Setting up your clinic online, in the right order
Most clinic software onboarding fails in the same way. You sign up, land in an empty dashboard, click around for ten minutes, and quietly close the tab. Nothing was broken. There was just no obvious first move.
Here is the order that works, and why each step has to come before the next.
What signing up actually creates
The signup form asks for very little: your business name, an email and a password. That is intentional — the alternative is a fifteen-field form before you have any reason to trust the product.
What it creates behind the scenes is more than it appears:
- A business, which is the container everything else lives in.
- A subdomain, derived from your business name. This becomes your clinic's public website address.
- An owner account, which is you, with permission to change everything.
- A trial, so you can set the whole thing up before deciding anything.
You now have a working public site. It has no clinic, no doctors and no services on it yet, which is what the rest of this is about.
Step one: add your clinic, with a real address
Not the business — the clinic. A business can have several; each is a physical place a patient can walk into.
Fill in the address properly, including the city and postcode. It is tempting to type the bare minimum here and move on, and it is the single most consequential shortcut you can take, because that address is not just displayed. It determines:
- the web address of your clinic's page, which is built from the city and clinic name
- the page title search engines show
- the structured data that tells Google where you are
A clinic with no city gets a weaker URL, a vaguer title and an incomplete listing — quietly, with no error message. Fifteen extra seconds now is worth more than any amount of tuning later.
Step two: add your services
Patients book a service, not a person. "Root canal", "Consultation", "Teeth cleaning" — whatever you actually offer, with a duration and a price.
Services attach to a clinic. A service that exists but is not attached to the clinic a patient is booking at is invisible to that patient. If you run more than one location and offer different things at each, this is where that difference gets expressed.
Two things worth getting right the first time:
- Duration drives the slot length. A consultation set to 60 minutes will hand out hour-long slots whether or not you need them.
- Name it the way patients say it. Your internal shorthand is not what someone types into Google.
Step three: add your doctors — then activate them
Add the clinicians who see patients. Name, speciality, and which clinic they work at.
Then activate them. A newly added team member cannot sign in until you switch them to active, and this defaults to off. They will look completely correct in your team list while being unable to log in. This catches nearly everyone once. We wrote a whole article about it because it is the most common "nothing is working" support question there is.
Step four: set schedules
This is the step that turns a configured clinic into a bookable one, and the one most likely to be skipped because it feels like an extra.
Availability is set per doctor, per clinic. Not per doctor. If Dr Sharma works Mondays at your first location and Thursdays at your second, that is two schedules, not one schedule with two entries.
Until a doctor has a schedule at a clinic, they have no slots. No slots means no bookings, no matter how correct everything else is.
Step five: make the site look like yours
Your public site is already live. Now make it recognisable: pick a colour theme, write the headline, add your phone number and any social links.
The headline is worth thirty seconds of real thought. The default is generic on purpose, and generic is the one thing that will not persuade someone who has three other clinic websites open.
Step six: check it as a patient
Open your public site in a private browsing window — not your normal one, where you are logged in and seeing things patients cannot. Then try to book an appointment with yourself.
You will find whatever you missed in about a minute. It is almost always a missing schedule.
The dependency chain, in one line
Clinic → services → doctors → activate → schedule → book.
Each depends on the one before it. Nearly every "the booking page is empty" turns out to be a step skipped rather than anything broken, and the order is the fastest way to find which.
Written against how VaidX behaves today. If your front desk does not match what is described here, tell us and we will correct it.