Glossary
Every term an agency might use on a call with you, translated — and, more usefully, what each one actually costs you if it is wrong. Written for someone who owns a practice, not someone who builds websites.
20 terms
There are no stupid questions here, and an agency that makes you feel there are is telling you something about how the rest of the project will go.
Filtering needs JavaScript. Every term is listed below either way.
The free listing that puts your clinic in Google Maps and in the box of three local results above the normal search results.
For most clinics this listing brings more phone calls than the website does. An incomplete one — wrong hours, no services, no photos, unanswered reviews — costs more bookings than almost any design decision.
The work of making your clinic appear when someone nearby searches for what you do, as opposed to ranking for a search anyone in the country might run.
“Best vet” is not a search worth winning. “Emergency vet near me” at 11 PM, three miles from your door, is.
Invisible labels in a page's code that tell search engines and assistants what each piece of information actually is: this is an address, these are opening hours, this is a question and its answer.
Without it, your hours are just text on a page. With it, Google and ChatGPT can state your hours confidently when someone asks. It is the difference between being readable and being quotable.
Being the source an AI assistant uses when it answers a question, rather than a link someone might click.
Discovery is moving towards assistants answering directly. One veterinary marketing network reported traffic referred from ChatGPT rising more than twelvefold across its clinics in a year. If an assistant cannot read your hours and services, it recommends a clinic whose site it can read.
Google's three measurements of how a page actually feels: how fast the main content appears, how quickly it responds when tapped, and whether things jump around while loading.
A pet owner on mobile data outside your practice is the least patient visitor you will ever have. These are the numbers that decide whether they wait.
How long until the biggest thing on screen — usually your hero image or headline — has finished loading.
Under 2.5 seconds is the target. Most clinic sites fail it because of one unresized photograph.
How much the page jumps around as it loads.
It is why someone taps “Book” and hits “Directions” instead. Measurable, and entirely preventable.
The address book of the internet: it turns yourclinic.com into the actual server that answers.
Whoever controls your DNS controls where your website and your email go. This should be an account in your clinic's name, not your agency's.
The company your domain name is rented from, annually.
If your agency registered the domain in their own name, you do not own your address. Moving away from them can mean losing it, or paying to get it back. Check whose name is on it today.
The server that stores your website and sends it to visitors.
Hosting is cheap and replaceable; being locked out of it is not. You should have a login you could use this afternoon without asking anyone.
Encryption between a visitor's browser and your site.
Without it browsers mark your site “Not secure”, which is the first thing a worried pet owner sees. It is free and automatic now, so there is no excuse for its absence.
The software that runs your practice: ezyVet, Covetrus AVImark, Idexx Cornerstone, Idexx Neo, Vetter and others.
This is the system a booking form has to reach for “book online” to mean anything. A booking button that emails your front desk is a request; a booking that writes into your PIMS is an appointment.
A booking form that reads your actual calendar and writes the appointment straight into it, rather than sending a request someone types in later.
Vetstoria reports 42% of appointments booked through its platform were made outside practice hours. Only about a third of practices offered online scheduling in 2024, which means most clinics are closed to two-fifths of the demand.
A layout that reshapes itself for the screen it is on, rather than a separate mobile site.
Most visitors to a clinic site arrive on a phone, often one-handed, often worried. If the site was designed on a desktop and squeezed down afterwards, it shows.
A phone number marked up as a link so tapping it opens the dialler.
A number typed as plain text asks a panicking person to memorise ten digits and retype them. This is a one-line fix that nobody notices until it is missing.
A written description of an image, read aloud by screen readers and shown if the image fails to load.
Required for accessibility, and read by search engines. Decorative images should have empty alt text rather than a description of nothing.
The international standard for making a website usable by people with disabilities. AA is the level most laws and contracts reference.
It is both the right thing and a legal exposure: one roundup counts 8,667 ADA Title III website lawsuits filed in 2025. Most templates sold to clinics have never been checked against it.
The admin area where you edit your own pages — WordPress, Squarespace, Wix or something custom.
The question worth asking is not which CMS, but whether you can change your hours at 7 AM on a Saturday without emailing anyone.
A rule that sends an old web address to its new home permanently.
When a site is rebuilt without them, every link to your old pages — from Google, from directories, from the local paper — lands on an error page, and the search ranking you built up goes with it.
Two small files that tell search engines which pages exist and which they may read.
Not glamorous. Their absence is one of the fastest ways to find out an agency rushed your launch.
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