Speed, mobile and accessibility

Most people who find your practice will look at the website on a phone, often on mobile data, often in a hurry. A site that is slow, fiddly or hard to read loses them before they see anything you wrote.

Check it on a real phone

Designers review websites on large monitors and fast office connections. Your patients don’t. Once a quarter, open the site on an ordinary phone, off Wi-Fi, and try to call, book and find your insurance list. Then ask someone older, or someone who wears reading glasses, to try.

Speed

Most slow dental websites are slow for the same few reasons:

• Huge photos: images uploaded straight from a camera. Ask for images to be resized and compressed.
• Autoplay video on the home page, especially as a background.
• Too many add-ons: chat widgets, review sliders, pop-ups and tracking scripts, each loading on every page. Keep the ones that earn their place.
• Cheap or overloaded hosting.

Google’s free PageSpeed Insights and Search Console show how your pages perform for real visitors and which pages have problems. Check their current reports rather than chasing a perfect score; the goal is a site that feels fast on a phone.

Mobile design basics

• Text readable without zooming, with buttons large enough to tap with a thumb.
• The phone number tap to call, and the booking button easy to reach on every page.
• No pop-up covering the screen as the page loads.
• Forms that bring up the right keyboard (numbers for phone fields) and don’t lose what was typed if there is an error.

Accessibility

An accessible website can be used by people with disabilities, including people who use screen readers, can’t use a mouse or have low vision. The widely used standard is WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), published by the W3C, and level AA is the usual target. In practice that includes:

• Text descriptions (alt text) on meaningful images.
• Enough contrast between text and background.
• Every link, button and form field usable with a keyboard, with clear labels.
• Captions on videos.
• Headings that describe the structure of the page.

The legal side deserves care. Dental offices are generally places of public accommodation under the ADA, the Department of Justice has said the ADA applies to the websites of businesses open to the public, and website accessibility lawsuits are filed against small businesses. Separately, practices that receive federal health funding, such as Medicaid, may be covered by HHS rules on accessibility. Exactly what applies to your practice is a question for a healthcare attorney. Two practical points: an accessible site is simply a better site for every patient, and be wary of plugins or overlays that promise to make a site “compliant” automatically. No tool can promise that; real accessibility comes from how the site is built and written.