Your clinic website: what to fill in and what to leave
Your clinic gets a public website as soon as you sign up, at your own subdomain. It works immediately, which is the good news and also the risk — a site that works is easy to leave exactly as it came.
The defaults are deliberately generic. Generic is the one thing that will not persuade a patient comparing you against two other clinics.
Here is what actually earns its keep.
The headline
The single most-read line on the page, and the default is written to be replaced.
The trap is writing something that sounds like marketing. Patients are not choosing between philosophies of care; they are deciding whether you are nearby, open, and able to see them. A headline that says what you do and where beats one that says you are passionate about wellbeing.
If you are stuck, the plainest version is usually the best one: what you treat, and the area you serve.
The contact details
Fill in the phone number even though the whole point is online booking. A patient who wants to ask something before committing will look for a number, and not finding one is a reason to close the tab.
The email is worth adding for the same reason, and the social links only if the accounts are actually maintained. A link to a profile last posted to two years ago is worse than no link — it suggests the clinic might be equally out of date.
The colours
There is a theme picker with ready-made palettes. Pick the one closest to your existing signage or printed material, if you have any. Consistency between your door and your website does more for recognition than any individual colour choice.
Two practical notes:
- The presets are checked for readable contrast. If you hand-pick colours instead, check the readability warning rather than trusting how it looks on your monitor — a pale accent that reads fine on a bright screen can be unusable in daylight on a phone.
- You are not committed. Changing the theme later does not affect bookings or patient data.
The clinic address
Covered in the setup guide, and repeated here because it is the field with the most consequences and the least obvious ones.
Your clinic's address is not just displayed on the page. The city becomes part of your page's web address, appears in the page title, and goes into the structured data that tells search engines where you are. A clinic with a partial address gets a weaker version of all three, silently.
What to leave alone
The layout. It is arranged the way it is because patients scan for the same four things — what you do, where you are, who works there, how to book. Rearranging that to be distinctive mostly makes it harder to use.
The booking flow. It is the one part of the page with a job, and the job is to not lose anybody.
The five-minute version
If you only do one pass:
- Rewrite the headline so it says what you treat and where.
- Add your phone number.
- Pick a theme near your existing branding.
- Check your clinic address has a city and postcode.
- Open it on a phone, in a private window, and read it as a stranger would.
That last one finds more problems than the other four combined, because it is the only one where you see the page the way a patient does.
Written against how VaidX behaves today. If your website editor does not match what is described here, tell us and we will correct it.