Teardown
This is the work, done in public. One veterinary homepage, run against the same ten-point checklist you can run on yours, with what I found and what I would change. No clinic is named, because holding up a real practice as the bad example would be a cheap way to make a point.
What we’re looking at
Composite, not real: the patterns below are drawn from a stack of genuine veterinary homepages, assembled into one so that the lesson survives without anybody’s practice taking the hit. Every fault described turns up repeatedly in the wild.
items passed cleanly on the first run through the checklist.
This teardownhero image, served full size and scaled down by the browser.
This teardownGoogle reviews averaging 4.8, none of them visible anywhere on the website.
This teardownThe run-through
Same ten questions as the free checklist. The difference here is that each one gets a finding and a specific fix rather than a tick.
Today’s hours live on a Contact page, two clicks in. The homepage header carries a logo and a nav, nothing else.
Fix: Move hours into the header with an open/closed state. This is the single most-wanted fact on the page and it is currently the hardest to find.
The number is typed as plain text in the footer. On a phone it does nothing when tapped.
Fix: Wrap it in a tel: link and lift it into the header. One line of HTML, and it is the difference between a call and a bounce.
A stock golden retriever against a white background, used by at least four other practices in the same state.
Fix: A phone photo of the actual team, outside the actual building. Slightly imperfect and real beats polished and generic, every time.
A “Request an Appointment” link sits in the footer and nowhere else.
Fix: One booking action in the header on every page, repeated at the end of each section. One action, not four.
“Small animal medicine” appears in a paragraph on the About page. Nothing on the homepage.
Fix: Name the species in plain text near the top: dogs, cats, rabbits, birds. A visitor holding a rabbit should not have to read an About page to find out.
No reviews anywhere, despite 180+ on Google averaging 4.8.
Fix: Pull three recent reviews onto the homepage with first name and date. The reassurance already exists; it is just on somebody else’s website.
There is no FAQ. Both questions are answerable only by phoning during opening hours.
Fix: Add both with a one-sentence answer each, marked up as FAQPage schema so Google and assistants can answer on your behalf at 11 PM.
Cannot be checked from outside. The WHOIS record is behind privacy, which is normal and proves nothing either way.
Fix: Ask the agency for both logins today, in writing. If they cannot produce them, that outranks everything else on this list.
The hero image is a 2.4 MB JPEG served at full resolution and scaled down in the browser. On a throttled 4G connection the page takes several seconds to become useful.
Fix: Resize to the dimensions it actually displays at, serve WebP, and drop the autoplaying background video on the Services page.
The address is linked to Google Maps. One tap to directions.
Fix: Nothing to do. This is the one item the site already passes cleanly.
If you only did three things
Nine failures is not nine projects. Three of them account for most of what this site is losing, and none of the three is expensive.
Two facts, one line of markup each, visible on every page. This is the fix with the shortest distance between effort and effect anywhere on the site.
A single, repeated, obvious next step. The practice already takes appointment requests by email; it just never asks for them above the footer.
Free. Takes twenty minutes with a phone. Replaces the weakest trust signal on the page with the strongest one available.
A practice could make these three changes itself in an afternoon, if it can log in to its own site, and that is still the honest answer. They fix the last step: the moment a visitor is ready to call or book. Whether owners trust the page enough to get there, from the first glance through the scroll, is the design — and that is the rebuild.
The offer
Same ten points, same format, on your actual homepage, on a 15-minute call. You get the findings and the fixes whether or not you ever hire me, and if the answer is “your site is mostly fine, do these two things yourself”, that is what you will hear.
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