10 Best Practices for Boosting Engagement on Your Healthcare Site
Today’s healthcare consumers expect an engaging, informative web experience that makes them feel confident that your hospital or health system is the right place for them to seek care or refer their patients. Here are 10 best practices for enhancing your website’s user experience and more effectively engaging your audience.
1. SEAMLESS UI/UX ACROSS ALL PLATFORMS
All audiences will appreciate a simple, clear, responsive design. Think mobile-first, intuitive navigation and destinations that don’t take more than a few clicks to reach. Whether you’re looking to engage a patient or physician, you are more likely to keep their attention and encourage engagement with subtle designs and colors that don’t distract from readability, a few clear options for fast and straightforward navigation, and brief snippets of copy that give the user the option to read more if desired.
2. CUSTOMIZED INTERFACE DESIGN THAT REFLECTS YOUR BRAND
Use your brand’s colors, photography, and type styles, as well as messaging that reflects your mission. Consider including photos, social media posts, and videos of your physicians and staff talking about why they believe in the quality of the care and positive experiences your health system offers patients. Promoting your brand identity in these ways will help web visitors relate to and respect your healthcare organization’s culture and commitment to high-quality care – ultimately building trust and encouraging interaction.
3. ENGAGING HUMAN LANGUAGE
Aim for approachability, relatability, and accessibility in all your messaging. Consider interesting patient narratives, success stories, and other easily digestible content without industry jargon. Keep copy short but detailed, and mix in infographics, photography, video, and interactive elements to boost engagement.
Tell your hospital or healthcare system’s story – the why and how of what you do and who you impact. Emphasize collaboration, teamwork, and partnership with both patients and referring physicians.
4. INTUITIVE DESIGN AND CONSISTENCY
Keep it clean and modern, rather than cluttered and complicated, on every page. Maintain lots of white space, a simple color scheme, and an easily readable font. Use brief, bold headlines and subheads and limit your calls to action, but make sure they stand out so they’re easily found. Consider numbered and bulleted lists to make your content easier to scan. High-quality, professional photos that fit your brand style will add interest and bring that human element back into the user experience.
5. ACCESSIBILITY/WCAG COMPLIANCE
Designing a healthcare website to be accessible allows anyone you’d like to engage, even people living with permanent or temporary disabilities, to find and understand your content. WordPress can be configured to comply with both the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Accessibility features you should absolutely consider include:
- Accurate captions and transcripts
- Alt text for graphics and images
- Color contrast for text and graphics
- Keyboard navigation options to access links, menus, form fields, and media controls
- The ability to disable flashing content/animations
- Text-to-speech functionality
- Resizable, simple text formats
- Simple tables
6. A SITE BUILT FOR SPEED
A website that loads quickly and doesn’t hold users up as they navigate from place to place is essential. A fast, agile, and intuitive site reflects a healthcare organization that’s good at what it does, understands its audiences’ needs, and respects their time.
7. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
WordPress is designed for SEO, including built-in features and plugins that can improve your visibility in search engine results. Higher search engine rankings mean more visibility and engagement with both current and potential patients and potential healthcare partners. Always research and include relevant keywords, develop high-quality metadata and backlinks, and make sure your site loads quickly.
8. VOICE SEARCH OPTIMIZATION
People use voice-enabled features on their devices for a variety of reasons. While they may not be the go-to method for engaging with hospitals and health systems on the web at this point, voice search will likely play a bigger role in the near future. Healthcare providers and patients may prefer these searches because they don’t require a disruption of work or activities like a typical search might. Try to create the conversational or “long-tail” keywords more often used in voice searches, and ensure your website is mobile-friendly for smartphone users.
9. EMBEDDED VIDEO
Videos and animations add visual interest, and making them user-activated is respectful of your audiences’ time and needs. Animations can show the steps of a treatment or procedure in an understandable way, and videos can showcase patient testimonials and success stories and offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse at your hospitals and clinical sites.
10. FOREVER FRESHNESS
Remember to consistently update your blogs, articles, Q&As, videos, animations, and more on a regular basis to keep your website fresh and interesting. Stay on top of the latest technology trends to impress your audiences with new ways to engage.
In today’s digital age, web marketing is a crucial component of any healthcare digital strategy, but keeping your audiences interested and engaged can be a challenging task. If you’re too busy to redesign a streamlined, responsive, and attention-grabbing web experience or you’re not sure where to start, LIGHTSTREAM is here to help. Contact us today to learn how we can increase your efficiency through an expertly designed and executed web strategy.
