Six tests, ten minutes, one phone
Take your phone off the clinic Wi-Fi, onto mobile data, and open the site in a private window. Each test is something a worried patient physically does. Note which ones fail: which ones matters more than how many.
1. Book a mole check as a stranger
The test: you have noticed a mole that has changed. From the home page, find what a mole check costs, what it involves, and reach a booking screen.
Pass: one page carries the fee, a description of the appointment and a button, reached in a tap or two.
Fail: screening is a line on a services list with no price, or the only route forward is an enquiry form.
The fix: give mole checks and skin-cancer screening a page of their own: the price, what the appointment involves, live availability. On most dermatology sites it becomes the busiest page.
2. Search the way a patient searches
The test: pick something you treat — eczema, psoriasis, rosacea, acne — and count the taps to a page about it.
Pass: one tap, to a page written in the words a patient would use, ending in a way to book.
Fail: a single Conditions page listing everything, or the condition appearing only inside a consultant's biography.
The fix: a page per condition and per procedure, mole removal and skin biopsy included. Patients type the condition, not the specialty, so each page is its own route in.
3. Check a consultant the way a patient checks
The test: pick one consultant and establish, from the site alone, their specialist registration, where they trained and what they focus on.
Pass: a profile page per consultant carrying all three.
Fail: a name and a photograph in a team grid, or credentials compressed into one footer sentence.
The fix: a profile per consultant listing specialist registration, training, hospital posts and areas of focus. Dermatology patients scrutinise credentials harder than most, and this is where they decide.
4. Find the fee, then find your insurer
The test: work out the consultation fee, the follow-up fee, and whether the clinic is recognised by your insurer.
Pass: one page with both fees, procedure prices where they can be stated, and the insurers named.
Fail: fees on request, or insurers mentioned without a list.
The fix: state them. A patient paying privately because they could not wait has a figure in mind, and an insured patient books whichever clinic confirms their insurer first.
5. Book, then read what arrives
The test: complete a genuine booking on your own site, then open the email it sends.
Pass: availability appeared live, the appointment type had a sensible length, and the confirmation carries a medical-history form to complete beforehand.
Fail: the confirmation is a bare date and time, or nothing turns up — check spam before deciding it never sent.
The fix: booking embedded from your clinic software with intake attached to the appointment type, so the consultation opens with the examination instead of the paperwork.
6. Audit every image on a condition page
The test: open each condition and procedure page and, for every clinical photograph, ask whether you could produce the consent for it today.
Pass: each clinical image is a real case held with its consent record, and promotional imagery elsewhere stays inside your country's rules.
Fail: stock skin photography standing in for clinical cases, or before-and-after sets nobody has checked against local advertising rules.
The fix: keep clinical images factual and consented case by case, and confirm what may be published where you work. Health advertising and patient-data rules differ by country; the country pages set out which apply.
Scoring
The pattern of failures tells you where to start. Tests 1 and 5 lose patients who had already decided to come to you, so fix those first. Test 4 loses the comparison quietly, because nobody rings to say the fee was missing. Tests 2 and 3 are slower, and decide whether a worried patient finds you at all. Test 6 costs nothing until somebody complains.
Where this sits
Our dermatology clinic websites are built to pass all six at a fixed price. For the same failures ordered by what each costs, read why your dermatology site gets no bookings, and for the build price see what a dermatology clinic website costs.