Six tests, ten minutes
A clinic website has six jobs. Each has a one-minute test on your own phone. Run them in order: the first three are the path to a booking, and if any fails the rest do not matter yet.
1. Book the right practitioner in one tap
Test: open the site on your phone. Without scrolling, is there a Book button? Tap it. Can you reach live slots for a specific service and practitioner within one more tap?
Pass: service and practitioner chosen, slots visible, two taps from landing.
Fail: the button is in a menu; it opens a contact form; the widget lists everything with no guidance; it asks for an account before showing availability.
Fix: a header Book button on every page, deep-linked per service from service pages and per practitioner from profiles, using the practice system's URL parameters (Cliniko, Jane and Nookal all support this).
2. Appear in under two seconds
Test: private window, mobile data. Load the home page and a condition page. Count until the heading and image are visible.
Pass: under two seconds; Search Console's Core Web Vitals shows Good on mobile.
Fail: white screen for three seconds or more; layout jumping; Poor in Search Console.
Fix: sized and compressed images, the hero prioritised, scripts and plugins trimmed, decent hosting with caching. A day's work on a sound site; a rebuild on a heavy template.
3. Have a page for each condition you treat
Test: search Google for your most common condition plus your town. Are you on page one with a page about it? Open that page: does it say how you treat it, who, what the first visit involves, what it costs, and offer a Book button?
Pass: a page per key condition, indexed, answering those questions.
Fail: a Services page listing disciplines; condition pages of three sentences; no ranking for any condition term.
Fix: condition pages built as structured content, written in the patient's words, linked to services and practitioners, with Book buttons.
4. Explain the first visit and the price
Test: as a stranger, find what an initial assessment costs, how long it is, and what to bring. Time it.
Pass: found within thirty seconds; real numbers; a first-visit explanation.
Fail: "contact us for prices"; nothing about what happens at the first appointment.
Fix: a fees page from price fields; a first-visit page; price and duration on every service page beside the Book button.
5. Prove the practitioners are real and registered
Test: find a practitioner's photo, qualifications and registration number. Find a photo of the actual treatment room. Find reviews or, where testimonials are restricted, professional body links.
Pass: all within a minute.
Fail: stock photos; names without registration; no clinic photos.
Fix: a photographer for half a day; profiles with registration numbers and Book-with buttons; regulator and professional body links; reviews embedded with reserved space where permitted.
6. Catch what it produces and report it
Test: submit the contact form. Where does it go, and when is it answered? Ask the practice manager how many bookings came from the site last month and from which pages.
Pass: form to a monitored inbox with same-day response; bookings by source known.
Fail: form to a former staff member; nobody knows; analytics counts visits only.
Fix: delivery to a monitored address; conversion events for Book clicks, calls and forms marked as key events; the practice system's booking-source report checked monthly.
Scoring
Six of six: the site works; invest in photography and condition content. Four or five: fix the failures, no rebuild needed. Three or fewer with 1 or 2 failing: the site is losing patients weekly and the fixes are worth more than they cost.
Where this sits
This is the launch checklist for every clinic website we build and the first ten minutes of a diagnosis on an existing one. Most clinic sites fail at least three; most failures are fixable inside a month.