A website is one of the most vital tools in any dental practice’s arsenal when it comes to finding new patients and dental practice marketing generally. The first thing that most potential patients will do when looking for a dentist near them is search on Google and that means their first interaction with you will be to look around your website. The question you now need to ask is: does the website inspire confidence or is it going to be off-putting?

What you also need to ask is whether this is the case for all devices. In other words: does your website look good on all websites, or only on desktop computers? This is incredibly important for your dental practice marketing seeing as many people these days will be surfing the web using a smartphone or a tablet – especially when looking for local services. What’s more, Google recently rolled out a ‘mobile friendliness update’ which essentially mandates that all websites need to be mobile friendly or they won’t show up in mobile searches. To rank high on Google you need an optimized site.

How to Make a Site Mobile Friendly

With that in mind then, how do you go about ensuring that your website is mobile friendly? There are a few things that you need to look at but the first and most important is to ensure that your site is using a responsive design.

A responsive web design is any design that has a fluid and dynamic layout that’s capable of changing shape to suit the size of the display viewing it. This means that your site will condense or spread out accordingly to ensure that it always looks good on any device that is viewing it. This is far preferable to having a ‘mobile only’ version of your website and it’s something that Google always recommends.

What’s more, your site should also utilize larger links and buttons so that it’s easy for users to click around the site. Furthermore, it should load quickly (so that users on slower mobiles aren’t left waiting) and it should have a large and crisp font that’s well spaced out.

A good web design team should always make mobile optimization a priority but if you’re unsure about your current design you can also try using Google’s own ‘Mobile Friendliness’ tool which will automatically analyze the suitability of your website for mobile. Take heed of what it has to say and you’ll be much more likely to rank high on Google.