A doctor’s website should do one simple thing: let a patient find the information they need in thirty seconds, and tell them how to book. Yet most medical websites we see fail exactly here. These are the mistakes we meet most often.
1. Practical information hidden away
Hours, locations, how to book, which visits you do: it is why 90% of patients open the website, and it is almost always the hardest thing to find. If a patient must dig through three menus to learn where you practice on Tuesdays, the website is working against you.
2. Letting the portals speak
Without a website of your own, patients find you on booking portals and directories — pages full of ads (often your competitors’), reviews you do not control, sometimes wrong data. Your own website does not eliminate them, but it puts you back at the centre: the first source about you becomes you again.
3. Ignoring healthcare advertising rules
Healthcare information has precise rules: truthful content, no outcome promises, transparency on titles and specialisations. A website written like a commercial brochure (“the best results in town!”) is not just poor taste: it can cost you a formal warning. Copy must be written by someone who knows the line between informing and promoting.
4. No trace of scientific activity
Publications, conferences, teaching: for many specialists it is the real calling card — and on the website it is missing, or a PDF from 2019. For a professor we work with we built an archive of over one hundred publications, searchable in a blink: it is the section colleagues (and informed patients) look at most.
5. The abandoned website
The saddest case: the website exists, but the latest news is four years old, the security certificate expired and the phone number is the old one. An abandoned website communicates exactly the opposite of what a doctor wants to communicate. Someone needs to keep it in order — little work, every month, consistently.
If you recognise yourself in one of these mistakes, no panic: they can all be fixed. On the page dedicated to doctors’ websites you find how we work, what the project includes and the real examples — and the first draft, as always, is free.