Website Design for your Medical Practice — The Complete Guide

Your website tells potential clients everything they need to know about your medical practice. It offers the first point of contact between your practice and your patients. Therefore, the impression it gives directly impacts your profitability and brand reputation.

This is why you need to create an informative and organized website that accurately represents your medical practice. Although some website design tips are considered universal, here is a comprehensive look at the best practices for the healthcare industry. Read on to ensure you design a fantastic website for your medical practice.

Start by Identifying Your Brand Personality

Creativity is a vital aspect of designing the ideal website for your practice. However, you can only come up with thrilling website designs when you have a clear understanding of your healthcare brand personality. It will help to ask yourself the following questions before you start designing your website:

• What unique services does your practice offer?
• How do you want potential and current clients to perceive your brand?
• Is there a unifying theme for your services?
• What is your competitor doing?
  

Simplicity is Key

Most medical practitioners make the mistake of thinking that their website layout needs to contain all patient information. Therefore, they create a website containing a lot of details — including maps, education resources, patient forms, directions, and appointment information. Instead of helping out, what this information does is clutter your website.

Ensure your website design is easy to navigate and clutter-free if you don't want to chase away your visitors — especially the many mobile users. Start by integrating visual buttons and a navigation button to keep everything organized by importance.

Ensure Faster Load Speed

In the past, consumers were accustomed to slow websites with multiple delays. However, today's consumer expects content to load faster and with zero delays. Kissmetrics reports that 47% of consumers expect a load time of 2 seconds or less when opening web pages.

However, how can you increase your website load time? It starts with limiting and compressing images in your design. Although it is somewhat tempting to use numerous high-resolution images, it is best to stick to fewer compressed images. It will also help to compress your code by taking off all unused characters and unnecessary formatting.

Make it Mobile-Friendly

Did you know that about 80% of website visitors use their mobile devices when conducting an internet search? Equally, nearly half of these mobile users will go to competitor sites when they have a poor experience with your website. Thus, it is time you consider mobile responsiveness when designing your website.

A mobile-friendly website will not only give your visitors a positive user experience but will also help you boost visibility. Your practice will rank highly on different search engines when your web pages are easily readable and interactive. Google's 2015 update indicates that mobile-friendliness is central among the ranking signals.

Produce High-Quality Content

It is vital to integrate compelling content into your website design. For starters, having good content is an excellent way of improving your website visitor experience. You also get to generate more leads when your content is relatable, factual, and high-quality. Always remember that your patients pay close attention to the content on your website.

Potential clients are less likely to seek services from your practice when they notice careless mistakes such as spelling errors. Equally, providing incorrect information will damage your brand reputation and credibility. The following tips will help you ensure you produce high-quality content on your website:

• Ensure your copy is free of any grammar, spelling, and factual errors.
• Keep the content relevant to your practice
• Create short content sections to engage your visitors
  

Ensure It Is Interactive

You might be thinking that having an interactive healthcare website is a waste of time. However, remember your competitors are prioritizing interactivity. It is no secret that today's consumer is accustomed to getting everything done from the comfort of their couch.

Start by identifying the main purpose of your website. Are you looking to encourage visitors to schedule appointments? Or is your goal to increase inquiries? Whatever the reason for designing your website, interactivity will help increase patient engagement. Therefore, it is much easier to attain conversion goals once your visitors are hooked on your site.

Choose a Sleek, Modern Design

Despite having excellent content within your interactive website, it is vital to consider the housing of the design. You risk losing potential clients when your website design is somewhat mediocre. Only a sleek, modern design in today's world can inspire patients to seek services from your practice.

Most consumers prefer an impactful website that is stylish, sleek, and packs a punch. Your practice needs a modern website design that is simple and features faster load times. It should also house high-quality content and include ideal color schemes to enhance the user experience.

Follow the Web Accessibility Guidelines

It will help to have a medical web developer work on making your website more accessible. It is especially vital when your medical practice serves individuals with disabilities. For instance, a web accessibility widget allows your site visitors to adjust brightness, text size, and font type. All of these options help meet Important WCAG 2.1 guidelines while ensuring persons with disabilities get a customized experience on your website.

Ensure you use alternative-text (alt-text) for images and links. It is used for images to describe its appearance and purposes, thus helping the visually impaired to better understand your website when using a screen reader. For links, on the other hand, alt-text helps describe the content within the landing page. Finally, using alt-text is an excellent way of ranking highly on Google because it helps identify the purpose of your web page.

We Are Here to Help

A well-designed website will help improve your online presence, thus attracting and retaining more patients. At DearDoc, we are here to ensure you have an excellent website design for your medical practice. Ensure you contact us today to boost your patient volume and improve the patient experience: