Two Numbers on Chiropractic Websites That Shouldn’t Both Be True

There’s one job I turn down every time a chiropractor offers it to me. I won’t be the name on your hosting account.

It would be the easiest yes in the world. I’d take the renewal emails, I’d click the button once a year, and nobody at your clinic would ever have to think about it again.

That’s why I say no. A job that lives with me is a job nobody in your building can name, and the month I go quiet it turns into a job nobody in your building can find.

Who at your clinic could tell me today which company your website is actually sitting on?

I said exactly that to a clinic owner last spring, and the two of us went round in circles for an hour. He’d found two numbers in my report and wanted to know how both could be true at once.

The two numbers he brought me

“You had us fourth at something. Fourth of what?”

Title tags. That one comes in at 99.6% for chiropractic websites, and when I put every trade in order, only a short list sits above yours. Whether anyone in your building could tell me what yours actually says in Google is a separate question, and most owners can’t.

“Fine. What’s the ugly one?”

The secure connection. 91.8% of chiropractic sites load over one, where 94% do nationally. On that one a handful of trades finish underneath yours, and everybody else is above.

“Same websites?”

Same websites. Same offices, same year of checking.

He assumed I’d broken a formula somewhere, and I assumed the same thing for about a day, until I counted both again and got identical answers.

He wanted to know which of the two he should care about, and answering that honestly took the rest of the hour.

What each job is, and the moment it costs you

Near you last week, a man with a wrecked lower back picked between three clinics by reading one blue line each. He never opened two of those websites. The line he read is the title tag, so a weak one loses you the appointment before your site gets a turn at anything.

The secure connection earns you nothing you can point at. It seals whatever a patient types on the way to you, so a form filled in on café wifi can’t be read or altered by the stranger two tables over. Let it lapse and his browser says so out loud, right as he’s making up his mind about you.

The bill for a lapsed one never arrives as a bill. It turns up as an afternoon where three people tapped away from a clinic they had already half chosen, and nobody in the building ever hears a word about it.

“So one of them is marketing and the other one is plumbing,” he said.

Near enough. And plumbing feels like nothing at all, right up until the week it feels like a great deal.

My first theory, which lasted about a year

A person wrote your title tag. You, or your designer, or the student who ran the clinic’s Instagram for a summer and vanished in September.

Whoever it was sat at a screen thinking about how the practice sounds to a stranger, which is a pleasant afternoon for anyone who likes the place.

Nobody types a secure connection. Someone logs into a hosting account they may not have the password for, installs a certificate, points every page at it, then remembers the whole business a year later before it runs out.

Typed jobs get done. Switched-on jobs rot. Tidy, and I told a lot of people about it. Software companies looked like the proof, because SaaS wins every check you can type and loses the ones that have to be built.

If your clinic splits along the same line, which of the two halves would you say has a person attached to it?

Then I checked a third number.

The number that broke it

Nobody types analytics either. It’s a scrap of code someone installs, the same as the certificate, and your trade sits level with everyone else on it: 58.6% of chiropractic sites run analytics against 58% of the sites I audited.

If switched-on jobs simply rotted, that number would look like the padlock. It doesn’t.

Certificates and analytics arrive by the same route, through an account someone has to log into, so whatever separates the two of them was never really about typing.

Missing analytics costs you the decision you’d have made differently. The page that brought in four new patients last month and the page that brought in none look identical from the inside, so this year’s money goes wherever last year’s money went. Could you name the page that brought in your last four patients? I ask that gently, having gone the best part of a year without opening my own visitor numbers.

“Ours got set up,” he said. “My wife did it. She wanted to know whether the ads were doing anything.”

Someone in that building wanted an answer, so the job got done, and it got done by the person who wanted it.

Jobs with a name on them, and jobs without

Once he’d said it out loud, we kept finding it everywhere else on his site.

Anything a person actually wanted, a person did.

Written descriptions cover 57.5% of the pictures on an average chiropractic site, against 54.9% across everything I audited, and almost nobody in any trade bothers with those.

Someone wanted the photos described. Probably the same someone who wrote the headlines.

Describing the practice is comfortable work, and it belongs to whoever cares most about how the place comes across, which in a chiropractic office is usually the person whose name is over the door.

Nobody wants a certificate. It isn’t a thing to want, it’s a thing you’d rather never hear about again, and a website is full of jobs shaped exactly like that.

So they sit there waiting for a person who notices. Your trade is full of people who notice things about bodies and short of people who notice things about servers, and I don’t hold that against you.

Half of what a chiropractic rebuild actually involves is handing those jobs back to the building with a name written beside each one.

Most of the ongoing work a website asks of you is jobs of that exact shape. Maintenance stays invisible until the afternoon it becomes the most visible thing about your practice, and by then the person who noticed is a stranger deciding whether you look organised.

Before you take any of this as an insult

The ugly number reads like an indictment, and it isn’t one.

I looked at 3,253 chiropractic businesses across 24 cities, and 2,404 of them had a website I could open and mark.

On most of what I check, you sit above the average. The checks you lose are the ones a patient walks into first, which is a rotten bargain to be striking.

Nine tenths of a website can be in decent order while the tenth a stranger meets first is the tenth nobody has opened since the day it launched.

An expiring certificate says nothing about your competence as a practitioner. It says something about whose diary the reminder was supposed to land in.