Two in the morning, one bar of signal
An owner is in a stable in wellingtons over pyjamas. The horse is sweating, pawing and trying to go down. They have one hand free because the other is on a headcollar, and they are searching your practice name on a phone with one bar.
That is the entire design brief for this part of an equine website. Everything else on the site is read in daylight by someone who is comparing. This page is read once, in the dark, by someone who is frightened. If it takes more than a few seconds, they ring a different practice, and the yard behind them goes with the call.
What "hard to find" actually looks like
It is rarely that the number is missing. It is one of these.
The number is only on the Contact page, two taps behind a hamburger menu that needs a steady thumb. It is typed as plain text, so tapping it does nothing and the owner has to memorise eleven digits and switch apps. It is set inside an image, so it cannot be tapped or copied at all. It sits below a large photograph that has not loaded yet on a poor signal. Or the out of hours arrangement described beside it changed last spring and nobody updated the page.
Each of those is small. Each of them costs an emergency at the exact moment the practice is most valuable.
The rule: every page, above the fold, tappable
There is no page on an equine site that should not carry the emergency route. Not the About page, not a blog post about laminitis, not the fees page. Someone panicking will land wherever search puts them.
So it goes in the site header, as a real telephone link that dials on tap, present before the photography loads. It repeats in the footer. On mobile it can sit as a persistent bar that does not scroll away. And it is worded so there is no ambiguity about what it is for, because "call us" next to a general number is not the same thing as an emergency line.
Say what happens when they ring
Beside the number, in a few short lines: your normal hours, and what happens outside them. Whether an on call member of the practice answers directly, whether it routes to a shared or provider arrangement, and what to expect in terms of a callback. Vagueness here reads as evasion at the worst possible moment, and an owner who does not know whether anyone will answer will hedge by ringing someone else too.
If your out of hours arrangement changes, that text must be editable by you in minutes. Hold it as a record on the site rather than as words baked into a template, so a rota change is a five minute job at eleven at night rather than a support ticket on Monday.
Give them something to do while they wait
Under the number, short holding guidance for the three situations that generate most night calls: colic, a significant wound, and acute non weight bearing lameness. A few plain lines each. What to do now, what not to do, what to have ready when the vet arrives, what information to have to hand when they ring.
Keep it short, keep it general, and be explicit that it is holding guidance and not a substitute for speaking to a vet. Write it yourself or have a vet in the practice write it, because clinical guidance published under your name is your professional responsibility. Advertising and professional conduct rules for veterinary practices differ by country, and in some places the wording around emergency provision and out of hours cover is specifically addressed, so check anything you are unsure of with your own regulator or professional body before it goes live. Treat this article as orientation, not as advice.
Farriers need a version of this too
A farrier does not run an emergency service in the same sense, and pretending otherwise causes problems. What a farrier does need on every page is a clear line about lost shoes and urgent trims: whether you fit them in, roughly how quickly, what number to use, and when it is a vet's problem rather than yours. An owner with a horse that has pulled a shoe off overnight is looking for exactly that answer, and most farrier sites do not give it.
Test it the way it will be used
Stand outside, at night, in a yard with poor signal. Open a blog post on your own site from a search result. Now, one handed, ring the emergency number. Time it. If it takes more than about five seconds and one tap, it is not finished.
Then check the details are still true. Hours, out of hours arrangement, the number itself. This is the single most important content on the site and it is also the content most likely to be quietly out of date, because it is nobody's job until it goes wrong.
Where this sits
An emergency route on every page, with tap to call, current out of hours details held as editable records and holding guidance for the common night calls, is standard on an equine vet and farrier website from us, and the same care applies across the emergency facing parts of our pet business websites. Packages are on pricing. Design this part for the worst night of somebody's year, because that is the only night it will be used.