It’s up to each individual dentist to decide whether it makes sense to maintain your own dental practice website. There’s certainly no right or wrong answer here. A majority of dentists operate solo practices, and they’re used to controlling all aspects of the office. Coming up with your own dental website design, however, can be an enormous undertaking.
No one has to tell a GP that operating a dental practice is a big job. The day-to-day routine is all about keeping appointments on time and improving the patient experience. For the dentist, there’s always a concern about increasing production per chair and keeping up with innovations in dental technology. The last thing the dentist and the staff really needs is to be distracted by the many demands of website hosting and maintenance.
Can You Maintain Your Own Dental Practice Website?
The question is a difficult one. Should you maintain your own dental practice website? To a majority of dentists, the answer is probably a resounding “No.” Maintaining any website means a great deal of work. For example, there’s the simple matter of routine maintenance, which includes keeping up with Google’s constantly evolving requirements for websites. Given the hectic schedules at many dental practices, keeping on top of these duties can become difficult to accomplish.
If you’ve elected to have a truly dynamic website, the requirements are even higher. it’s generally recommended that a website generate as much as 2,000 words of original marketing content in blogs or landing pages every single month. For many dentists who believe the job is done when the website goes live, this comes as quite a shock. This is, of course, on top of all of the maintenance required on any website, such as refreshing the content of old pages and blogs and devising new keyword research and strategies for future content.
Dental Website Maintenance – A Checklist
The following are some of the most important responsibilities involved if you decide to maintain your own dental practice website:
Backup Your Website
As amazing as it seems, many people don’t back up their own websites. This is a mistake. If someone hacks your website, your dental practice suffers. Unforeseeable technical glitches happen as well. Consequently, you could lose every shred of content, every digital media file, every video… everything. Would you really want to start from scratch to rebuild your website? Of course not. Backups provide peace of mind in case the unthinkable happens.
Update Your Plugins
People like content management systems like WordPress due to the easy availability of plugins. For the uninitiated, plugins are small programs that add functionality to a WordPress site. Hundreds of free plugins are available, depending on what you may require.
These plugins must be regularly updated. When you log into WordPress, you’ll receive notices on your dashboard if you need any updates to plugins. Webmasters need to stay on top of these updates because they not only improve performance but also remove bugs that can increase the chance of someone hacking your website.
Refresh Your Website’s Theme
When your dental practice website goes live, the work doesn’t end. That’s just part of the territory if you maintain your own dental practice website. Unfortunately, no website theme or brand strategy is “evergreen.” At some point, the look and feel of your website will require adjustments to keep up with changing tastes and styles. Failure to do this will make your website—and your practice—seem out of date.
Do Software Updates
Notice all of the updates that Windows routinely requires on your practice’s computers? It’s the same with web development software. In web development software like WordPress, for example, new features and interfaces must be updated routinely to improve viewers’ experiences when they land on your website. Failure to do so could eventually create compatibility issues.
Dentists Must Make a Choice When It Comes to Their Websites
Trying to maintain your own dental practice website can be difficult. Consequently, it’s wise to not even try. Dreamscape Marketing, a recognized leader in digital marketing in the healthcare field, can offer you effective options for website creation and maintenance. Call us at 877-958-9180 or email us at info@dreamscapemail.com and let’s discuss your practice’s new website.