Why You Shouldn’t Build Your Veterinary Practice Website on Squarespace
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By Deanna Hendrick, MCM | Director of Digital Marketing
A website serves as your veterinary practice’s digital front door. It is often the first place that prospective clients learn about your practice and your services. Therefore, it is essential to have a well-designed, engaging, and easily visible website. But it is not something that can easily be created over a couple of days by you or your team members. Over the last few months, I’ve heard a significant spike in advertising from Squarespace and seen the promotion of other drag-and-drop website builders in the veterinary space.
Don’t get us wrong – Squarespace and similar easy-to-use website builders can be great for creating simple sites, especially for small startups, individuals, or entrepreneurs. But when it comes to building a sophisticated website for an established, growing business, it is generally not recommended. If your practice has used Squarespace or another drag-and-drop builder, it might be time to invest in a new website developed by experienced web programmers and designers.
Here are three important reasons why you should not build your veterinary practice website on Squarespace or similar do-it-yourself website builders:
- You are not a website designer
Most veterinarians, hospital owners, and practice managers do not have experience in website programming and development, and despite there being some “easy tools” for website design, if you don’t have the foundational skills or knowledge to properly use them, your veterinary practice will be left with a poorly designed and ill-functioning website.
- You and your team don’t have the time
You and your team are responsible for a busy and growing caseload, so it’s unlikely that you have bandwidth to write website copy, select and properly size photos, test forms, and add the meta descriptions necessary for search engines to find your site (an essential form of SEO). Even for seasoned website builders, it takes a significant amount of time to build a well-designed, informative, and user-intuitive site.
- These sites won’t grow with you
Squarespace is intended to help individuals and small businesses quickly build small, accessible websites, but it doesn’t allow for customization or long-term optimization. You won’t be able to properly scale your website as you expand your capabilities, and as you refine your brand and your content, your site won’t be able to reflect your growth. Additionally, these types of site builders have a limited supply of templates, meaning your website will look very similar to other small business sites, possibly even competitors in your area.
A Better Option for Growth
For these reasons, we recommend WordPress, the preferred system of many major brands – including Fortune 500 companies – around the world. WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS), which has more in-depth functions than a basic website builder, meaning you can scale and customize your WordPress site on a more technological level. A CMS allows multiple users and the client to own, manage, and complete edits to their site and offers more robust and progressive programming options. Additionally, Squarespace is not the best SEO solution. It does not allow for in-depth practices such as meta descriptions, implementation of Google Tag Manager or plugins to enhance online visibility and searchability. WordPress does.
Even if someone on your team has created a website before or has dabbled in digital marketing, that doesn’t make them qualified to build or manage a sophisticated website like the one you need. You can absolutely rely on their talent and experience to review website wireframes or development links from your programmer or help with other digital marketing tactics such as social media. But just as primary care clinics refer out complex and advanced cases to veterinary specialists, website development, design, and programming should be left to the experts for the best and optimal outcome.