Resize the Med Spa Gallery, Not the Website

I spent a Saturday last winter making a med spa client’s homepage load faster, felt tremendously pleased with myself, and then put a photograph of my own face on my own website at about the size of a road sign.

My site was the slowest thing I opened all week. A friend screenshotted it for me, which is how these things always arrive.

So take the order below from a man who got the order wrong on his own website, in public, while charging other people to get it right.

Say you have one afternoon and no budget at all. Where would you point it?

Where your trade actually sits

Med spas average 56 out of 100 for how quickly a page shows up on a phone, under the 58 I get across every site I run that same test on.

I don’t enjoy writing that, because your industry, which finishes 32 of 47 when I line every trade up on speed, is otherwise one of the tidier trades I audit.

It isn’t a handful of bad examples dragging an average about, either. 1,635 of these sites sat through a full performance run rather than a quick look at the homepage.

I’d sooner you checked me than believed me. The explorer at the foot of that report will roll a whole trade up for you if you pick Medical Spas from the industry list and leave the city list where it is, and every rate comes back with the number of sites underneath it, which is how I caught myself misreading my own numbers in the spring.

Your pages fit the phone already

Worth saying before the list, because your trade did this part properly. 80.0% of these sites pass Google’s basic mobile checks, a shade above the 78% I get everywhere else.

That check is the sign over your door. Either it’s readable from where she’s standing or it isn’t, and once someone has hung it straight, nobody ever thinks about it again.

Turning up is a separate job. She can be holding a page built beautifully for her hand and still be holding nothing at all, because none of it has arrived yet. The look you paid for is the part that arrives last, which is why I won’t hang a video across the top of a med spa homepage.

First: the photographs

Your gallery is the heaviest thing you own, and it’s heavy for an honest reason, because a before and after has to be sharp or it proves nothing.

Sharp on a phone and sharp on a poster are different sizes, though, and your website has been quietly serving the poster.

I’ve opened med spa pages carrying one single photograph that weighed more than an entire electrician’s website. Nobody did that on purpose. Someone dragged a file off a camera card, and the site took it without a word of complaint.

Your photographer hands over a folder of enormous files because enormous files are what she was paid to deliver, and nobody in that chain has done anything wrong. The website is simply the last stop, and it’s the only place along the way where the size of a photograph starts costing you appointments.

Ask whoever runs your site to put every picture back at a width near the screen it lands on. It’s an afternoon, it costs nothing, and your gallery will look exactly the same to a customer. I won’t crush a client’s photographs into mush to buy points on a speed test, and resizing them properly was never that.

When did anyone last check what your treatment pages weigh?

Second: the page she lands on, not the one you look at

You test your homepage, because it’s the page you’re proud of and the one you show your mother.

She never sees it. She comes off a search or an ad and lands on the page about the one treatment she wants, and that page is usually carrying the same gallery plus a booking box bolted underneath.

So spend the afternoon there instead. If your budget stretches to one page this month, make it the page that gets the most visitors, and whoever runs your site can tell you which one that is in about a minute.

Which page would a stranger land on if she searched for the treatment you make the most money from? I’d put money on it not being the one you had redesigned last year.

Third: the tools nobody has opened in a year

The chat bubble. The popup offering money off. The review carousel, the map, the countdown to an offer that expired at Christmas.

Each of those is a van from another company that has to park outside your shop and unload before you’re allowed to open the doors. One van is nothing. Five vans and a driver hunting for a space is your homepage on a Tuesday morning.

I take two or three of these off nearly every site I’m handed, and no owner has ever once asked for them back.

Who replied to your last chat message? If the honest answer is nobody since March, that bubble is losing you customers rather than catching them, and it’s a two minute job to take it off.

What I wouldn’t bother with: a faster server

Every time speed comes up, someone appears to sell an owner a better host, or a plugin with a monthly fee, or a package with the word performance in the title. A boat yard owner gets that email most months, and the slow part of his business was never the website.

Move a heavy page onto a faster machine and you get a heavy page delivered by a faster machine. The photographs don’t shrink because the server woke up. Nearly everything that makes a page arrive quicker lives in your own media library rather than on a machine you rent.

I’ve watched clinics pay a year of hosting upgrades for a problem that lived in their own media library, and the worst part is that the invoice always arrives before the disappointment does.

Has anyone emailed you a screenshot with a red number in the middle of it? Forward it to me before you pay him anything, and I’ll tell you whether he found something real, because often enough he has and the fix is still an afternoon.

None of the three needs a designer

Not one of those jobs is a rebuild, and I’m the man who sells rebuilds, so you can weigh that however you like.

On a med spa build the gallery gets resized before it goes anywhere near a page. That isn’t skill. It’s a step nobody skips while they’re being paid to care.

Your trade got the hard part right years ago. You look better online than almost anyone I audit, and I’d hate for that to be the thing she never waits around to see.

So go outside, turn the wifi off on your phone, and open your busiest treatment page from cold. Count out loud until the photographs land.