Good UX (user experience) design can be a crucial factor in increasing conversions and boosting your allied health brand. However, practice owners can occasionally fall subject to some common mistakes that may damage their presence online. 

Luckily we have curated some easy steps that you can take to improve the design of your allied health website. Read on to find out how to tackle unresponsive pages, unclear navigation, and slow loading times in order to enhance patient-centred care.

4 Common UX Design Mistakes To Avoid On Your Allied Health Website

1. Confusing Navigation

Anyone trying to navigate your site will become frustrated if they are unable to find what they are looking for. An engaging, uncluttered, organized site will retain site visitors and enable them to access the right pages and find the information that they are looking for. It is vitally important to curate a user-friendly design that captures your patients’ interest quickly. 

Ensure that your website flows logically in terms of categorization and content. For example, avoid subpages or drop-down menus with an untenable number of options. This can overwhelm and confuse visitors, often prompting them to leave the site instead of learning about your services.

By fine-tuning your navigation set-up so that it is clear and straightforward, you will no longer lose those hard-earned clicks!

Slow Loading Speeds

2. Unresponsive Pages

Unresponsive pages are frustrating for everyone, and unfortunately, they usually cause visitors to leave a website. Users might experience error messages, technical glitches, or malfunctions that reflect poorly on the otherwise superb services that your practice provides. 

Medical websites such as WebMD or Healthline frequently rank highly in terms of monthly traffic because of their UX design. People report that their sites are accessible, convenient, and responsive. 

One of the most common causes of this is a missing link somewhere on the site. Tackling this is simple – just double-check that all links are connected to an existing page. 

Also check that pages are optimized for all sorts of devices, from mobiles to desktops. This will keep visitors engaged, and is of particular importance as the number of users browsing from a mobile or tablet continues to rise.

3. Slow Page Loading Times

A slow loading site will quickly cause your visitors to lose patience. According to the experts, you should be aiming for pages to load in three seconds or less, or you risk losing your traffic. Luckily, there is a simple way to test this problem and simple strategies that one can implement to minimize loading speeds. 

For example, Google’s PageSpeed tool gives useful insight into your pages’ load times. Based on the insights it provides, you can take the necessary steps to boost the UX design quality of your website. In turn, this will increase conversions. 

Other actions you can take is to reduce image sizes or compress files on your site to drive faster download times.

User Experience Design

4. Not Putting Patients At The Forefront

It is easy for allied health marketers to lose sight of the website’s purpose when there are technical aspects to master. Ultimately, you should make every effort to remember the patient comes first and incorporate that into your UX design. 

The best way to do this is to design with the target demographic in mind. Yes, you want to be able to tick all the boxes for SEO, or easily integrate or access your injury management system, for example. But you should also ensure that there is purpose and reason for your patients to visit your site by providing informative and engaging content that directly meets their needs, concerns, or interests. 

Something as simple as an improved aesthetic or more convenient design can be all it needs to convert a user.

Final Thoughts

While PPC ads and SEO strategies are crucial for driving traffic to your allied health practice website, this and the quality services you offer can and will be overlooked with poor UX design. 

However, this is a simple problem to solve, and there are several straightforward steps you can take to tackle this. Now watch your conversion rate soar!