The Med Spa Look You Paid For Arrives Last

I won’t put a video across the top of a med spa homepage.

Not a slow pan around the treatment room, not hands folding a warm towel, not the reel your photographer already shot and billed you for.

Clients hate hearing it, and twice this year the meeting went cold at that exact sentence, which tells you how much of this business is decided before anybody looks at a single number.

My reason has nothing to do with taste. I’ve watched what that file does to a woman sitting in a school pickup line with two bars of signal, and she was the customer who was about to book you.

“But my whole business is how it looks”

That’s the pushback, near enough word for word, and I get it in this trade more than in any other one I work with.

It deserves a straight answer, because you happen to be right about something most of my clients are wrong about.

Nobody books a laser appointment off a page that looks like a plumbing quote. Your room, your lighting, your before and afters, the whole feel of the place, all of that is the product here in a way it never is for the man replacing a breaker panel.

I’ve lost work over this. A clinic owner once told me my first draft looked clinical, which in her business is an insult rather than a description, and she wasn’t wrong about the draft.

So I’m not going to sit here and argue that looks don’t sell treatments. They do. Yours especially.

Would you book a clinic whose photographs looked worse than your own reception? Of course you wouldn’t, and neither will she.

Then I check the clinics one at a time

Your trade already won the argument everyone else is still having. 92.0% of the med spas I sampled have a website at all, 4 of 47, while 17% of local businesses still give a customer nothing to click.

The trades above you on that check are a short list at the top. Underneath sits nearly everything else I audit, including a pile of businesses you’d assume run a tighter ship than a skincare clinic does.

Then I sorted the same 2,916 businesses by how quickly those pages turn up on a phone, and the trade slid down into the bottom half of the pack.

Med spas average 56 out of 100 for the speed a page arrives at, under most of the trades I run that same test on and under the 58 I average across every site I check.

Best in the room at owning a website. Bottom half at getting it to show up.

So how does one trade manage both of those in the same year?

The wait you never sit through

You have never once watched your own website load properly, and neither have I, and I build the things for a living.

You open it on your own phone, on your own wifi, from a copy your browser tucked away weeks ago. It appears the second you tap, so it’s fine, so there’s nothing to fix.

I ran that same fake test on veterinary sites for three years and wrote down what it was hiding from me once I finally caught myself at it.

Hers doesn’t behave like that. She got your name off a friend at six in the evening, she’s on a bus or standing in a car park, and she has three other clinics sitting in three other tabs.

How long do you wait on a stranger’s page when you’re already half committed to the next one?

She’ll never tell you she left, either. She’ll remember looking you up, she’ll remember booking somewhere else, and she will never once put those two memories together.

Nothing heavy on your page is an accident

The weight isn’t carelessness. Every slow thing on a med spa homepage is something an owner asked for and paid extra money to get.

The gallery, uploaded at full camera size because the photographs are the whole pitch. The video header. The booking widget, the chat bubble, the review carousel, the live feed of your Instagram.

Those last four are small programs your page has to fetch from another company before it can finish loading, and whoever runs your site can bolt one on in about two minutes, which is exactly why there are four of them.

Nobody ever takes one back off. Years of “can we just add” is how a beautiful page ends up slower than a builder’s site nobody has touched since 2016.

Which of the four did you actually ask for?

Your trade buys its tools on looks as well, which is why Squarespace turns up on 11.7% of the sites I audited here and Wix on 11.5%, both of them well clear of the share those two hold across everything I check.

I don’t think that’s a mistake, by the way. Those tools look expensive out of the box, and expensive is exactly what your customer came for.

They just never argue with you when you upload a photograph the size of a poster.

She asked me for a new website

A clinic owner wrote to me last spring wanting a quote on a full rebuild, because bookings had gone quiet and the site had started to feel tired to her.

I asked for her login instead of writing the quote.

When did anyone last take something off your homepage instead of adding to it?

Off came the chat bubble nobody had answered since 2023. Off came the review carousel. Every photograph in her gallery went back up at a size a phone could reasonably carry.

The site looked identical afterwards, which was rather the point of doing it that way.

She wrote a few weeks later to ask when the rebuild was starting, and I had to tell her the only part that had been hurting her was already finished.

The gallery was the first of three cheap jobs I’d do on a clinic site before anybody says the word rebuild.

“Our clients aren’t in a hurry”

The second version of the pushback, and the one I have the least patience with.

Your customer isn’t browsing. She’s deciding, usually between you and two other places within a fifteen minute drive, on a phone, in a gap between two other jobs.

Nothing about that mood is patient, and she certainly isn’t admiring your typography while the screen sits there white.

Would you wait for her? You wouldn’t give a dry cleaner ten seconds, and a dry cleaner needs you to physically walk through the door.

The checks you’re already winning

None of this makes your trade bad at websites, and I’d like that on the record before you sit down to email me.

The padlock is handled, with 96.8% of these sites served over a secure address. The stars are handled. Add up the ten separate checks I score on and med spas come out at 75 out of 100, 7 of 47, which is a perfectly respectable place for a trade to be sitting.

When did a customer last thank you for a padlock?

Every trade carries a shape like that. Marine businesses land on a phone in a hurry and then ask the customer to squint at what turned up, and it costs them the same way.

Your weakest score is the one your money went into, and I find that a hard sentence to say kindly.

You bought the look, the look is lovely, and the look is standing outside with its coat on while she gives up and books elsewhere.

What I’d do about it

None of this is a rebuild, and I say that as a man who sells rebuilds for a living.

Resizing a gallery is an afternoon. Pulling two widgets off a homepage is a coffee. Moving the video onto a page she chooses to open costs you nothing at all.

Speed is only half of what makes a page easy for her to use, and the other half costs less than that.

When I build a med spa site, the photographs go on last and they go on resized, and not one client has ever noticed the difference on screen.

Can’t tell which part of yours is the problem? Send me the address and I’ll open it on a bad connection for you.

If it were my clinic, I’d take the header video down this week and I wouldn’t touch a single before and after.