Sample audit
A real audit, on a real clinic
This is what the written audit looks like, on a single-practitioner osteopathy clinic in central London, with the parts that need the owner's access marked as such. The clinic is not named. Everything was checked from outside on 27 September 2026, and no enquiry was sent: the clinic did not ask for this.
The clinic is a good example because it does the hard part well: a central address, a registered practitioner, published fees. Patients who find it have every reason to book. The findings are almost all about what happens between someone deciding to book and a booking existing.
The enquiry path
Two ways in, both through one person
Call one mobile number, which belongs to the practitioner who is also treating the patients, four days a week. Or fill in the contact form, which exists on the contact page only, although the homepage tells visitors to use it. There is no online booking and no way to book outside clinic hours.
The cost figures below use the clinic's own published fees: a first visit is £100 and a follow-up is £75, so a new patient who books a first visit and three follow-ups is worth £325. That is an assumption stated, not a measured figure; the paid audit replaces it with the clinic's real numbers.
Findings
Six findings, in the order I would fix them
- 01CriticalEffort: Small
Every booking depends on one phone being answered
The only way to book is to call the practitioner. A first visit runs up to an hour and a half, and while a patient is on the table the phone cannot be answered, so the calls most likely to be missed are the ones that arrive during the busiest hours.
A caller who reaches voicemail can leave a message, or try the next clinic in the search results, and the clinic only ever learns about the first kind.
- What it costs
- Every missed first call that does not ring back is roughly £325 at the numbers above. Nobody can see these; they leave no trace.
- The fix
- An online booking link for first visits, plus a voicemail or text-back message that tells a caller how to book without waiting.
- Needs the owner
- The call log. The paid audit counts missed calls against booked first visits for the last three months.
- 02HighEffort: Under an hour
On a phone, the phone number cannot be tapped
The number appears on every page, but as plain text. On a mobile, tapping it does nothing: the visitor has to memorise or copy it. For a business where the phone is the only booking route, that is the single most important link on the site, and it is not a link.
- What it costs
- A step added to the only path that makes money.
- The fix
- Make the number a tap-to-call link everywhere it appears.
- 03HighEffort: About an hour
The contact form cannot be confirmed from outside, and its emails have nothing vouching for them
The form asks for the email address twice and needs a captcha and JavaScript to submit. Each of those is a small reason to give up, and together they sit in front of the only written way in.
More importantly, the domain publishes no SPF record and a DMARC policy of "none". Nothing tells Gmail, Outlook or anyone else that email from the clinic's domain is genuine, so replies from the clinic, and possibly the form's own notifications, are exactly the kind of mail that ends up in spam without anyone knowing.
- What it costs
- Unknown until it is tested, which is the problem.
- The fix
- Add an SPF record for the mail provider, move DMARC past "none" once mail is confirmed to pass, drop the repeated email field.
- Needs the owner
- Permission to send a real test enquiry and time the reply. In the 21-site study on this site, the most expensive problems were exactly this kind: a way in that looks fine and delivers nowhere.
- 04HighEffort: Under an hour
Four versions of the site, and the insecure ones do not redirect
The site answers on http and https, with and without "www", and none of the four sends visitors to the others. Anyone who arrives on an http link sees "Not secure" next to the clinic's name, on a medical site, where trust is the whole sale. Search engines also see four copies of every page competing with each other.
- The fix
- One permanent redirect to the https version.
- 05MediumEffort: Half a day
Nothing tells a search engine what this business is
No page has a meta description, so Google writes its own snippet from whatever text it finds. The homepage title is the clinic's name followed by "Home". There is no structured data saying this is a medical clinic, where it is, when it is open, or what it costs, which is what local results and AI answers read.
- The fix
- A written description for each page, a title that says what and where ("Osteopath in central London"), and LocalBusiness or MedicalClinic structured data.
- 06MediumEffort: Two hours
The site looks unattended
The last blog post is from February 2017. The footer copyright says 2016. The booking and fees page has several spelling mistakes, and the site names the practitioner's professional body two different ways. None of this is serious on its own. Together, on the pages a new patient reads just before deciding, they say nobody has looked at this site for years, and a patient reasonably wonders what else has not been looked at.
- The fix
- Correct the text, remove or date the blog, one consistent line about registration.
What is fine
What should not be touched
A redesign would throw most of this away. Nothing here needs one.
- The fees are published. Most clinics make people call to find out. This one tells them, and that removes the biggest reason not to book.
- The first visit is explained plainly: how long, what happens, what to wear. That answers the questions people are too embarrassed to ask on the phone.
- The homepage is small, about 30 KB of HTML, and it sets a mobile viewport.
- Email is on a real mail provider with proper MX records, not a free address.
The order
What it would take
Items two to six are about a day and a half of work in total. Item one is the one that changes the numbers.
| # | Fix | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | An online booking link for first visits, plus a voicemail or text-back message that tells a caller how to book without waiting. | Small |
| 2 | Make the number a tap-to-call link everywhere it appears. | Under an hour |
| 3 | Add an SPF record for the mail provider, move DMARC past "none" once mail is confirmed to pass, drop the repeated email field. | About an hour |
| 4 | One permanent redirect to the https version. | Under an hour |
| 5 | A written description for each page, a title that says what and where ("Osteopath in central London"), and LocalBusiness or MedicalClinic structured data. | Half a day |
| 6 | Correct the text, remove or date the blog, one consistent line about registration. | Two hours |
The paid audit
What five days adds
Everything above came from outside, in an afternoon. The written audit costs £340, is deducted in full from a build, and adds the parts that need the owner.
- A real test enquiry through every route, timed from submit to reply.
- The call log against booked first visits, so the cost of missed calls becomes a number, not an estimate.
- Search Console and analytics, to see which searches bring patients and which pages lose them.
- The booking and payment setup behind the site.
Want this for your site?
Book a free 30 minutes. Bring your site and roughly how many enquiries you get. You leave with the two or three things I would fix first, whether or not we end up working together.
Prefer not to get on a call? Send your URL to contact@ordstudio.cc and you get a written teardown back within two working days. No call, no pitch.