If you are launching a new website for your Physical Therapy clinic, you might not know where to start. There are so many different factors and you don’t want to miss anything to make you’re your website is the best it can be. Well here are some great tips to help you on your way with this ultimate checklist for your PT clinic website for 2019.
The overall look of your website is important. However, you need to test this before it is launched. Try out different colours and fonts to find the design that works the best for you. Using only a few colours is best and it is much easier to see the important information you want your customers to see. Remember that a simple layout will make for an easier user experience so you should reduce the amount of content on the page to reduce the chance of it being saturated. Simple things like making sure there is a search bar so visitors can search your site easily and quickly will make a big difference for customer usability.
Think about where you want users to go first and make sure the landing page is spot on with all the information they need. Then make sure the site is easily navigable so they can move around the website easily. Your customers should also clearly be able to recognise your brand, so ensure logos and styling are identical throughout and matches with the styling and look of your actual clinics.
When your website is up and running, you will want to be able to check how well each page is performing, how users are finding your website and your customer demographics. You will be missing out on a lot of usable data if you fail to implement google analytics correctly within your site. Google Analytics offers many different types of statistics about your site and visitors’ behaviour.
Set it up for each page that you need to track and analyse data from. This can be done in the back end of your website and you will need a unique code for your website. Once this has been set up you will be able to view tables and graphs of your collected data easily and simply enabling you to make changes to your site to improve its performance. It is a good idea to take a look at what type of information is collected and what this can show prior to your launch.
This is really important because if your website is too slow, then you won’t keep customers on your website. People don’t have much patience and expect everything to load super-fast. So, if the page doesn’t load quickly, they will move on. Experts will say that most users usually expect a site to load in two or less seconds. If not, they will move to the next item in their search results. Use a website tool to check site speed and then make any necessary changes to make improvements.
Changes you can make to improve your site speed include upgrading your hosting plan if it is the actual hosting provider or plan that are causing site load delays. You can also reduce your adverts especially video adverts which can make a difference to the time it takes for the page to load. Images and files can also be compressed to make your page load more quickly. Check all of the pages and make sure they load as quickly as possible to stop the slowing of your site.
Mobile devices are the most popular way of browsing the internet today and this is only going to increase with the improvement of mobile services and reduction of the use of desktop computers for browsing. That means being mobile friendly needs to be one of your top priorities. Everyone will be searching the web on their lunch breaks, on the commute and any other time that they have five minutes. So, you need to be easy to reach on mobiles and fast loading for the users to make the most of their browsing time.
Many website themes will have a mobile option that you will need to turn on. Then the screen will be optimised for mobile browsing. The desktop version of the site will probably look a little different to the mobile version so you should make sure it features the content you want visitors to see first. For example, header videos don’t work on mobile sites and large images and videos increase the load time and reduce the user experience. Test all of your versions before launch to make sure it works for your Physical Therapy clinic.
Both for your own safety and security and that of your visitors, it is important to make sure your website is secure. Google will check if the website has an SSL certificate and then if it does not will inform the user that the site is insecure. This will more than likely mean that the visitor will move on and discontinue viewing your website. To make sure that doesn’t happen you can purchase an SSL certificate easily which will ensure your site is secure and give you that ‘s’ at the end of your http at the beginning of your URL.
Your hosting provider will be able to give you the chance to purchase or add your certificate upon checking the website. This means that once you are secure, data will be encrypted and you are less likely to suffer a data breach. You may also want to consider other forms of protection such as good password management and a spam filter on comments if you have that feature.
It is still important in 2019 to make sure your website is optimised as well as it can be for search engine results. There are many different factors that affect your position in results of a search, some remain the same throughout the years but there are also some changes too. We have already mentioned that you should make sure your site is mobile friendly in order to improve your usability but this is also an SEO factor too. A relatively new factor to think about is how you feature in voice activated search results and more and more searches are conducted this way.
You can use SEO checkers to see how well your website is performing and make changes to improve this. The most important factor is usually going to be ensuring you have quality content that will keep visitors interested and give excellent answers to their search query. It can take some time and research to get the right content for your niche, but when the organic search visitors start to appear it is worth the effort.
Underneath it all is the functionality and versatility of your website and that comes with the architecture. Without a great structure and website provider then the website is not sitting on good ground. There are many different providers out there so you should choose the right one that suits the type of website you are producing. Of course, the more reliable and trustworthy the provider, the better.
You also need a good hosting provider. There are many different hosting packages out there and you need to decide what you want. To do this you should determine how much website traffic you are expecting, how fast you need you site to be and if there are any extras you can get as a package such as email or business registration. Decide what you need then shop around to find the right one for you.
Do you want to take payments through your website or are you looking to take bookings and store personal details? Then you may need some extra features and functionality to do so. You must also ensure you have a privacy policy and ensure safe storage of personal details to adhere to data protection laws. Taking payments also needs to be extremely secure so you should make sure your service provider can ensure this. Again, opting for a trusted and tested site.
You may also want to include stock images so you will need to consider this and its impact, as well as what websites you are linking to. These factors will make a difference to the trust your website has with visitors and customers. Check with your hosting provider to see what services are available and as above what package is best for the type of website you want to deliver to your customers.
As you can see there are many different factors that make a difference to the overall website performance, but that means so many improvements can be made. Now you have this ultimate checklist you can be sure to have a great performing Physical Therapy website. However if you need any help then you can take a look at Patientsites services to give you that helping hand to improve your PT website reach and visits.
Do you need some help with your physical therapy website and marketing? Download our Free Evergreen Marketing Blueprint for Physical Therapists and start creating long-term assets that generate new patient bookings for years to come.
