If you’ve ever abandoned a website because it looked out of date or was simply difficult to navigate, you understand the importance of dental website design to attract more patients. According to recent studies by Northumbria University (per the CVMA), 94% of website first impressions are design-related, and you only have seconds to make a good first impression. People judge dental website designs (or any website) just as quickly as they make decisions about other people, and recent studies published by Behaviour & Information Technology found, “web designers have about [50 milliseconds] to make a good first impression,” from the colors you choose to your website’s navigation and mobile responsiveness.
In other words, creating a patient-centric website is key in dental website design (and dental marketing as a whole) to attract more patients.
To achieve this, here are 11 key steps:
Step 1: Clarify Your Website Objectives
Determine the primary goals of your dental website.Whether your website goals are to increase online bookings, highlight your dental services, or educate patients as part of your overall dental marketing, your goals will shape every dental website design decision you make.
Step 2: Know Your Patients
Dive deep into understanding who your website will serve. Recognizing the preferences, requirements, and online behaviors of patient demographics are essential for creating a dental website design that truly resonates with them.
Step 3: Evaluate Your Competition
Review the dental website designs of your competitors. Note which ones stand out in terms of design and functionality and consider how you might adapt elements to better attract and serve patients and add to your own dental marketing.
Step 4: Choose Your Colors and Fonts Carefully
The right color scheme and typography can significantly affect how patients perceive your practice. Per Science Direct, the psychology of color “determines how users interact with a website and affects users’ behavior.” Similarly, the fonts you choose for your website can influence emotional reactions and decision-making. So, choose your website colors and fonts carefully to convey both professionalism and your practice brand.
Step 5: Design Your Website’s Structure
Organize your website’s content with a clear sitemap, outlining the hierarchy of pages. This roadmap is critical for intuitive navigation and ensuring patients can easily find the information they need. At the same time (per our dental SEO learning module), a well-organized sitemap enables Google and other search engines to quickly determine whether your dental website best matches a patient’s online search for a dental practice, meaning your sitemap plays a significant role in search results, online visibility, and dental marketing to attract new patients.
Step 6: Prioritize Mobile Responsiveness
Make sure your dental website works flawlessly on mobile devices. Almost all Americans (97%) now own a smartphone, and the world percentage is 85%. Google owns just under 84% of the global search market and Google (like other search engines) is in the business of delivering the best possible value and experience for its users. So, it’s not surprising that Google is done with websites that aren’t mobile responsive, meaning mobile responsiveness is essential in dental website design to rank higher in search engines and attract new patients.
Step 7: Focus on User Experience
The usability of your website is paramount. Aim for a design that offers easy navigation, fast-loading web pages, and straightforward calls to action, incorporating regular user feedback to refine and improve the experience. Page load speed is particularly important. As a key element of user experience (UX), page load speed impacts search engine ranking and website bounce rates and conversion rates.
Step 8: Integrate SEO in Your Dental Website Design from the Start
Search engine optimization (SEO) is critical to increase online visibility for your practice website in search results pages. Indeed, given the importance of SEO and the competitiveness of dental marketing, more dental practices than ever are planning to add more SEO as part of their dental marketing or maintain the same level of SEO, and there’s an imperative of time. As critical as SEO is to online visibility, it can take time to rank higher in search engines. When you put dental SEO services to work in your dental website design from the start, you put SEO to work faster for your practice rather than trying to play catchup afterward.
Step 9: Create a Robust Content Strategy
Google favors websites that provide high-quality content and penalizes websites with content deemed unauthoritative, questionable, or otherwise robotic in nature. So, focus on creating informative, engaging content relevant to dental care and the dental services your practice provides.
Step 10: Launch and Test
Don’t ignore your website once you’ve launched it. Conduct thorough testing across multiple devices and browsers to ensure everything works as intended and fix any issues before they affect user experience.
Step 11: Make Website Adjustments Based on Feedback
Actively seek out and use patient feedback to make ongoing adjustments to your dental website design. Utilize analytics to track user behavior and stay abreast of new trends and technologies to ensure your dental website design remains effective and engaging over time. A dynamic, patient-focused dental website design strategy (as it is with overall dental marketing) is not a one-time task but an ongoing process of adaptation and refinement. By staying committed to this approach, your dental practice website will not only attract more patients but also provide them with a superior online experience to keep them engaged and coming back.
Dental Website Design Summarized
Creating a dental website that resonates with patients goes beyond visual appeal. Dental website design is about addressing patient needs and streamlining their journey from curiosity to care.
That’s what we do at ProSites.
For two decades, we’ve been helping dental practices grow with online dental marketing solutions and dental websites built with all the elements mentioned in this article (and more) to help dental practices attract more patients and thrive.
