Veterinary practices

WordPress for vet practices: what usually breaks

Your vet practice website has one main job: get a worried pet owner from Google to a booked appointment. On WordPress, a few things keep getting in the way. Old analytics code that stopped counting years ago, a cache plugin that hasn't been updated since the last locum left, and a booking page that takes ages to show up on a phone in the car park.

Most of it you can check yourself in ten minutes, and the fixes are usually small.

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01Analytics that stopped counting
02Cache plugin security fixes
03Slow booking pages
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Line drawing of a vet practice booking page with a paw print and an appointment calendar still loading, between a low speed gauge and a cache plugin shield.

01

Your analytics may have stopped counting in 2023

Google's Universal Analytics stopped processing data on 1 July 2023. If your site still has a tracking ID starting with UA-, it's sending visits nowhere. You won't get an error. The reports just stop, and the "how many people found us this month?" question has no answer.

  1. View the page source of your homepage and search for UA- and G-.

  2. Only UA-? You need a GA4 property.

  3. Both? Clear out the old tag so it stops loading a script for nothing.

02

Cache plugins get security fixes too

Caching plugins make WordPress faster, so nearly every practice site runs one. They also run with a lot of access, and they've had serious bugs. Both fixes below came out quickly. The problem is sites that never installed them.

Check: go to Plugins and look at the version next to your cache plugin. Turn on auto-updates for it if your host allows. Or run our free plugin checker and let it do the reading.

03

Slow booking pages lose bookings

Most practices embed a booking widget from their practice management or booking provider. That widget often pulls in its own scripts and an iframe, on top of the theme, the chat bubble and the cookie banner. On a phone with two bars of signal, that adds up.

Google's guideline for a good Largest Contentful Paint is 2.5 seconds or less. Run your booking page through PageSpeed Insights on mobile and look at that number first.

  1. Load the booking widget only on the booking page.

  2. Lazy-load anything below it.

  3. Drop the plugins nobody remembers installing.

04

What our free scan checks

Pop your address in and the scan reads your site from the outside, the way a visitor (or a bot) sees it. It flags old analytics tags, plugins with known security issues, slow pages and anything that looks like it shouldn't be there. You get the report by email. No login needed, and nothing gets installed on your site.

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Check the site before Monday's appointment rush. If the report shows something you'd rather not fix yourself, send it to us and we'll tell you what it involves.

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