My Podiatry Website Looks Bad on My Phone. What Should I Do?

Your podiatry practice is growing, but you’d like it to grow more. You’ve got a website, and you’re trying to be more active with your marketing efforts. So far, so good.

Well, here’s a question you might need to consider: have you checked your website from your mobile device lately? What do you see?

Don’t just look at the website, either. Try to use it. Pretend you’re one of your patients and see if it’s easy and intuitive to find critical information about conditions, access the patient portal (if you have one), submit forms, etc.

If your website looks or performs badly, you’ve potentially got a big problem on your hands. Let’s briefly explore why, before shifting toward solutions

Why Website Performance Is Such a Big Deal for Your Practice

There are several important reasons why your practice website has to be good on mobile—some of which fall under the general category of “common sense,” and some of which deal more with the technical side of search engine performance.

For starters:

Most people surf the web primarily on their phones—NOT a desktop or laptop.

According to a study by Perficient based on over 5 trillion US-based web visits, approximately 64% percent of web traffic is served on mobile devices (mostly smartphones, with some tablets). That’s almost 2 out of 3.

In case you might be thinking the podiatry industry is an exception to the rule, spoiler alert: it isn’t. Here at VMD Services, where we work with podiatrists around the country, more than half of our clients’ traffic has been coming from mobile devices for years now.

So it’s already nearly a certainty that, already as you read this, the majority of potential patients accessing your website are viewing and using the mobile version. And if what they’re seeing is ugly, unprofessional, or difficult to use, that obviously can have a major effect on how likely they are to schedule an appointment with you.

Mobile-First Indexing is the New Normal

Now, let’s look at the technical SEO side of the problem.

Google is always tweaking its algorithms to try to serve users with the best possible results for their search queries, and of course they are well aware that most people surf the web primarily on their phones. For that reason, for the last several years Google has been rolling out mobile-first indexing, which means that Google will primarily use the mobile version of a website to determine search rank, rather than the desktop version.

All new sites launched (or first indexed) by Google since July 2019 have this selected by default, and all other sites were slated to be moved over to mobile-first indexing by 2021.

User Experience Matters More than Ever

At the same time, Google is constantly refining their algorithms to take user experience into account when ranking pages, including a recent Page Experience Update that’s rolling out this summer. Factors that affect user experience, such as page load speeds, interactivity, and visual stability of a design will play more of a role in determining search rank.

To put it in plain, simple English? If your mobile site is lacking information, hard to use, loads slowly, or has any number of other technical or user experience issues, there’s a good chance it will adversely affect your rankings on search engine results pages. 

Even simpler: If you give your users a bad experience, eventually Google will stop sending them to you in the first place.

Testing Your Mobile Site: Some Quick Checks

Not sure if your mobile website makes the cut? The best choice is to call VMD Services and ask for a mobile website audit. Our technical SEO experts will examine and test your site carefully, then make recommendations for how you can improve your mobile performance.

But if you just want to get a quick feel, pull up your site and take a look:

• Does it just look like a tiny, scaled-down version of your desktop site? Do you have to constantly pinch, resize, and scroll just to read anything? Chances are you don’t even have a mobile site.
• Do the proportions of images, text, buttons, etc. look visually pleasing and correct, or do varying elements of your pages look disproportionate to each other? Can you see and read everything clearly, and are buttons the right size?
• Is some content missing? Broken images, videos that won’t play, etc.?
• How quickly do pages load? Try to test this both using mobile data (4G/5G connection) and via a WiFi connection. If a page takes longer than 2 seconds to load and be functional, or lags constantly, it’s more likely that users will quit their session in frustration. Many times the issue might be that images or other page elements need to be compressed and optimized for mobile.
• How stable is the layout? Do text and images seem to “jump around” or change their positions? Do you find yourself mis-tapping because a button or menu item moved unexpectedly?
• Pick a few key pages on your site and pop them into Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool. Google will analyze your page and let you know if it flagged any loading issues.

The Leader in Podiatry Web Design and Marketing

Our digital marketing experts have been building websites and running digital marketing plans for podiatrists across the country for years. We understand the ins and outs of web development, technical SEO, branding, content marketing, and more. And we make beautiful websites that look and function great on any platform—mobile or desktop.

Maybe your website simply needs better optimization for mobile. That could mean compressing images and media files, adding a few extra metatags to the code, and updating plugins. A few simple tweaks might be all you need to dramatically boost performance and keep users on your site.

In other cases, a new mobile-friendly website built from the ground up might be the better choice, with a better long-term ROI.

Either way, you can trust the experienced team at VMD Services to help. Feel free to check out our web design page for more detailed information about what we provide, as well as our case studies for real stories about other podiatry practices we’ve helped over the years.

But whatever you do, don’t wait around while a poorly performing mobile website costs you search rank and new patients coming through your doors! To open up a no-obligation conversation with our team, just call (833) 823-3335, or reach out online today.