Many patients meet your practice for the first time on a phone: in a waiting room, on the bus, or late at night when a symptom starts to worry them. It is worth seeing your website the same way. None of the checks below needs any technical knowledge. You need your own phone, ten minutes, and to be the patient for a moment.
1. Can a patient call you with one tap?
Open your home page and look for your phone number without scrolling. On a phone it should be a link: tap it, and your phone should offer to call. If the number is only part of a picture, or tapping it does nothing, a patient has to copy it out by hand, and some will not bother.
Try the same on your contact page, and on your WhatsApp button if you have one.
2. Are your hours and address easy to find?
Some of the simplest questions a patient has are also the most urgent: are you open today, and where exactly are you? Check that your opening hours and your address are no more than a tap or two from the home page, and that they are written as text rather than shown as an image. Tap the address: it should open in a map.
If you practise in more than one place, make sure each location has its own hours.
3. Does it open quickly on mobile data?
Turn off Wi-Fi and open your site on mobile data. Notice roughly how long it takes before there is something useful to read. A page that stays blank for several seconds loses people who are in a hurry, and people looking for a doctor often are.
A common cause is large photographs. They look sharp on a desktop screen and take a long time to arrive on a phone.
4. Can you read it without zooming?
Hold the phone at a comfortable distance and read one of your treatment pages from top to bottom. You should not need to pinch or zoom, no text should run off the edge of the screen, and pale grey text on a white background should not make you squint.
Then try it outdoors in daylight, where contrast matters most. If you wear reading glasses, try it without them: some of your patients will be doing exactly that.
5. Does the way to contact you work one-handed?
Fill in your own contact or booking form on your phone, holding it in one hand.
- Are the fields large enough to tap without zooming?
- Does the right keyboard appear for a phone number or an email address?
- Does anything cover the form, such as a cookie notice or a chat window that will not close?
- When you press send, is it clear that the message went through?
Afterwards, ask whoever reads those messages whether yours arrived.
What to do with what you find
Write down every moment that made you hesitate, even for a second. Those are the moments where a patient gives up and tries the next name on the list.
Most of the fixes are small: a number turned into a link, hours written out as text, photographs resized, a larger font. Send the list to whoever looks after your website. If that is us, these are the kind of edits the subscription covers, so send it our way.
It is worth repeating the checks every few months, and whenever something on the site changes.