The 10-point vet clinic website checklist.

Tick what your site passes. Anything you leave unticked opens up with the specific fix underneath it — no email, no download, nothing to sign up for.

1. 01 / 10Can you find your hours in under 5 seconds?Load your homepage on your phone and time yourself. If today's hours aren't visible without scrolling or hunting through a menu, an anxious visitor will call before they read anything else — which is fine, but it means your site isn't doing that job.

   Fix: Put today’s hours in the header with an Open now / Closed state that updates itself. It is the first thing an anxious visitor looks for, and it should never need a scroll.

2. 02 / 10Is your phone number an actual tap-to-call link?Tap it. If it doesn't open your phone's dialer, it's plain text — meaning a mobile visitor has to manually copy and dial a number instead of tapping once.

   Fix: Wrap the number in a tel: link — one line of HTML. On a phone that turns copy, paste, dial into a single tap, which is the difference at 11 PM.

3. 03 / 10Is your hero photo real, or stock?A real photo of your actual team with an actual animal is the cheapest trust signal on the page. Stock photography of a generic vet and a generic dog is instantly forgettable — and increasingly recognizable as stock.

   Fix: Replace the stock hero with a phone photo of your own team and an actual patient. A slightly imperfect real photo outperforms a polished stock one every time.

4. 04 / 10Can you book or request an appointment without scrolling?If the only "Book Now" button is buried at the bottom of the homepage, you're relying on visitors to scroll past everything else to convert.

   Fix: Put one booking action in the header of every page and repeat it at the end of each section. One action, not four buttons competing for the same tap.

5. 05 / 10Does the site say which animals you treat?"We treat pets" isn't an answer. A visitor with a rabbit, a bearded dragon, or a backyard chicken needs to know in one glance whether calling you is even worth their time.

   Fix: List the species you treat as visible text near the top — dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, reptiles. Someone holding a bearded dragon needs to know in one glance.

6. 06 / 10Are your reviews visible on the site itself?If the only place to see what other pet owners think of you is a separate Google search, you're making a worried visitor do extra work to find the reassurance that would've converted them right there.

   Fix: Pull three recent Google reviews onto the homepage with first name and date. Sending a worried visitor off your site to find reassurance is how you lose them.

7. 07 / 10Does your FAQ answer "are you open right now" and "do you take walk-ins"?These are the two questions a panicked pet owner searches for at 11pm. If answering them requires a phone call during business hours, you've lost the after-hours visitor to whichever clinic's site answered first.

   Fix: Add both questions to an FAQ with a one-sentence answer under each, marked up as FAQPage schema so Google and AI assistants can answer them for you.

8. 08 / 10Do you personally hold the login to your domain and hosting?Not "does your agency have it" — do you have a login, right now, that you could use today if you needed to. If the answer is no, you don't fully own your website.

   Fix: Ask your agency for the registrar and hosting logins today, in writing. If they cannot produce them, you do not own your website — and that outranks everything else on this list.

9. 09 / 10Does your homepage load fast on cellular data, not just office wifi?Turn off wifi and reload your site on your phone's data connection. A slow load on a fast office connection tells you nothing about what most visitors actually experience.

   Fix: Resize hero images to the size they actually display, serve WebP, and drop any autoplaying video. Most slow clinic sites are slow because nobody resized one photograph.

10. 10 / 10Is your address a tappable map link?Typed-out text means a visitor has to copy and paste it into Maps themselves. A linked address (or embedded map) gets them directions in one tap.

    Fix: Link the address straight to Google Maps, or embed a small map. One tap to directions instead of copy and paste into another app.