Why Consider a Custom Optometry Website To Gain More Clients

How you build your optometry practice’s website sets it up for success or failure in the long run. It truly pays to get your website’s design right the first time to avoid any issues in the future. A template is fine for getting started, but it only works well as a base.

This article tells you what you need to know about custom optometry website development, including:

• Why to avoid using template designs
• Benefits of custom optometry website design
• Customizing your optometry website
• Learning vs. outsourcing development

There’s a lot to discuss, so get ready to take notes.

Let’s go!

To learn how Digital Authority Partners can create a standout website for you, watch this video!

The Problem With Using Template Designs

Most content management systems (CMSs) and website builders today have a decent range of preset themes they like to show off as an easy way for anyone to build a website. They match you with these designs based on your goals for your website, such as blogging, shopping, etc.

The problem is that, although these services and their templates follow basic technical search engine optimization (SEO) practices, such as responsive design, they fall short in other areas. Here are three reasons why using website design templates does not help you attract traffic:

1. Although most templates are optimized for mobile-first indexing, they are sorely lacking in many other areas. You must still optimize them for SEO and compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and the American Disabilities Act (ADA) on your own.
2. When you use template designs, you choose to play it safe in a way that does not benefit you. Templates lack personality and do not help with branding. They do little to attract your target market or promote business.  Their sole benefit is to cut the costs of your optometry website development.
3. Using a template makes it easier to build a website, but it also prevents you from having a unique look. That makes it more likely users will skip over your page because it looks too generic. Being distinct and unique keeps you in people’s minds, which is vital for digital marketing.

The main takeaway points here are that you must make custom changes for both kinds of websites if you want to show branding on your website, and be distinctive so your site attracts patients. To follow best practices in optometry website development, you should plan your website from scratch.

5 Benefits of Using Custom Optometry Website Design

As mentioned, although CMSs and templates make life much more convenient, you still need to apply so many custom changes that you might as well forgo them. For instance, WordPress lacks critical security features for a medical website without plugins. 

1. As healthcare providers, optometrists must abide by HIPAA and manage patients’ Protected Health Information (PHI). For example, a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate helps secure access for your users.
2. With custom optometry website development, you can show off your brand identity in multiple elements on your website. That includes the logo, color scheme, and icons that give visitors a better idea of your brand. Connect with your patients through designs.
3. When you outfit your website with personal and creative elements, you make it better for UX and more engaging for your target market. This is important because the length and quality of dwell time are ranking factors, and a higher rank on search means more clicks.
4. The ADA provides added website design guidelines that focus on removing barriers to usability and accessibility for all. That calls for changes to features such as navigation, typography, and color palette that affect your brand identity. 
5. Using custom website design means you plan for features that make your UX much better for all of your target market. Enabling voice search is a great example of what you can do to add more value for your potential clients through custom changes to your website. 

How to Customize Your Optometry Website

Given the many points listed above, you might wonder what you can do to gain more clients with good web design or where to begin. Luckily, you have many options for design practices that work, starting with using a font that is easy to read, even for people with dyslexia.

The colors you choose should also account for visual issues. It might seem as though you have too many limits on what you can do, but that is not the case. It does lower options a bit, but what matters is how you use these elements in the best ways you can to your benefit.

For example, white space lets you create frames around the content on your pages that you feel site visitors should focus on more. If you want to take it a step further and be more critical with how you sort page elements, make samples, run tests on them, and get honest user feedback.

Coding Your Website vs. Hiring a Developer

Now that you have a basic idea of what optometry website development entails, the next step is to decide if you want to do it on your own or hire an agency to take care of it for you. Mostly, it depends on your goals and why you want to change your current website.

You have many options for front- and back-end web development tools, including CMSs such as WordPress and Squarespace, as well as tools and resources such as GitHub and Redis. However, the problem with the latter is knowing how to use them, which requires some coding ability.

On the other hand, hiring an agency or developer to do the work removes all of the major and heavy tasks from you and gives them to experts to solve. With their help, the process moves faster, and the final output quality is much higher, with better overall results for your business.

Summing Up

Getting more traffic is a great goal for a small business such as your optometry practice, but achieving meaningful results can be hard and frustrating. For many, custom website design can hold the key to reaching critical growth milestones that other methods cannot help with.

For instance, slow websites lead to high bounce rates, resulting in low traffic and fewer potential clients.

Need help updating your optometry website to attract more clients? Contact Digital Authority Partners (DAP) to learn how we can help.