Once you’ve taken the steps to design and optimize your veterinary website, the last thing you want to do is allow it to become outdated. Old sites can signal to potential customers that your clinic may be about as updated as your 2006 web page. To avoid this misconception, it’s important to follow a few critical steps for veterinary website maintenance. Keep in mind that these will need to be done on a regular basis or you’ll risk broken pages and unimpressed clients.
Accurate Business Information
The most vital parts of your website likely appear on every page. They’re so ubiquitous that they’re easy to overlook, too. Your veterinary clinic address, phone number, emails and hours need to be updated any time there are changes to them. If you’ll be closed over particular holidays, note that in your hours. If you’re open, you might want to highlight that even further on the home page. This type of regular veterinary website maintenance prevents confusion and promotes confidence in your business. As with all medical fields, veterinarians work best when they have the trust of the pet owners they work with.
Track Updates to Platforms
If you use a website building platform, such as WordPress, you might have noticed the occasional email informing you of automatic or forced updates. While many of these won’t have an impact on your site, they can be a major headache occasionally. Some updates may break your theme, or affect the mobile view of your website. There are plenty of moving parts to keep track of with mobile website optimization. It’s frustrating to feel like you finally understand the ins and outs only to have the rug pulled out from under you with a system update. Your website hosts can also make changes, adding another layer to veterinary website maintenance. Some will affect how sites like Google read your pages for search engine results page ranking.
New Services
Have you added services at your clinic? Or maybe stopped performing others? Make sure your website reflects the most current offerings. As with your other business information, if you have service pricing on your site, you’ll need to make sure it’s updated. And if you want to highlight certain services your clinic provides, you might want to update your veterinary website to reflect that. Even changing the order of tabs in a dropdown menu may increase traffic to certain parts of your site.
Current Images
Has your clinic undergone a remodel? Have you taken better photos of the interior or exterior? With newer and better cameras on even your phone, it’s easier than ever to get high quality images on your site. Part of veterinary website maintenance is going to involve replacing pictures of your clinic and staff with some regularity. It doesn’t stop at a simple upload though. Images need to be optimized for page crawlers and search engines as well as loading speeds.
If you have any questions about veterinary website maintenance, please feel free to reach out to us at Vet Marketing Pro, we’re always happy to help.