Building Your Dental Practice Website on WordPress?

6 key things to look out for to avoid WordPress maintenance and usability headaches

WordPress is an extremely popular system for building websites, including those for dental practices; indeed it is the most popular system in use worldwide.

WordPress has some huge positives but also some significant negatives too – however with a little planning and diligent ongoing maintenance, many of the problems can be avoided and you can benefit from an excellent website for your business. Here at Dental Media we use WordPress to build lots of dental websites and we thought it would be useful to share our experience with you.

Here are some of the main issues to look out for if you choose this system:

Understand the technical and maintenance requirements

WordPress is great but you need to set it up correctly and then stay well on top of it when it comes to maintenance.

WordPress can be quite resource intensive and so will drag down a cheap, overcrowded server. This  results in slow page loading, frustrated users and damage to your SEO. So with WordPress you will need some good quality website hosting and a skilled designer to set the system up optimally. When the site is live, you will then need to have it maintained regularly to a) keep it secure and b) include new functionality as the core program updates (this can be quite frequent).

If you fail to maintain a WordPress website, it is very likely that at some point you will get hacked as vulnerabilities in the system are exposed by the hacking fraternity. Normally any problems can be avoided, but maintenance should be done diligently and in a timely fashion.

Don’t go overboard with functionality

All too often we see designers load a website with lots of bells and whistles in pursuit of an aesthetic masterpiece. However, they fail to balance form with function and the resulting website can be very clunky and deliver a poor user experience. This inevitably leads to poor conversion rates and can also limit Google ranking potential. You may have seen dentists’ websites which are chock full of glamorous stock images and funky menu systems etc which are quite popular these days? However, if you check closely where they rank in Google and how they perform technically, you’ll find plenty of problems.

WordPress works with a system of “plugins” which allow you to add all sorts of functionality, but overdoing it will result in a sub-optimal website for a variety of reasons. Similarly if you go overboard with lots of fancy, generic stock images and funky page effects, you can also drag down site performance very quickly. A great website will always balance form with function.

Select the minimum number of well-supported plugins

As mentioned above, WordPress uses “plugins” to extend its functionality and there are thousands of these available. Many are free but some are also available as paid options. The typical format is that you get to use a free plugin with limited functionality but if you want the full item and support, then you have to pay.

The key thing to realise with WordPress plugins is that some are coded very well indeed whereas others are very poor. Similarly for support levels where you can receive excellent support or it may be non-existent. This can become a complete minefield so it’s essential to minimise the number of plugins you use and be sure of the track record for support and updates. Even then, you can still get caught out and find that a long-standing plugin is discontinued, albeit you are still reliant on it. It’s then a nervous waiting game to see what breaks as the WordPress core engine updates.

For a typical dental website built on WordPress, you should only need 6 or 7 plugins.

Use optimisation tools

Even when you design a dental website diligently and with form and function in mind, WordPress can still be a bit sluggish which, as we’ve seen, can detract from user experience and from search engine optimisation.

Fortunately there are optimisation plugins which can really help with this, for example to cache content, optimise images, javascript and css (web code). When used correctly, the best optimisation plugins can make a huge difference to website performance and ensure that your site complies with the latest Google guidelines.

Take regular back-ups

This should go without saying for any type of digital marketing content but for a potentially complex website with a content management system like WordPress it makes even more sense. If something goes wrong during the maintenance programme for example, you need facility to simply roll back the site to an earlier version and start again.

Don’t over-estimate your ability to make website updates

Even though WordPress has some very handy tools to allow users to make their own edits to site content, don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s always easy. Simple edits such as minor text updates can be pretty straightforward but if you want to build new pages or make structural changes to the overall layout of the website, more than likely you’re still going to need the help of an experienced designer.

Summary

WordPress is the most popular tool for building dental practices websites and will give a great result if you understand the various pros and cons. It’s a really flexible and fully-featured platform which will serve you well if you invest the time and money to build with it correctly in the first place and then maintain it diligently in the future. Get either of those things wrong however, and you could end up with some major headaches.

If you’d like help with building an excellent website using WordPress, please get in touch with the design team at Dental Media on 01332 672548 or by using the website contact form. We’ll be pleased to set up a call with you to discuss the next steps.