3 Quick Website Fixes to Bring New Patients Back to Your Practice
In this episode, Samantha Mabe walks you through three quick and practical steps to check if your website isn’t bringing in new patients like it used to. Before you panic or start planning a total website overhaul, these quick and practical checks will help you troubleshoot the problem—from making sure your website is actually live, to checking that your links and forms work, and ensuring your site is mobile-friendly. She also breaks down what to do if everything seems technically fine but the new patient flow is still slow, including potential marketing and messaging tweaks that can help turn things around. If you’re ready to troubleshoot your practice website and bring in more of the right clients, this episode is for you!
Key Takeaways
If website leads or appointments suddenly drop, avoid panicking—start by checking for simple technical issues.
Always ensure your website is actually loading and is accessible to potential new patients.
Test all forms, links, and schedulers to confirm they are functioning and notifications are received.
Review your website’s mobile design—over half your visitors likely use their phones to access it.
If technical issues are resolved, examine your messaging, keywords, and marketing strategies for alignment.
Diversify marketing efforts with SEO, social media, and email to consistently drive new traffic to your site.
Samantha Mabe
Samantha Mabe is a website designer and the founder of Lemon and the Sea, where she helps health and wellness professionals build strategic websites that reflect their unique approach and actually bring in new clients.
With over 10 years of experience, Samantha created the One-Week Website Design process - a fast, focused approach to custom web design that works across platforms like Squarespace, WordPress, Kajabi, and more. She blends design strategy with firsthand experience navigating holistic care as both a patient and parent, offering a unique perspective wellness professionals trust.
When she’s not building websites, Samantha’s probably elbows-deep in books (her goal is to read 200 books this year), on an adventure with her kiddo, or trying to keep her plants alive.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Samantha Mabe: Hi, I'm Samantha Mabe, website designer and founder of Lemon and the Sea, and this is Elevate your practice. If you're a holistic health practitioner ready to grow your practice without wasting time on things that don't work, you're in the right place. Each week I share a website, SEO, and marketing advice along with guest experts so you can bring in the right clients and feel confident about how you are showing up and serving the people that you help. Let's get started.
[00:00:42] Thanks for listening to the first official episode of the New Season of Elevate Your Practice.
What to Do When You Notice a Drop in Patients
[00:00:49] Have you ever noticed that the consultation requests or appointment notifications you were used to just stop coming in? It's frustrating, but before you panic and think you need to do a complete redesign of your site or that your SEO strategy just isn't working, let's walk through a few simple checks.
[00:01:10] Today I am sharing three quick things to look at if your website isn't bringing in new patients like it used to. These are easy, practical things you can do right now, and they'll help you figure out whether the problem is technical or if it's a deeper issue with your website and your marketing.
Make sure your website is working
[00:01:27] The first thing I want you to do is make sure your website's actually loading. That sounds obvious, but a lot of people assume the last time they went to their website, it looked fine, or because no one's messaged them on Instagram to say, I can't book an appointment, that means everything's working the way it should, and that's just not the case.
[00:01:51] A lot of times if people can't get to your website, they'll find somebody else, or they might decide to check in later, but that doesn't help you know if there's an issue. So if you've noticed a significant drop off when you normally have traffic or appointments coming in, and now you don't, one easy thing you can do is type your URL in and make sure your website's actually live.
[00:02:18] If it's not, there are a couple things you're gonna need to do. First, check with your host, make sure everything is paid and that your host is up and running. Every once in a while the internet goes down, and I think we've all experienced that. So if that's the case, don't worry. Just give it time. If you haven't paid your bills, let's make sure those are up to do to date.
[00:02:41] Then if everything seems fine with your host, they're working, Things are up to date, but the website's still not loading, You should check your DNS settings. You should make sure that it tells you that your domain is connected to your website and that they're actually talking to each other. If not, there are gonna be some things you might need to change. This usually happens when you're first connecting a website, but every once in a while things can get wonky, and if you need support, make sure that you contact them.
Check all your links and forms
[00:03:18] But if your website is live and running normally we can move to the next step, which is to make sure your links and forms are actually working. This is where most problems are going to show up. Broken links, dead forms, schedulers that don't actually schedule.
[00:03:36] What you want to do is go through your website and click on every item in your menu, in your footer, every button on all of your main pages. You want to test your forms by completing it and actually submitting it, making sure that it lands in your inbox and that you get whatever auto reply you're supposed to. Same thing with your scheduler. Don't just assume that it's working because you can see it on your site. Actually try to schedule and make sure that you get the confirmation email, you are set for any follow-ups, and that you as the business owner get notified that somebody has booked. You wanna make sure that both sides of either of those processes are working.
[00:04:26] You also wanna make sure that you're testing all your contact forms, any applications that you have, the call buttons for your website and checkouts if you sell products.
[00:04:37] Oftentimes what I have seen is that people will update a link and then they forget to update all the buttons on their site and so that book now button actually goes to a page not found instead of going to your booking site. You wanna make sure that there aren't any broken links and that nothing is stopping somebody from actually getting to work with you.
[00:05:05] Another tip that you can use here is one of my favorite tools, uber suggest. You can run a site audit and it will tell you if there are any broken links. Your top priority if you see any broken links in a website audit is to make sure the internal links that are going to other pages in your content and anything that's going to a scheduler or an application are working correctly.
[00:05:32] You might look at your site often, but most of us don't regularly test every path that a client could take, and clients aren't going to tell you that they clicked on a link and it didn't work, it's easier for them to just click away, and so you wanna make sure that every once in a while you're going through and checking all of these things, especially if you're seeing an issue.
[00:05:56] A quick tip here is to ask someone else to test it for a second set of eyes. This is actually part of what I do in my free website review, in which I go through your website and I make suggestions on how you can improve conversions, how you can get more traffic, changes you can make to your SEO. But I also run a site audit so you can see if there are any broken links that need to be fixed. If you want me to take a look at your site, you can submit your information at lemonandthesea.com/review and I'll get it back to you in a couple of days.
REview your website’s mobile design
[00:06:32] Okay, so all your forms are working. People can schedule and obviously they can go to the website. So what's the problem now? Have you taken a look at your website on your phone?
[00:06:47] 50% or more of traffic to your site is coming from a phone. If your mobile design doesn't work, you're losing half your audience. And so while you have been designing on desktop and you might get a phone preview, you actually wanna pull up your phone and go through your website. Walk through each page to make sure there's no overlapping text and things aren't cut off, that the buttons aren't too small for somebody to tap on and that the navigation isn't confusing.
[00:07:22] You want to make sure that it is easy for people to figure out what you do, where you're located, who you work with, and what their next steps are, and then you wanna make sure that the design supports the ability to actually take that next step. Remember that if your clients can't tap on a button on their phones, they're not going to be able to book. You wanna fix any issues that you find and then retest it on your phone. Again, this piece gets overlooked really often, but it's usually where your patients are actually finding you, especially if they are ready to book an appointment or visit you in your office.
What if the issue isn’t technical?
[00:08:08] If you haven't found the problem that means everything looks fine technically: your site is loading, the links are working, your mobile design is clear. There might be a bigger picture reason that you are not continuing to get bookings on your site. A lot of this comes back to your messaging and your marketing, so you may need to do a little bit of research, think about what has changed over time and make some shifts in your messaging.
[00:08:42] Maybe your audience has changed and things aren't updated yet. You may need to make sure that the keywords that you've been trying to target on your website are actually keywords that are relevant to who you work with and what you do, and that they're getting searched.
Review your marketing channels and strategy
[00:08:59] The other piece of this is marketing. You want to make sure that you are doing marketing for your practice. Less marketing means less referrals, and so you should choose one to two channels to start with, where you can put effort into sharing what you do and who you work with and how people can work with you. This can be SEO. That's a great foundation and blogging is a great way to build that. But it's probably also going to include some type of social media or in-person networking where you can direct new people to your website and remind people who've been there before about what you do.
[00:09:45] Some of the most common marketing activities that I see, bringing people, bringing traffic to people's websites and therefore bringing them patients are marketing on social media, especially Instagram, potentially marketing on email where you are reminding previous clients or people who have signed up for a freebie that you offer appointments and services and how they can book. And of course, you're going to see people coming from organic search if you are focusing on SEO.
[00:10:20] So when you look at your website traffic and you're seeing where that traffic is coming from, if it's organic search, if it's ads or paid marketing, if it is social marketing, you're going to have a good idea of where people are finding you from and where it might make sense to put more of an effort so that you can continue to grow your business.
[00:10:45] The good news, all of those things, messaging, audience, and marketing are fixable with some strategy, some clarity and then a little bit of work.
submit your website for a free review
[00:10:55] Before you start panicking about a redesign, because things seem to have shifted in your business, I want you to make sure that your site is loading, that your links and forms are working and that everything looks good on mobile. If you are still not sure, or if you'd like an set of expert eyes on your site, I'd love to help Through that free website review where I record a personalized video walking through what's working and what's not. You'll walk away with clear action steps, no tech overwhelm, and you can sign up at lemonandthesea.com/review.
[00:11:34] If you're wanting to focus on your messaging and your marketing, and you just dunno where to start, make sure you subscribe to the Elevate Your Practice Podcast so that you can get the upcoming episodes in which I'm gonna be talking to some amazing guests about exactly those topics so that you can make sure you can grow your business and help the people that you are in this to work with.
[00:11:56] Thank you so much for listening. Make sure you follow the podcast on Instagram. Make sure you subscribe, leave a review and share this with another practitioner.
[00:12:09] Thanks for listening to Elevate your Practice. If you enjoyed today's episode, follow the show and leave a review. It helps more practitioners find these tips and start growing their practices with confidence. And don't forget to check out the show notes for links and resources from today's episodes.
[00:12:24] I'll be back next week with more strategies to help you build a thriving practice.
