Is Your Website a Dinosaur?

We bet most of our clients, and most cosmetic practices across the country, think they have at least an OK website. We can hear the excuses already:

• I just redid my site not that long ago.
• My site can’t be all that bad, people still contact me on it.
• I’m focused on social media and AI. A website doesn’t matter that much anymore.
• I’ve added before and afters, blogs, videos and other things to keep my site fresh.
• My staff and I like the look and feel of our site already.

But we’re here to tell you that even a site that looks great on the surface and seems “good enough” may be placing you at a serious competitive disadvantage. Why? We’re glad you asked!

Site Slowness: An SEO Killer

Over the years, we’ve had a few clients say “it doesn’t matter what my site looks like.” And to a certain extent, that can be true. If you have the most beautiful website, but it’s slow as heck, you might as well be putting lipstick on a dinosaur.

Site slowness is a double whammy. First of all, users can’t stand sites that take more than a second or two to load. But even more important to us, search engines and AI engines place considerable weight on page speed, and will route traffic to and site sources from sites that load quickly.

Slowness can come from your hosting setup, but more likely your site is slow due to technical problems with the site coding itself, including outdated/incompatible plugins, poor caching, scripts running in the background, unoptimized images and files, and more. 

Site Schema: Beyond Mission Critical

You may have heard your web vendor talking a lot about “site schema” over the past year. But what the heck is it? Site schema adds labels to the information on your website so search engines and AI tools don’t have to guess what everything means. It tells them things such as your business name, services, doctors, articles, reviews, FAQs and contact information.

Think of it as putting sticky notes on different parts of your site that say, “This is a phone number,” “This is a doctor profile,” or “This is a frequently asked question.” These labels help Google and AI systems understand your content more accurately. Common types of schema include:

• Local Business schema for addresses, hours and contact information.
• Doctor schema for physicians and credentials.
• FAQ schema for questions and answers.
• Article schema for blog posts.
• Review schema for ratings and testimonials.
• Service schema for treatments and procedures.

Schema does not make a website load faster, but it greatly helps search engines organize and interpret information more effectively. As AI-powered search becomes more common, schema is super important because it provides structured information that helps search engines and AI tools understand who you are, what you offer and how your content relates together.

Site UX: Are Your Users Engaged?

User expectations are constantly changing on the web, and what felt fun or state of the art even a year or two ago can now look very dated. For a good user experience (UX), a modern website needs to house information exactly where users expect, and give users several pathways to arrive at the info they’re seeking.

Can your visitors quickly find what they need and easily do what they came to do on your site? Here are 10 big things that may be stopping them in their tracks, and limiting your site’s conversion value:

1. Confusing navigation – Visitors struggle to find information or important pages.
2. Cluttered design – Too many popups, ads or competing calls to action muddy the waters.
3. Poor mobile experience – The text is hard to read, buttons are too small or elements overlap.
4. Difficult forms – Long, complicated forms cause users to abandon inquiries.
5. Broken links or errors – Missing pages, malfunctioning buttons or outdated content impact site quality.
6. Weak calls to action – Users aren’t sure how to schedule, purchase or contact the business.
7. Inconsistent design elements – Fonts, colors and layouts change from page to page.
8. Hard-to-read content – Large blocks of text, small fonts and poor contrast discourage reading.
9. Slow load times – Like we said above, pages that take more than a few seconds to appear are deal killers.
10. Intrusive elements – Chat widgets, autoplay videos and popups interrupt visitors.

A bit of user testing can reveal issues quickly. If someone unfamiliar with your website struggles to complete simple tasks like finding pricing, booking an appointment or contacting your practice, the site likely needs UX improvements.

How to Fix It

The last time you redid your site, it may have taken a considerable amount of time and effort. So “redesign” may feel like a 4 letter word around your office. But instead of a full-blown medical website design, a “refresh” – rebuilding for dramatically improved site speed, ensuring proper backend coding, and freshening up the look a tad – can be a very quick process with big returns through a small effort from you and your team.

With the help of AI tools, we can now automate much of the manual work that used to be involved in website redos. It’s a win for clients since it produces an extremely modern site at less cost. And being selfish, it’s a win for us too, since the drudgery of manual publishing is a thing of the past.

If you’re completely happy with the look and content on your site currently, we can still upgrade it to perform better while retaining a nearly identical front end experience. And if it’s been more than 3-5 years since you last did an overhaul, we can get more aggressive with an updated design that retains the hallmarks of your brand, while also integrating the latest tips and tricks for SEO and AIO. 

Websites may not be the shiny new thing, but they’re certainly not fossils yet. If yours is showing its age, it’s time to dust it off and give that dinosaur some new life.