Did you know Google sees over 1 billion health-related queries daily? In today’s digital age, most patients search online before finding a new healthcare provider or booking a consultation. Regardless of your niche in the healthcare world, a solid online presence is fundamental to attracting new patients. Potential customers rarely trust practices without a professional website that displays their services and social proof.
Accurate online healthcare information is more crucial than ever. What does it mean for your healthcare website? Providing the right and essential information users are craving can make you a top industry leader. You will need a professional healthcare web design that provides easy access to vital information and an excellent user experience to achieve this.
Prioritize smooth navigation
Your healthcare website is a valuable tool for users (potential future patients) to obtain the information they seek. Your site design should highlight the most important features, helping visitors quickly find what they are looking for. Remove any unnecessary steps that can clutter navigation or make your site confusing.
Add a navigation tab at the top of the page with the most essential resources, such as:
- Our locations
- Our professional staff
- Services
- Conditions and treatments
- Blog
Additionally, consider including a search bar in your web design so patients can find any other resources they may need. Shortening the process of finding the right service, booking a consultation, or finding any other information they seek will result in more appointments for your practice.
Make it mobile-friendly
Today, about 55% of patients make their health-related searches from mobile devices. Ensuring your healthcare website design is responsible for smartphones, tablets, and other devices is no longer an option but a necessity.
Adapt your design so layouts, texts, images, and other features automatically adapt to smaller screens. Another option is developing a mobile app. Mobile-friendly website or app, mobile customers can not be left out.
Optimize your forms
In the healthcare industry, forms – in paper or online – are a must. You must gather patients’ information, but they often dread filling them out. What can you do to improve this step and prevent potential patients from exiting your site without filling out your forms? The best tips is to optimize your forms and make them as painless as possible:
- Provide clear direction and remove distractions
- Use microcopy to guide the patient through the forms
- Clearly label each important section
- Add mobile-friendly input types
- Consider smart defaults
- For complex applications, break the process into multiple forms
Those are just a few tips, but you have many more ways to optimize your medical forms. You must adopt online forms’ best practices to avoid abandonment and increase your website conversion rate.
Create a clear FAQs
For some websites, a frequently asked questions section is optional; however, it becomes a crucial feature for a healthcare site. As a professional healthcare provider, you know better than anyone what the most common questions or doubts patients typically have are. Why not anticipate those questions and provide potential patients quick access to the answers?
Remember that a good web design anticipates needs. Providing valuable, helpful information through FAQs will prevent confusion, prepare patients for booking an appointment, and lead them to other website pages where they can find further information.
Medical website must-have features
We mention how crucial the FAQs section is for medical sites. Continuing down this lane, we want to discuss essential healthcare website design features. There are countless options when it comes to web design features. As stated above, you want to keep your medical website easy to navigate, avoiding cluttering it with non-essential attributes. What are the must-have healthcare website features?
- FAQs
- Online booking appointment – It makes scheduling an appointment more convenient for patients.
- Opening hours
- Contact info
- Blog – Besides improving your website’s SEO and Google ranking, it places you as a trustworthy practice in your readers’ eyes.
- Patient reviews – This is what most visitors will look for before making up their minds.
Don’t forget trust signals and badges
When owning a healthcare practice and a medical website, you deal with patients’ sensitive information. Users want to know how you will protect their privacy before giving away personal or medical information or filling out a form. You can display your security signals, such as HIPAA compliance badges, to give them peace of mind. You can also exhibit professional symbols, such as accreditations and awards, as signs of your expertise in your niche.
Hire professional healthcare web designers
Probably the best way to take your medical web design to the next level is by hiring professional talent. A web designer or design team with experience working on healthcare-related projects can help you put together a website that attracts new visitors and turns them into loyal patients.
Designing a top-notch healthcare website
Your website is like your online practice’s front reception, a fundamental tool to get patients through your physical office doors. Nevertheless, that is only achievable when you use that tool right. That means developing a design that is easy to navigate and counts on all the essential features a professional medical site must have.
How is your healthcare web design performing? Do you think it may need some adjustments? You can use this guide as a checklist to see where your site requires improvement.