Training’s parent group, with a fifth on the way.

We’re currently on Phase 3 of the PGD system – continuously developing it based on what the business needs. As Ben Moden put it, the system allows for a “fully bespoke system to operate based on the business and customer needs.” 2026 is when they plan to start actively marketing the new system. We’re looking forward to seeing what the numbers look like when they do.

This is what a long-term partnership looks like. We’re not an agency they call when something breaks. We’re their website team – without the overhead of hiring in-house.

See how we approached similar challenges for Rejuvenair Sanctuary (WooCommerce platform with subscriptions and product management) and U&I Renewables (large-scale WordPress build with 200+ automated pages).

This project was led by James Taylor, Director at Pixelish.