5 Ways to Make Your Medical Website More User Friendly
It’s no secret that a user-friendly website will help you generate new business for your practice. But how do you make a user-friendly website? Here are 5 tips to making a user-friendly website for a medical practice.
How to Make A User-Friendly Medical Website?
Design for mobile first.
Most Internet browsing now takes place on mobile. Because of this, it is absolutely paramount to have a mobile-friendly website. However, in 2020, we can take it a step further: mobile FIRST. Since desktop makes up a smaller portion of website views, the design of the site needs to, first and foremost, be optimized for viewing on mobile phones.
This includes navigation menus, calls to action, image sizes, and layouts. Your website needs to look good on mobile, otherwise you miss out on a great deal of potential traffic.
Make your purpose clear and visible above the fold.
Above the fold is an old advertising term that used to refer to content on a newspaper that was above the fold line; however, that term is now used to refer to the content on your webpage that is immediately visible on the screen without scrolling.
You need to include who you are (logo), what you do (a main headline), and an action that most users will want to take (call to action button) above the fold. You should also have an easy navigation menu above the fold so that people can browse the rest of your site.
Keep your website fast.
Site speed is the number one reason why someone would exit your page. If it doesn’t load fast enough, users will simply go to another site that might be able to help them.
Keep image sizes small, make sure to keep on-page scripts to a minimum, and choose a dedicated server to host your website. Use Google’s PageSpeed insights to get personalized recommendations for your website.
Make your website easy to navigate.
A big reason people leave a website is because they couldn’t find what they were looking for. If you have the information on the medical website, but people can’t find it, it’s about as useful as not having the information there at all!
How do you make a website easy to navigate? First, have a menu that includes the most important options. Second, make your most important services accessible on the front page. Lastly, make sure that your sitemap is easily accessible by users. The site map is a last resort for people, and is mainly used for search engines.
Make sure calls to action are big and prominent.
On a website, calls to action are typically in the form of buttons. The button tells the user what to expect when they click, and the button is made large and easily visible so that their eye is drawn to it when they want to take an action.
Your button needs to be large enough to click on, but not so large that it takes up too much of the screen. However, that’s not enough. The button needs to also be prominent. The best way to make a prominent button is to use a color that stands out from the rest of your website. If your main website color is green, you’ll want to use orange buttons (for example). If your main website color is blue, red buttons will stand out the most. Stick to complementary colors for important calls to action!