I Faked the Phone Test on Vet Websites for Three Years

For about three years I told vet clinics I had checked their website on a phone. I hadn’t.

What I did was grab the corner of my browser window and drag it in until it was tall and narrow, glance at the result on a big monitor at arm’s length, and then write “looks great on mobile” in the email like a professional.

It isn’t the same thing. I knew it wasn’t the same thing while I was typing it, which is the part I’d rather not have to write down.

Then a client forwarded me a text message from his sister-in-law. Four words and a screenshot, and the four words were “is this your website?”

There it was on a real screen at real size, the writing packed into gray ribbons, his phone number sitting on the page as a piece of text nobody could tap.

I had signed that site off. Twice.

How many of the websites you’ve paid for do you suppose were checked the same lazy way mine were?

Two practices, same trade, opposite results

Two veterinary clinics out of the ones I audited, near enough the same size, three vets apiece, both checked on the same wet afternoon in the spring.

Both of them have a website, which in this trade is unremarkable, because 91.2% of the practices I sampled do.

Both look handsome on a laptop. Both owners paid a real person real money for the work, and neither of them has been careless about anything.

One of those clinics passes my phone check. The other has been failing it since 2016 without a single client ever mentioning it to anyone at the front desk.

And the clinic that fails has the better reviews, the better vets and a waiting room I’d rather sit in. So which of those two is yours?

I found the same pairing in Montreal, two businesses doing identical work with one phone ringing and one quiet. The trade never explains it. Something inside the building does.

What the check is actually asking

A page that fails is a shop sign built to be read from the road, taken down and hung on the wall inside the waiting room.

Every word is still on it. None of them are the size for where she is standing, and she is not going to walk backward across the room until they come into focus.

A page that passes gets rebuilt for the width of a hand. One column, type she can read in a dark hallway, a button big enough to hit without aiming at it.

None of that is taste. It’s the plain mechanics of using a page, settled for a hand instead of a desk.

Your own homepage does one of those two things tonight, and you can’t tell which from a desk chair. When did you last watch a client use it?

60.3% of the veterinary sites I opened manage that.

Forty seven trades go into that ranking, and this one comes to rest at the foot of it, underneath the roofers, underneath the restaurants, underneath every single trade I check.

78% clear the same check across everything I audit, so your competition on a dark evening isn’t only the clinic across town. It’s every other website she used that day, all of which behaved themselves and none of which asked anything of her.

So what separates the two clinics

Not money. I checked that first, because it would have been the comfortable answer for both of us.

The clinic that fails bought a good looking theme back in 2013 from a designer who was proud of it, and at the time it was a sound decision made by sensible people.

Phones weren’t what they are now. That theme was built at a fixed width, the way nearly everything was, and it has spent every year since shrinking itself down like a photocopy of a photocopy.

The clinic that passes replaced its website in 2021. Not because a client complained, and not because the old one had gone ugly, but because the practice manager had a line in a budget and chose to spend it there.

One of them has a person whose job quietly includes the website. The other has a website that belongs to everybody in the building and therefore to nobody at all.

Nothing else about those two businesses explains the gap. Not the vets, not the town, not the money, and not the software either.

Who in your building would notice if your site broke tomorrow afternoon?

Passing isn’t the same as pleasant

A door can be exactly the right size and still stick when you push it.

Google scores how quickly a page becomes usable on a phone, out of a hundred, and veterinary websites average 54 out of 100 when I score them.

That isn’t a disaster on its own. Google files anything from 50 to 89 under needs improvement, and the average across every site I run the test on is 58 out of 100, so nobody in small business is walking away with a medal here.

Winston-Salem clears the phone check better than any city I sampled, and the excuses start the minute it passes. A pass is where the argument begins.

Your client isn’t grading on a curve, though. She is watching a photograph of your building load, one band at a time, while a dog is being sick on her back seat. How long would you give it?

None of this is my private spreadsheet, by the way. My explorer carries two menus, and choosing veterinarians on one while the other stays on all cities gets you a card with every check in this post, the number of sites behind each one, and a platform mix showing WordPress on 37.9% of what I opened.

Your own clinic is one of the rows sitting behind those numbers, and the card will never tell you which one. Only your phone can do that.

What the failing clinic actually needs

Not a rebuild. I’d talk them out of one if they rang me tomorrow, and I’ve talked owners out of bigger jobs than that.

It needs a developer for a day, two at the outside. A theme built after phones existed, the fixed widths taken out, the type sizes set properly, and that phone number turned into something a thumb can press.

Then a person has to open the finished thing outdoors, on a real phone, and say out loud whether it works. That step takes four minutes and gets skipped on nearly every project I inherit.

Most of the veterinary websites I take on these days are repairs of that kind rather than rebuilds, and the phone is where I start every time, before anyone shows me a color palette.

Would your current web person know how to do that work? Would you know who to ask?

Go and look at yours

Don’t check it my old way. The narrow browser window on a desk flatters everything and tells you nothing, which is exactly why I liked it for three years.

Take your own phone out to the parking lot after evening surgery, on whatever signal you get out there, with a coffee in your other hand and your reading glasses left inside on the desk.

Find your opening hours. Find your address. Try to send a message to yourself.

If any part of that makes you wince, send me the address and I’ll go through the whole thing properly and tell you the worst of it first.

And if it all works beautifully, write and tell me so, because a trade that finishes last on this one could do with a few clinics arguing back.