Every link should go where it says

Every link and menu item on your site should go exactly where it says it will. On a surprising number of practice sites, some don't — and each one quietly costs you a little. A "Services" link that just reloads the homepage, two menu items that open the same page, a button that does nothing on a phone: small faults, but a patient reads them as a sign the practice is sloppy, and a search engine reads them as a site it can't quite make sense of.

The patient's reaction is the one that costs you a booking. Someone who taps "Book an appointment" or "Our team" and lands somewhere unexpected doesn't think "minor technical glitch". They think the practice doesn't look after its own things — and if that happens on the very button meant to convert them, they may simply leave. The links that matter most, the ones a ready patient actually taps, are exactly the ones a broken navigation tends to fail on.

There's a quieter cost too. When two different links point to the same page, or links lead nowhere, the search engines crawling your site get a muddled picture of how it's organised, which doesn't help your ranking. And dead links age a site fast: a footer credit pointing to a designer's page that no longer exists tells anyone who checks that nobody has minded the site in a long while.

The good news is that this is nearly always a quick fix — the faults are cheap to correct; they've just never been checked. Finding them takes one careful pass:

How to check your own navigation

• Tap every menu item, on a phone. Confirm each opens the page it names, and that no two open the same one.
• Test your main action. The call button, the WhatsApp link, the booking link — the things a ready patient taps. If one of these misfires, it's the most expensive fault on the site.
• Check the footer and any credits. Old designer links and social links that no longer resolve are common, and they quietly date the site.
• Fix or remove anything broken. A link that goes nowhere is worse than no link; if it has no destination, take it out.

In the practices we audit, this turns up more often than you'd expect, and always as something the practice didn't know: two service links opening the same page, the top "Services" and "Contact" links reloading the homepage instead of going anywhere, and a footer credit linking off to a page that vanished years ago. None of it was deliberate; all of it was invisible from the inside, because the people who run the site already know where everything is and stop clicking.

A broken link is a small thing that reads as a big one. To a careful patient — and the nervous ones are the most careful — it says you don't check your own work, which is the last thing you want to suggest to someone deciding whether to trust you. Tap through your own site as a stranger would, and fix what doesn't go where it says.

Straightening out navigation is part of what we do when we build or rework a site — but tapping every link on your own, as a patient would, costs nothing and takes ten minutes.