Today’s patients demand a lot from their provider’s medical website design.  They want it to be a trustworthy information source, drive easy communication, and serve as a platform for engaging with their providers. Studies have shown that your website design significantly influences your visitor’s perception of your practice. Some sources indicate that nearly 38% of all website visitors will leave a site, never to return, if they don’t like the design. This effect is why your website design should be the result of a thoughtful design process that speaks to your patients.

Medical Website Design Practices To Drive Patient Engagement

Understanding how important medical website design is leads us to the next important question. What makes a website design friendly and inviting while promoting engagement and building patient relationships? The answer is a combination of visual design elements and functionality that create a smooth, frustration-free experience for your visitors.

Elements Of A Patient-Centric Design

Your patient’s needs and emotional state must be considered when doing medical website design. The language used to discuss aesthetic treatments is much different from that used when discussing critical illnesses like cancer. Regardless of your specialty, three elements can be used to provide a positive experience for any patient.

• Simplified Navigation: Menus should be laid out to make specific areas accessible. The first step is clearly labeling categories with titles such as “Services,” “Locations,” etc. Using a roving menu means that it will be available at any point on your site. Combine this with a “return to top” feature, allowing visitors to navigate your site easily.
• Readable Typography: Font selection is another step that often doesn’t receive the consideration it needs. The type of font you use ensures that your site is easy to read and maintains sizes and spacing that can accommodate users of every ability level. 
• Clear Call-to-Actions (CTAs): Calls-to-Actions may seem like a concern largely focused on benefiting the business, but they don’t have to be. Potential patients visiting your site seek your services; clear CTAs can make it easier for them to do so. Prominently placed buttons and hyperlinks that lead directly to scheduling services serve those looking to seek care.

These small steps help reduce frustration and can build confidence in your visitors. While these are important for any practice, they’re essential for medical website design focused on sensitive care. Those seeking mental health care, treatment for chronic conditions, and fighting life-threatening diseases need a compassionate experience. Ensuring they don’t struggle to find the information they need is one form of nonverbal compassion that is easy to overlook.

Mobile Responsiveness for All Users

Statistics show that over 70% of all medical website traffic comes from mobile device users. Any medical website design aimed at providing a comfortable visitor experience must be mobile responsive. Mobile responsive designs must incorporate certain features to guarantee your user experience is smooth and intuitive. Some of these features include: 

• Dynamic Content Adjustments: Optimize layouts and ensure content (e.g., forms, videos) adapts seamlessly to various screen sizes. This design extends to navigation features, including integrated hamburger menus and back-to-top buttons.
• Mobile-Specific Features: Click-to-call buttons and GPS-enabled directions should be available with the tap of a finger. This feature ensures that patients can quickly and safely reach their destination while on the go.

These medical website design elements significantly impact mobile engagement metrics. Mobile users will tend to spend more time on your site, and you will experience less bounce. Bounce rates increase when users land on your site and leave without further engagement.

Integrate Online Scheduling and Forms

Time-on-site and engagement are important metrics used to determine patient satisfaction with their experience on a website. One way to increase both is to provide access to new patient forms, online scheduling options, and patient portals. 

• Real-Time Availability Updates: These updates allow patients to see and select available appointment slots without contacting the office. It empowers the patient and reduces the workload on your staff.
• Form Automation: When you link website forms to your clinic’s database, you streamline gathering patient information. 
• Payment Portals: As part of medical website design, payment portals serve patients and providers in important ways. Providing a quick and easy way to pay for services reduces the amount of outstanding debts you carry. Patients are more likely to settle debts with their providers and do so faster when barriers are removed from doing so.

The hassle-free experience these steps provide to your patients is worth the investment. They also reduce the amount of physical paperwork necessary, eliminate storage concerns, and prevent the loss of patient documents. 

Provide And Promote Telehealth Services

Telehealth used to be an option that was provided to promote patient convenience. Today, it has become more of an expectation. While it was on the rise before the pandemic, patients have become accustomed to its availability. It serves your clinic and its patients well by lowering wait times and reducing the need for room sterilization. Equally important, this component of medical website design also reduces the number of canceled appointments by removing scheduling and traffic concerns. You can provide and promote telehealth services by taking a few important steps:

• Clear Step-By-Step Guides: Clear guides using videos and screenshots will help patients feel comfortable using telehealth. Ensure that these guides rely more on visual elements than spoken or written word to ensure they’re accessible to everyone.
• Technology Support: Providing an FAQ and Live Chat support aids patients with any technical issues. While most patients are familiar with modern technology, older patients may still struggle to use these tools.
• Service-Specific Pages: Telehealth comes in many forms, and each should be highlighted for your patients. Mental health visits can often be done entirely through telehealth. However, other services can use telehealth for pre-visits and follow-ups.

Telehealth is an aspect of medical website design that requires significant attention from today’s providers. Patients expect the convenience of not having to go into the office for every level of care.  Telehealth visits tend to be shorter, take up less time for both patient and provider and promote patient satisfaction.

Content Personalization for Patient Engagement

Personalization is important in engaging your patients, whether you’re in a large regional hospital or a small local clinic. Personalizing your content to your audience can promote engagement and connect with your visitors.

• Geotargeted Content: Focusing your information on the patient’s location makes it more relevant and relatable to them. Sites that integrate geotargeted content can suggest local offices and address community concerns.
• Behavior-Based Suggestions: Information gathered from your patient’s browser can be used to direct them to articles and services relevant to their concerns. This data helps ensure they’re being shown things that match their needs.
• Patient Portals: Patient portals are a valuable data source for tailoring your website’s experience. It can remind them of follow-up appointments, provide lab results, and ensure the site meets their needs.

When visitors have a medical website design tailored to fit them, it helps foster trust in the site and loyalty to a provider. These small touches help them feel seen and their concerns understood. These are both important elements of a positive patient experience.

Enhance Website Speed and Performance

Patients expect a smooth experience from medical websites, which can be achieved by optimizing performance. Performance is a more technical aspect of website design, but providing the best possible experience for visitors is necessary. There are several ways to enhance your website’s performance.

• Lazy Loading: This approach loads images and other site assets as they become necessary. Images and other high-bandwidth elements are loaded as your patients scroll through the site, reducing initial load time.
• Hosting Optimization: An optimized hosting solution is one of the most powerful tools for optimizing your patient experience. These hosts store your site on multiple remote servers to improve access. The host used will be determined based on the user’s ping time, often using the physically closest server.
• Image Optimization: Image optimization reduces the filesize of your images without losing quality. Reduced file sizes mean faster load times and less lag for your visitors, creating a smoother overall experience.

You achieve two goals by optimizing your website to provide the best loading times. First, you provide the best possible experience for every site user. Second, optimization often reduces bandwidth costs, improving the experience for those on slower devices. Finally, it also reduces the data used when visiting your site, which concerns some users.

Medical Web Design Experts Deliver The Best Experience

Effective medical website design is a complex task. Getting great results requires as much art as science. From the visual elements and layout to the underlying technical considerations, it requires an expert touch to be successful. The digital marketplace is the cornerstone of the patient experience and is essential to the growth of your practice. While making it yourself or in-house may seem like a cost-saving measure, the consequences of poor design are immense. Optimized 360 has delivered exceptional medical website design for providers like you. Call today and experience the benefits of delivering an outstanding patient experience with a website created by our team of experts.