Six tests, ten minutes
A hygiene clinic website has six jobs. Each has a test you can run on your own phone between patients. Do them on mobile data in a private window, as a stranger would, not on the surgery wifi with the site already cached.
The first three are the path from a stranger's doubt to a slot in your diary.
1. Settle the referral question
Test: open the home page and start a stopwatch. How long before you know whether a patient can book without their dentist sending them?
Pass: a plain sentence within the first screen, next to the booking button. Where direct access applies to you, it says so. Where it does not, it says what is required instead, and the booking flow collects it.
Fail: nothing at all, or the answer buried on an About page in the third paragraph.
Fix: write the sentence against your own regulator's current position. What is permitted varies by country and, in the United States, state by state, so do not copy another clinic's wording. Repeat it on the booking page, and give the detail its own short page for the patients who want it.
2. Price a visit
Test: find what a returning patient pays for a standard hygiene appointment. Time yourself.
Pass: a price per visit type, new and returning, found in under thirty seconds, matching what your booking tool charges.
Fail: "prices on request", one number covering everything, or a fees PDF from two years ago.
Fix: the price list as editable records, one per visit type, plus any longer appointment and any plan pricing. You change a field, the page updates, nobody is rung.
3. Book in one tap
Test: without scrolling, tap Book. Is the visit type already chosen? Are new and returning patients separated?
Pass: one tap into Dentally, Software of Excellence, Cliniko, Jane, Acuity or whichever tool runs your diary, visit type pre-selected, medical history collected inside the tool.
Fail: Book hidden in a menu, a generic contact form, or a page where the patient has to search for your clinic again.
Fix: a header Book button on every page, deep-linked per visit type, with a tappable phone number beside it. Anything containing health information stays inside the booking or forms tool, under whatever agreement applies where you work. The website stores none of it.
4. Appear in under two seconds
Test: load the home page and one inner page on mobile data. Count.
Pass: under two seconds, Core Web Vitals Good on mobile.
Fail: a blank screen, then a slider of stock smiles.
Fix: images sized and compressed, hero prioritised, slider removed, hosting above the cheapest tier. Most rebooking happens on a phone in a spare minute, and a spare minute does not wait four seconds.
5. Explain the visit
Test: find how long an appointment takes, what happens during it and what to expect afterwards.
Pass: a what-happens page in plain language, written for someone who has never chosen a hygienist directly, plus your qualifications and registration presented the way your regulator expects.
Fail: a services list with three words per line.
Fix: write the page as a description of your process rather than as clinical guidance, and route anything that reads like a symptom into an appointment instead of an answer. Build the registration details into the template so an update cannot quietly remove them.
6. Bring the patient back, and know that it worked
Test: think of a patient you saw seven months ago who has not returned. What did the website or the booking tool do about it?
Pass: a recall at your interval with a one-tap rebooking link that opens real dates, plus booking clicks, call taps and enquiries recorded by page.
Fail: nothing goes out, and nobody can say how many bookings the site produced last month.
Fix: turn on the recall in your tool, set the interval, and read the message it sends out loud before you enable it. If it does not sound like you, rewrite it. Then add tracking so next month's version of this test has an answer.
Scoring
Six out of six and the site is doing its job. Keep prices and photographs current, and review the recall message once a year.
Four or five: fix the failures individually. No rebuild needed.
Three or fewer, with tests one, two or three among the failures: the site is losing patients every week, and each one lost is not a single appointment. It is a decade of six-monthly visits that went to a clinic down the road.
Where this sits
This is the launch checklist for every dental hygienist website we build, and the first ten minutes of a diagnosis on one you already own. A similar six run behind our dental practice websites. For a hygiene clinic, test one is the cheapest fix on the list and the one that changes your phone calls fastest. Treat all of this as orientation rather than legal or regulatory advice, and confirm the scope and registration points with your own regulator.