These days, a strong online presence is the only way a business can truly succeed. This is just as true of the healthcare industry as it is any other sector. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend endless amounts of time and money on creating the perfect website for a healthcare provider.
This post will focus on seven of the most important things your customers expect from a healthcare website. If your site incorporates these seven things, you can rest assured that it will have a positive impact on your practice over the long term.
1. Simple Navigation
When designing a website, it’s crucial that it caters to the lowest common denominator. This means that you have to consider your entire demographic and make sure it’s it’s as easy as possible to navigate for the person who is the least familiar with computers among those demographics.
Sites that have simple, clearly-labeled pages and menus that are easy to navigate will always perform better than ones that don’t. If people can’t find the information they’re looking for in a relatively short amount of time, they will simply go elsewhere.
Simplicity and intuitive navigation should always be prioritized over cutting-edge design or cluttered pages.
2. Clear and Useful Information
This ties into the first point on the list. Whether the person on your site is a new or returning patient, it’s important that they can find the information they need quickly and easily. While this can be accomplished partly by designing the pages with simplicity in mind, it also requires taking the time to consider what the needs of these people are.
For example, potential customers will be looking for information such as whether or not your practice accepts new patients, what services you provide and how they can get in touch with your office. Returning patients will want easy access to things like patient portals, cost estimates, and past visits.
Common information like this should be clearly labeled and available from any page on your site.
3. Patient Testimonials
Being able to view customer feedback is a great way to attract new clients. Research shows that people are much more likely to trust online reviews than advertisements. When your patients leave good reviews, it makes it much more likely that others will trust you. Let your patients advocate for you.
Ask patients to leave reviews. Include a small sidebar of rolling testimonials, or you can create an entire page dedicated to patient feedback. This adds an extra touch of humanity to your online practice.
4. Mobile-optimized Design
In the last few years, there has been a notable shift in how people browse the internet. Before, websites were accessed almost exclusively for computers. For the past couple of years, however, mobile web browsing has overtaken computer browsing by a significant amount.
This means that your website has to be made with a mobile-responsive design in order for it to be a useful tool for your practice. Responsive design simply means that the site is able to automatically adapt its layout to make it easier to view on a smartphone or tablet. While this isn’t difficult to implement, you should definitely hire someone with experience to make this type of change.
5. Relatable Content
Even though everyone needs healthcare, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re obligated to get healthcare from you. The ultimate goal of your practice is likely to help as many people as possible and give the absolute best care in your region. To do this, you have to offer more than bare-bones, clinical information.
Patients want to know that you’re an authority figure in the field, and they want to feel like they can trust you to take care of them. One way to build credibility is to maintain a blog. Not only can a well-written blog emphasize a human connection between your providers and patients, but it’s an excellent avenue for providing useful, interesting content to your patients.
Consistently providing relevant, professional and fresh content to your clients is also a great way to bump up your search engine results, which means more visibility for your practice.
6. Website Security
Health records are highly sensitive information, so patients need to feel secure in sharing their personal data with you. All websites should have stable, secure hosting, but medical websites need to take extra precautions when it comes to data security. To maintain HIPAA compliance, be sure that your service providers are able to keep up with all HIPAA standards.
7. Easily Accessible Contact Forms
This is another feature that’s critical to long-term success. If patients have questions or want to schedule appointments, they won’t want to look further than the page they’re already on. Your website should have clear, obvious contact forms on almost every page. Any page that doesn’t have these forms embedded should have a call-to-action that links directly to them.
Your aim should be to make it as simple as possible for everyone who visits your page to contact you.
Great Design Will Set You Apart
This might sound like a lot to manage, but once the initial changes are made, it will be easy to keep up. The initial time investment will further your practice’s reach and make you more accessible to as many clients as possible.
Want more ideas to help your medical practice succeed?
Our firm offers a consultation model that can accommodate private practices in all phases of business to provide them direct expertise and support in reaching operational goals, strategic goals and ultimately unlocking the freedom of success.
References:
Adobe Blog | A Comprehensive Guide to Web Design
Podium | Why Customer Reviews Matter
Centrinet | 10 Website Security Best Practices You Can Implement Today
Hubspot | How to Identify Content Topics That Hit Home With Your Readers
DotCom Design | Good Website and Web Design = Success!
