Is the Lack of a Responsive Website Hurting Your Dental Practice?
A great website runs like a well-oiled machine. All components must work in tandem in order to produce the best experience for the user. Got a website that loads too slowly? What about one that doesn’t display correctly? Don’t expect your viewers to have patience. Statistics show that 75 percent of people will not return to websites that take longer than four seconds to load. FOUR seconds! That’s all you have before your potential customers try a competitor, and by then you’ve already lost them. Page-loading time is a priority for web visitors and you can’t afford to miss the boat for your dentistry practice.
What is RWD?
That’s where the concept of responsive web design comes in. As a central feature of contemporary web design, responsive web design, or RWD for short, is critical in a day when people are using their smartphones and tablets more and more for researching information online. Essentially responsive design automatically reformats web pages to conform to whichever device they are being viewed on at any given time. That means that whether the content is viewed on a phone, tablet, or desktop computer, the website stays user friendly, says . RWD is quickly overpowering mobile design which basically involves two separate websites created for different platforms.
How Can it Help Your Dental Practice?
There are many benefits to RWD. The main one is that Google likes it, and whatever Google likes has to be good. Google recommends RWD as the primary way to target an audience — particularly mobile users; plus, it prefers RWD sites for local searches made on mobile devices like phones or tablets. Separate mobile websites require their own URLs and HTML codes, while a single, responsive site has only one set. This makes Google happy because it can crawl and index content very easily. Most separate mobile sites fail to rank well in search engines, causing you to have to build the authority of your site from the ground up. Responsive websites, on the other hand, allow you to develop social shares for one URL with easy-to-navigate content.
You could experience a drop in rankings if you have a separate mobile site. This is because those separate sites are often vastly different in appearance than the desktop versions, spurring high bounce rates. Google sees these high bounce rates as an indication that your website doesn’t provide relevant content, thereby dropping your ranking. With RWD, you don’t have to compromise on your content plus it doesn’t lead to such high bounce rates. After all, the goal is to keep visitors on your site once there so they can make a meaningful connection, such as book an appointment.
The bottom line is: if you want to give your users the best navigation experience possible when on your website, you have to make it easy to scroll, load a page, find the information they want, and share the information they find that is useful with their friends. Contact us today to learn how you can optimize your site for RWD and increase the rankings of your dental practice website.
