Healthcare business owners understand the benefits of cultivating trust to attract clients needing health services. Since healthcare is personal, every patient wants to deal with a reliable and trustworthy healthcare provider. It is not hard for a healthcare provider to demonstrate the best qualities and inspire trust when treating patients. However, building trust through a website requires skills and experience. Therefore, a healthcare website should be the foundation of trust and credibility since many potential clients will interact with the website before visiting the facility. If the website fails to inspire confidence, the client will likely see a different healthcare facility. To solve this problem, this article highlights a few effective tips for healthcare websites.
Make a Patient-Oriented Website
Many people visit a healthcare website, including investors and other healthcare providers who want to benchmark. Although the website should provide relevant information for everyone, the primary target should be the clients. They are the lifeblood of the business, and the business would be on its knees without them. Therefore, the healthcare website design should be patient-centric and seek to answer all patients’ questions about the facility. The site has achieved its purpose if the patients can find what they want and the contact details as quickly as possible. This means the business owner should choose a simple design that is easy for the target clients to navigate.
Minimize Jargon
The healthcare jargon can alienate the primary target of the healthcare website. The complex language might help healthcare providers understand each other better and serve clients effectively without confusion. However, the complex language usually makes patients distrust the facility and consider competitors. Therefore, the content published should not have baffling terminologies but capture the ideas and perspectives of the target patients. The goal is to ensure an average patient understands the content rather than magnify the knowledge gap between the healthcare provider and the patient.
Increase the Loading Speed
Nobody wants to wait more than a few seconds for a webpage to load. If a web page takes more than five seconds to load, some target readers will leave it to competitors. This means the landing page, contact us page, and other primary pages should load as fast as possible on PC and mobile devices. They should contain very few plugins and extensions that could affect the loading speed. Remember that websites that load faster attract more clients and rank better on search engines.
Use Personal Images
Personalizing a brand helps target customers associate the brand with its owners. Many web designers use stock photos of actors or actresses. These images may be attractive, but they are not ideal for healthcare websites because they don’t inspire trust. How about using authentic images of nurses and doctors in the facility? The patients will feel familiar with the service providers and the facility even before they visit the premises. After the first visit, patients will quickly put names on the images they find on the website, creating a lasting connection based on trust.
HIPAA Compliance
The US healthcare system requires healthcare websites that collect sensitive or personally identifiable information to have strict protective measures. Therefore, the healthcare business owners and the web designer should review HIPAA regulations and ensure the site complies. Noncompliance is unprofessional and could damage the reputation, attracting fines or a jail term. However, compliance builds trust and inspires confidence.
These tips can help a healthcare business owner create a reliable website that attracts target clients. However, they should always hire a competent web designer to implement the project. This will ensure the site has all the critical features the patients need to know before visiting a healthcare facility.
