Your practice website is the front door for your IVF clinic. And patients looking to grow their family do extensive research – whether they’re looking for fertility testing, researching an IVF cycle or looking to freeze eggs. In fact, choosing a fertility provider is one of the most research-intensive healthcare decisions a patient can make. This means that as an IVF clinic, you need to take extra care to make sure your website answers key patient questions, and motivates them to become a lead and ultimately, a new patient.
Common Pitfalls in IVF & Fertility Website Design
There are a number of issues we commonly see when evaluating IVF clinic websites. If your practice site has any of these issues, you are losing new patients every month.
No visible phone number
This is the single largest issue we see on most IVF & fertility clinic websites. It’s pretty simple – if there’s not a visible phone number that looks clickable on your website, you are getting less new patient calls. In fact, when RUNNER redesigned the Dallas IVF website, we saw a 25% lift in new patient leads overnight, due largely to this single change.
No “sticky” navigation
A “sticky” nav is when your primary navigation on the site “sticks” to the top of the page, making it visible as the patient scrolls through the site. It essentially ensures that the phone number mentioned above, as well as your appointment request and other key items that help patients navigate your site are clearly visible. Without it, these key calls-to-action are invisible.
Slow load times due to un-optimized images & video
It’s very common for Fertility & IVF websites to feature large photos and videos front and center on the homepage. While this may look great, if those images or videos aren’t properly optimized to load quickly, you are losing out on patients. Slow loading times lead to patients abandoning your site waiting for it to load. Slow loading sites also are penalized by Google in both SEO and Google Ads.
Your site is more about your practice than the patient
There’s a fundamental challenge we see that most medical practices struggle with. Your site shouldn’t just be about you – it should be about the patient. Yes it’s important to build trust with a potential patient by convincing them of your expertise, but if your IVF practice website has pictures of your docs on the homepage, rather than a picture of a family… you’re losing out on patients. It should reflect the patient’s questions and cast a vision of the future.
What Makes a Great IVF Website?
There are a number of elements we see associated with higher new patient lead volumes, and more willingness to commit to IVF cycles or other procedures.
1. A Fertility Brand That Inspires Trust
Often when a potential patient visits your IVF or Fertility clinic website, they’re evaluating your practice before reaching out, or comparing you to another practice. One of the most important things that you can communicate immediately with your website is trust. Trust that you’re up to date with the latest in IVF and Fertility technology, trust that you’re going to give them a great patient experience, and of course, trust that they’re giving themselves the best chance to be successful. Things like poor imagery, difficulty navigating the site, slow loading can all undermine that trust. Simply put, you need to create a brand impression that is modern and trustworthy.
2. Educational Content, With a POV
New patients are looking for content. As we mentioned before, fertility decisions are researched extensively. Some patients may have already had some sort of testing or even seen an IVF or Fertility clinic previously. Your practice website should have content that answers the questions, conditions or treatments they’re researching. But they also want to see your point-of-view as a fertility expert. For example, if you’re writing a blog post or site page about the cost of IVF, explain why your clinic costs more than others – provide the context and background and you’ll drive more leads, and ultimately, more patients.
3. Transparency in IVF Outcomes
For IVF clinics, it’s important to provide data on outcomes. Link to SART patient outcome data. Patients are aware of it, they want to see it, and will research on their own.
4. Prominent Patient Testimonials & Reviews
But the most important patient outcomes you can build into your IVF website are patient testimonials. The more, the better. More than anything you can say about your doctors or practice, patient testimonials will do more to drive new patient leads. Video testimonials are the best, but written reviews and testimonials can also be powerful.
One very important note about testimonials is to make sure you have enough for new patients to be able to see themselves in the testimonials. You should have a spread – older couples, single women, LGBTQ+…
5. Real Photography
Real photography will create a stronger performing IVF or Fertility website than stock photography. New patients need to be able to see real photos of the practice (inside & out), pictures of the real team and real patients.
6. Variety of Lead Types on The Site
The most common lead types on IVF clinic sites are a phone call, a “request appointment” lead form and a general “contact us” form. However, since fertility and IVF decisions are often complex and take place over many weeks or months, we’ve found that offering additional lead types will generate more leads, and more patients in the long run. These other types of leads should be tailored for potential patients that may not be ready to schedule an appointment. One common example we see sometimes are the educational seminars that IVF clinics will often put on to help explain the process in more depth to potential patients. Or fertility “quizzes” or “assessments.” These lead types can provide not only valuable information to patients, but information to the practice as well – so they might reach out to these potential patients and see if an office visit is a good next step.
These are just a few strategies we think about when building an IVF website, and are often the kinds of strategies that agencies who don’t work with IVF and fertility practices may not understand.
Practice Right Websites for IVF & Fertility Clinics
At RUNNER, we created our Practice Right Website service to make sure that IVF and Fertility practices could get an affordable website that’s really good at converting traffic to leads and leads to patients. That’s because it’s built on our medical marketing expertise, and our experience working with IVF & Fertility clinics. In fact, our Practice Right Websites convert 2X as many new patient leads, on average.
If you’re ready to redesign your fertility clinic website, schedule a no-obligation consultation with a fertility marketing expert at RUNNER. We’ll evaluate your existing website and give you a free proposal so you can see what working with a Fertility Marketing Agency like RUNNER would look like.
