When someone lands on your website, they’re probably not thinking, “I wonder what trust signals this business has included.” They’re thinking:
Is this person actually qualified to help me?
Do they work with people like me?
Is this practice still open?
What happens if I reach out?
Do I feel comfortable taking the next step?
And they’re making those decisions pretty quickly - especially in health and wellness, where someone may already be frustrated, nervous, or tired of feeling like they haven’t been heard.
Your website can’t build an entire relationship before someone books an appointment. But it can give them enough information to feel comfortable taking the next step.
By the way, I have a guide about what helps build trust on a health and wellness website if you want to dig deeper.
Your 6 Step Website Audit
Open your website in another tab. We’re going to look at your homepage, About page, main service page, and contact or booking page and see what a potential client actually finds there.
And no, you don’t need to redesign your entire website when we're done.
1. Check the first section of your homepage
Start at the very top of your homepage and ignore everything you know about your own business.
Within a few seconds, can you tell:
What you do
Who you work with
Where you’re located or whether you work virtually
What you want someone to do next
This sounds simple, but it’s one of the most common issues I see.
“Helping you feel your best” doesn’t count (because it doesn’t actually mean anything).
If you’re a therapist who works with anxious, high-achieving women, say that. If you’re a chiropractor focusing on pregnancy and pediatric care in Richmond, make that clear. If you’re a naturopathic doctor who helps women with digestive concerns and hormonal symptoms, tell me. Specificity lets the right person recognize themselves in what you’re saying.
Your potential clients should not have to read your website like A Court of Splintered Harmony - collecting tiny clues, analyzing every sentence, and developing a full theory about whether you might be the person they need. Save that energy for figuring out what Sarah J. Maas is setting up next.
Quick fix: Look at your main homepage headline and the few sentences directly underneath it. If they could just as easily belong to another practitioner in your industry, rewrite them to include more specific information about what you do, who you help, or where you work.
2. Review your About page and credentials
Next, head to your About page.
You don’t need to paste your entire résumé onto your website. But someone also shouldn’t have to visit LinkedIn, Google your name, and cross-reference three professional directories to figure out whether you’re qualified to help them.
Your bio should explain the experience you bring to your work and why it matters to the people you serve.
Then make the details easy to scan. Depending on your profession, that might include:
Degrees
Licenses
Certifications
Specialized training
Professional memberships
Relevant continuing education
Years of experience
Areas of focus
And yes, you can include all those letters after your name; just remember that your potential clients may have absolutely no idea what half of them mean. You don’t need to explain every credential in painstaking detail, but your main bio should help connect your experience to the work you actually do.
Clearly listing your credentials can also make it easier for search engines and AI tools to understand who you are, your expertise, and the topics you're qualified to discuss.
Quick fix: Check that your bio is current, then add a simple credentials section underneath it if that information is currently buried in paragraphs of copy - or missing completely.
3. Go through your booking process like a new client
This is one of my favorite website checks because it takes very little time and can uncover some surprisingly big problems.
Here’s what to do:
Start on your homepage.
Now try to become a client.
Can you easily find where to book or contact you?
Click the button.
Does it go where you expected?
If there’s a contact form, fill it out. If there’s a scheduling system, go as far through the process as you can without actually booking yourself an appointment.
Then ask yourself:
Was it obvious what I was supposed to do?
Did I know what would happen after I submitted the form?
Do I know when I can expect a response?
Did I have to hunt around for anything?
Did any links or buttons not work?
Was the form unnecessarily long?
Did the process work just as well on my phone?
You know your process because you do it every day. The person visiting your website does not. They shouldn’t have to piece it together from a sentence on your Services page, another one in the FAQ, and a button in the footer.
A simple three-step section explaining exactly what happens next can do a lot of heavy lifting. For example:
Request an appointment.
Complete your new-patient paperwork.
Meet with your provider.
Yours might be different, of course. The important thing is that people know what they’re agreeing to before they click.
Quick fix: If your process isn’t obvious, add a short “How to Get Started” section to your homepage or service page.
4. Check that your information is actually current
This sounds painfully obvious. And yet I regularly find websites with old office addresses, outdated team members, services that are no longer offered, or hours that changed six months ago.
Sometimes the business has grown and the website simply hasn’t caught up.
Take a few minutes and check your:
Phone number
Email address
Office address
Office hours
Team members
Staff bios and credentials
Services
Pricing
Insurance and payment information
Booking links
Social media links
Announcement bars
Pop-ups
Any references to dates, events, or limited-time offers
If your website says you're accepting new patients, but your schedule has been closed for months, update it.
If an associate left last year, take them off the team page.
If you stopped taking insurance, make sure that information isn’t still tucked away on an old FAQ page.
Your website should be useful to the person visiting it today, not an archive of how your practice operated in 2023.
Then click your important buttons while you’re there.
Because there is nothing confidence-inspiring about finally deciding to schedule an appointment only to discover the “Book Now” button leads directly to nowhere.
Quick fix: Update anything that could affect someone’s decision to contact you first. You can worry about the rest of the housekeeping later.
5. Look for proof that you’re a real, established practice
You don’t need to cover your homepage in every logo, badge, certification, and five-star review you’ve collected until it starts looking like a water bottle covered in stickers.
A few well-chosen examples of your experience, credibility, and client feedback will usually do the job better. Look through your site and see whether you have some combination of:
Patient or client reviews you have permission to share
Professional certifications
Professional affiliations
Awards or recognition
Media features
Podcast appearances
Speaking engagements
Community partnerships
Photos of your actual team
Photos of your actual office or treatment space
You definitely don’t need all of these. What makes sense depends on your practice. A local chiropractic office might benefit from photos of the doctors, team, and office alongside a few patient reviews. A therapist might focus more heavily on credentials, specialized training, and professional affiliations. A naturopathic doctor who speaks at conferences or has been featured in the media may want to include those as additional evidence of their experience.
The goal is to make it easy for someone to see that you’re experienced, established, and someone they can feel confident reaching out to.
Quick fix: If your website has little proof of your experience, choose one or two things you already have and add them where they make sense. You probably don’t need to create anything new.
6. Look at your website like someone who doesn’t work there
Finally, take a step back and look at the overall experience.
This one is a little harder to put into a checklist because often it comes down to whether the site feels like someone is still paying attention to it.
Look for:
Broken links
Tiny or difficult-to-read text
Blurry images
Old photos that no longer represent you
Buttons that look different from page to page
Pages that are difficult to use on mobile
Forms that are frustrating to complete
Empty or unfinished pages
Outdated team members
Services you no longer offer
Navigation that makes important information difficult to find
Pop-ups that cover half the screen on your phone
Each one might feel minor on its own, but add enough together and someone may start wondering whether the same lack of attention carries over into the actual practice.
You don’t need a brand-new website every year. You do need a website that looks like someone is still paying attention to it.
Quick fix: Choose the one thing that would frustrate a potential client most, and fix that first. A broken booking button beats changing a font every single time.
Your Website Audit Score
Now that you’ve gone through the site, give yourself one point for each statement that is true:
My homepage clearly explains what I do and who I help.
My experience and credentials are easy to find and up to date.
A new client can understand exactly how to get started.
My contact, service, team, and payment information is accurate.
My website includes evidence of my experience and credibility.
My website works properly and feels current on desktop and mobile.
5–6 points
You’re in pretty good shape.
Make the smaller updates you noticed while going through the audit and put another website check on your calendar a few months from now.
3–4 points
You probably have a solid foundation, but a few places on your website aren’t keeping up with your practice.
Focus on anything that could make someone hesitate, get confused, or leave before contacting you.
You may not need a new website. You may just need a focused refresh.
0–2 points
Your website may be asking potential clients to do way too much work.
That doesn’t automatically mean you need to throw it all away and start over.
But I would prioritize updating the most important pages - your homepage, About page, main service pages, and contact or booking page - so people can actually understand who you are, what you offer, and how to work with you.
You probably don’t need to fix everything today
If you went through this audit and now have seventeen tabs open and a list called “Website Things I’ve Been Ignoring,” close a few of them.
You don’t have to fix everything at once. Start with whatever is most likely to stop someone from contacting you.
A broken booking button matters more than whether your About page photo is your favorite.
An outdated address matters more than tweaking the spacing between two sections.
Missing information about how to become a patient matters more than choosing a slightly different shade of green.
Your website should make it easier for the right people to understand your practice and take the next step.
Sometimes that requires a redesign. A lot of the time, it just requires paying attention to the details that have slowly become outdated, unclear, or harder to use than they need to be. And that’s a much more manageable place to start.
