Orthodontists Are Great at Blogging and Bad at Mobile. Both Are True.

For years I told clients that the writing was the hard part of owning a website.

Find someone in the building willing to publish, I said, and the rest of it looks after itself. Writing takes discipline. Layout takes an afternoon.

I was wrong, and orthodontists are the trade that showed me how wrong.

Every practice I talk to keeps score on the writing. How many posts went up this quarter, whether anyone got around to the expander article, whether the hygienist ever sent her draft over.

Nobody keeps score on the thing that decides whether the article gets read at all.

50.4% of the orthodontic practices I audited publish a blog, against 37% of small businesses in general. That comes from 1,890 sites I could open and check myself rather than a survey asking practices what they get up to.

Now put the same sites through a different question. Do those pages work on a phone?

These practices clear Google’s mobile checks 74.0% of the time where 78% of everything I audited does, and the trade that comes 4th on the writing comes 38th on that.

One good number has never predicted another for me. Furniture stores hold a Google review 96.3% of the time, and that told me nothing at all about how their pages behave in a hand.

Same trade, same websites, same year. How does one industry manage both at once?

The hard part is the part you already did

Writing is the expensive habit, and in my whole file it’s the one almost nobody keeps up.

Someone in your office had to sit down, work out what parents keep asking in the chair, and turn it into a page. Then do it again the month after, with no way to prove it did anything.

Half your trade keeps at it anyway, which is more than I can say for most of my own clients, who manage two posts in a year and then apologize for it.

Two practices in this trade published the same article the same month, and only one of them got the call.

You even describe your photos. Alt text is the caption written on the back of a print and kept out of sight, and it exists so a blind visitor’s screen reader can say the picture out loud while Google reads it quietly.

It covers 59.6% of the images on your pages on average against 54.9% across everything I checked.

So the effort behind those pages is real, and I would far rather give you credit for it than pretend otherwise, which is why the mobile result stings the way it does.

What failing the mobile check looks like

A mobile check isn’t a taste test, and Google doesn’t care what I think of your design.

Picture your front door rather than your decor. Is the sign readable from where a person is standing? Can she get a hand on the handle without catching her knuckles on the frame? Does the door fit its own doorway?

The check asks three things in the same spirit: text you can read without zooming, tap targets far enough apart for a thumb, and a page that fits the width of the phone it opened on.

Fail one of the three and the door still opens for her. It just sticks.

Sticking doors are the cheap end of what a page owes the person holding it, and none of it is a matter of taste.

You’ve seen the symptoms even if nobody ever put a name to them. Body text the size of a grain of rice. A photo of the office running off the right edge, so the whole article scrolls sideways.

Two buttons stacked so close together that a thumb catches the wrong one, and your booking link happens to be one of the two.

Recognize any of that from a site you own?

It isn’t a speed problem

The first thing every owner says to me here is that the site must be slow. It isn’t.

On Google’s mobile speed scale your trade averages 60 out of 100, a shade ahead of the 58 out of 100 the average small business site manages.

No trophy in that, mind you, since anything from 50 to 89 lands in the band Google calls needs improvement. It still isn’t what makes a parent give up on a page.

Your pages arrive at a reasonable pace and then behave badly once they’re there. Two different faults with two different fixes, and mixing them up is why people spend money on the wrong one.

Speed is a plumbing question about servers, image sizes, and the pile of scripts a browser has to chew through before anything appears on screen at all.

Mobile-friendliness is a shopfitting question about type sizes, spacing, and what your columns are supposed to do once the window narrows to the width of a hand.

You can buy faster hosting all day long and the text will still be too small to read. Which of those two has your web person been quietly billing you to fix?

Why the article page is the one that breaks

My theory here is boring, and I’ve watched it play out on enough builds that I’ve stopped questioning it.

Whenever a new client hands me a login, the article page is the first one I open, because it’s the one I expect to be broken.

Your homepage got designed. Your blog template got inherited.

Someone laid out the homepage carefully, checked it on a phone, and argued about the hero photo for the better part of a week. Then the article page arrived free with the theme, and I doubt anybody in your office has opened it on a phone since the day the site launched.

Whatever your site runs on, the story is the same. WordPress powers 54.9% of these practices, and nothing else on the list gets anywhere near it: Wix at 3.9%, Squarespace at 3.8%, Webflow at 2.9% and GoDaddy at 2.0%.

Every one of them ships a default article layout, and every one of them will let you drop a plugin into the sidebar that nobody ever tested at the width of a phone.

Then a team member pastes in a photo straight off a camera, or a table of treatment stages that was laid out on a desktop, and the column gives up quietly without telling anyone.

A plastic surgeon’s gallery did exactly that to me in 2021, and rather than rebuild it I hid the thing on phones.

When did anyone in your office last read one of your own posts end to end on a phone?

The half of this that goes your way

None of it adds up to a crisis, and your own numbers are the reason.

74.0% means most orthodontic sites pass. If yours is one of them, your blog is doing the job you built it for and this post belongs in someone else’s inbox.

Your speed sits above the national average too, and your writing habit beats almost every trade I looked at, which is a better starting position than most of my clients arrive with.

The gap bothers me because of exactly who it lands on, since nobody in the history of the internet has read a 900-word article about palatal expanders by accident.

That reader is the most valuable stranger your website will meet all week, because she’s already interested, already comparing two offices, and already close to picking one.

And she’s meeting the one page in the building that nobody ever checked.

Read your own post in a parking lot

My favorite test for this takes about four minutes and costs nothing at all.

Take your phone off the office wifi. Open your most recent blog post on cellular data, somewhere with two bars, sitting in your car.

Read the whole thing through. Not skim it, read it, the way a mother would in a parking lot outside a hockey rink with eleven minutes to kill and a rink door to watch.

Can you get to the bottom without zooming once? Does anything slide sideways? When you reach the end, is there a way to book an appointment that your thumb can hit on the first try?

If you got there and found nowhere to go, the writing was never the problem and it never had been.

I keep a shelf of orthodontic sites worth copying if you want to see what the working version looks like. And if you’d rather skip the diagnosis altogether, rebuilding these is the work I take on.

Your trade keeps score on the writing. The mother in the parking lot keeps score on whether she could read it.

Only one of you is holding the checkbook, so whose score should you be keeping?