Six tests, ten minutes, your own phone
Come off the clinic Wi-Fi onto mobile data and open your site in a private window. Each test is something a cautious first-time patient physically does before committing to being needled by a stranger. Run them in order and note the failures: which ones they are matters more than how many.
1. Learn what a first appointment involves
The test: from the home page, try to find out what the first consultation is like — how many needles, how long they stay in, what to wear, how you might feel afterwards.
Pass: one tap to a first-visit page that answers all of that in your own words, with real photographs of the room rather than stock hands and orchids.
Fail: a page on the history and philosophy of the medicine, nothing about the appointment.
The fix: write the first-visit page. It is what a nervous patient reads immediately before booking, and most clinic sites do not have one.
2. Read a condition page as if you had not written it
The test: open your busiest condition page and check every sentence that says what treatment does.
Pass: claims sit inside the advertising standards of the country you practise in, and registration is stated on the page.
Fail: promises lifted from another clinic's site, or a patient testimonial in a market where you may not use one. Advertising regulators in the UK, Australia and elsewhere restrict claims to what the evidence supports, and registered practitioners in Australia cannot use testimonials in advertising.
The fix: rewrite to the rules where you practise. A page written on hope comes down eventually, usually just after it starts bringing in appointments.
3. Book yourself in as a new patient
The test: on the phone in your hand, get an initial consultation into the diary right now.
Pass: real availability appears, the initial consultation carries its own longer slot, and an intake form follows.
Fail: a contact form promising a call back, or one appointment length for everything.
The fix: embed live availability from the clinic system you run — Cliniko, Jane, Zanda, Acuity, Power Diary and Fresha all carry separate initial and follow-up types with intake forms.
4. Find the follow-up price
The test: without ringing anybody, find what a return visit costs, then what a herbal prescription costs if you dispense.
Pass: initial, follow-up, packages and prescription charges all sit on a page reachable from the menu.
Fail: the initial fee alone, or fees on request.
The fix: state all of them. Somebody weighing up a course of treatment does the arithmetic on the follow-up figure, not the first one — on whichever site lets them.
5. Go looking for the other services
The test: count the taps from the home page to herbal medicine, cupping, moxibustion or dietary therapy — whichever you offer.
Pass: a page each, named the way patients name them, each one bookable.
Fail: all of them as bullets on a single services page, or a passing mention on the home page.
The fix: one page per service. Each is a separate search, and each carries its own claims to check.
6. Verify a registration in ten seconds
The test: behave like the patient who checks credentials. Find the practitioner's professional body and registration number.
Pass: both on every practitioner profile and in the footer.
Fail: fully qualified and insured, with nothing a patient can verify.
The fix: training, professional body and registration number on each profile. The patients who check are the ones who nearly booked.
Scoring
Nobody passes six from six first time, so the useful output is a repair order. Test 1 first: the doubt it answers costs more first appointments than anything else. Then 3 and 4, which an already-convinced patient needs in order to act tonight. Then 6, fifteen minutes of work. Then 2, before somebody at a competing clinic reads that page. Test 5 last: growth rather than repair.
Where this sits
Our acupuncture clinic websites are built to pass all six at a fixed price. The diagnostic version, ordered by what each failure costs, is why your acupuncture website gets no bookings. For test 2, see acupuncture website rules by country; for what a build costs, see what an acupuncture clinic website costs.