Don’t Make These 5 Mistakes On Your Orthodontic Website

Creating a competitive website for your orthodontic practice isn’t always easy. Beyond keeping up with the latest SEO trends and customer service innovations, it’s also important to avoid making mistakes that could hurt your potential for growth. Here are some missteps to avoid when creating and maintaining an orthodontic website.

Poor Navigation

It’s very easy to create your website in a way that looks great and makes plenty of sense to you. However, what’s important is that it makes sense to your visitors. Create a simple layout of sections with a sensible list of subsections users would expect to find there.

For example, users should be able to easily find a “treatment options” section, which should only contain the treatments your office offers. They shouldn’t be left looking for financing options only to find that it’s listed in your treatment options section or some other place where it doesn’t make sense to be.

In the same vein, it should never take more than two clicks to find most pages on your website, even some of the more obscure pages.

Slow Response Time

This mistake can be easy to make during the initial creation of your website and after it’s already live. If your web pages take any more than three seconds to load completely, including all images and forms, it’s likely you’re losing some potential patients.

Creating a responsive website often starts with choosing a quality server. Uploading large image files when you create your website can cause the load time to soar. It’s equally important to manage your website to ensure new problems with page load time and responsiveness don’t arise. There are several potential causes of poor responsiveness, so if you notice your website starting to load slowly, take the time to troubleshoot and address the issue.

Not Including a Favicon

This one is easy to overlook, but it’s one way to make your website that much more competitive. A favicon is a little icon that appears on an open tab. Since people are likely to keep tabs open, and also probably procrastinate in booking an orthodontic appointment, having a memorable favicon can boost conversions.

Forgetting About Mobile

This may be the cardinal sin of modern website design. While it’s been a good idea to optimize your website for mobile for some time, it’s now an indispensable aspect of web design. With 70% of all digital media being consumed on mobile, and with no sign of this trend slowing down, failing to make your website mobile-friendly will make it impossible for your website to be competitive.

Not Thinking of Conversions

Making your website great for users is a must, but you can’t forget to make it work for you. The navigation of your website and the overall design should guide visitors to converting on some sort of desired action. For example, it should be easy to find the page to schedule an appointment, and it would be a good idea to create some sort of portal to the appointment booking page on many of your website’s pages.

It’s also smart to include a section where users gain some incentive by providing contact info before they leave your website. Without these elements present, your website could be gaining lots of traffic but failing to earn new patients.

By noting these website mistakes, you can move forward with your website creation with more confidence.