What Should a Clinic Website Audit Checklist Cover? Five Checks That Beat Design

What should a clinic website audit checklist cover for a dental or med spa clinic in Ontario or Quebec?

Key takeaway. Grade five things, in this order: loading speed (LCP), interaction responsiveness (INP), visual stability (CLS), the number of taps between a phone screen and a booked appointment, and whether your key content exists as plain text a search engine can read. Google publishes exact thresholds for the first three, so each one is pass or fail, not a matter of taste. Design opinions come last. A focused clinic owner can grade all five in one afternoon with free tools.

Why now

Google's Web Vitals documentation, published on May 4, 2020 and last updated on October 31, 2024, confirms that the interactivity metric changed hands: Interaction to Next Paint replaced First Input Delay, and the page states that "INP became a stable Core Web Vital metric in 2024" (web.dev, Web Vitals, Stable). That matters for clinics because most clinic sites were built or last reviewed against the old metric. A site that scored fine on the previous interactivity measure can fail the current one, especially on a mid-range phone in a waiting room with weak signal.

The second shift is where answers show up. Google's Search Central documentation on AI features, last updated 2025-12-10 UTC, spells out what it takes to be used as a supporting link in AI Overviews and AI Mode. If your hours, services and booking information are locked inside images, scripts or widgets, you are invisible to that layer. Both of these are checkable today, without hiring anyone.

What the rule actually says

Google does not leave the thresholds vague. The Web Vitals page defines the three Core Web Vitals and their targets in plain language. On loading: "To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading." (web.dev, Web Vitals, Core Web Vitals). On interactivity: "To provide a good user experience, pages should have a INP of 200 milliseconds or less." (web.dev, Web Vitals, Core Web Vitals). On visual stability: "To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1. or less." (web.dev, Web Vitals, Core Web Vitals).

There is also a rule about which number counts. The same page says: "To ensure you're hitting the recommended target for these metrics for most of your users, a good threshold to measure is the 75th percentile of page loads, segmented across mobile and desktop devices." (web.dev, Web Vitals, Core Web Vitals). So a single fast test on your office fibre connection proves nothing. The page is blunt about that too: "While lab measurement is an essential part of delivering great experiences, it is not a substitute for field measurement." (web.dev, Web Vitals, Lab tools to measure Core Web Vitals).

On the AI side, the guidance is reassuring and specific. Google states: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." (Google Search Central, AI features and your website). And: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features." (Google Search Central, AI features and your website, SEO best practices). What does matter is eligibility and readable content. To be used as a supporting link, Google says "a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet" (Google Search Central, AI features and your website, Technical requirements for appearing in AI features), and one of the listed best practices is "Making sure that important content is available in textual form" (Google Search Central, AI features and your website, SEO best practices).

These are documentation statements, not legal or professional advertising rules. Anything you publish about treatments, claims or pricing should still be validated with your regulatory college or a qualified advisor.

The method

1. Pick your three money pages before you test anything

Do not audit the whole site. Pick the homepage, the single highest-value service page, and the booking or contact page. A dental clinic in Ottawa might choose the homepage, the Invisalign page and the new-patient booking page. A med spa in Laval might choose the homepage, the injectables page and the consultation request page. Everything else can wait. Write the three URLs on a sheet of paper with four empty columns: LCP, INP, CLS, notes.

2. Pull field data, not a single lab score

Run each URL through PageSpeed Insights, which the Web Vitals page lists as one of the tools powered by the Chrome User Experience Report, and read the real-user section first. Record the mobile number and the desktop number separately, because the guidance asks for results segmented across mobile and desktop devices at the 75th percentile. If a page has too little traffic to report field data, note that and treat the lab score as a diagnostic hint only. A physiotherapy clinic in Mississauga with a quiet blog section will often see field data on the homepage and nothing on a deeper page. That is normal.

3. Grade loading and visual stability against the published numbers

Compare each LCP figure to 2.5 seconds and each CLS figure to 0.1. Pass or fail, no debate. Clinics usually fail LCP for one of three boring reasons: an oversized hero photo of the reception area, a slideshow of before-and-after images loading at full resolution, or a third-party chat or booking widget that blocks rendering. CLS failures usually come from a cookie banner, a promo bar or a review carousel that pushes the page down after the patient has already started reading. Imagine a clinic in Quebec City whose homepage shifts just as a visitor reaches for the call button: that is a CLS problem, not a design preference.

4. Test interactivity where the patient actually taps

INP measures responsiveness to real interaction, so test it the way a patient behaves. On a mid-range phone, on cellular data, tap the main booking button, open a service accordion, and change a date in the booking form. Count the lag. The target is 200 milliseconds or less. Note that lab tools cannot produce INP without a user, which is why the Web Vitals page points to Total Blocking Time as a lab proxy. While you have the phone in hand, count taps from landing to confirmed request. If a clinic in Gatineau needs seven taps plus a PDF form, that is the finding, and it usually costs more bookings than any font choice.

5. Check what a machine can read

View the page as text. Can you copy and paste your address, hours, services and practitioner names? If your hours live in an image, if your services are inside a slider that renders only after a script runs, or if your booking page is an embedded iframe with no surrounding text, you have failed the readable-content test described in Google's AI features guidance. Confirm the page is indexed with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console, and confirm nothing on the page blocks snippets. A clinic that wants to be cited when someone asks an AI assistant about emergency dental care in its city should first make sure that information exists as text on an indexed page. If you want the broader context on content fundamentals, our guide on 10 proven SEO strategies for organic growth covers the groundwork.

Templates

The one-page scorecard. Print this and fill it in by hand.

Clinic website audit, date: __ Page 1 URL: _ Mobile LCP: s / target 2.5 s / PASS or FAIL Mobile INP: _ ms / target 200 ms / PASS or FAIL Mobile CLS: / target 0.1 / PASS or FAIL Taps from landing to booking request: _ Hours, address, services readable as text: YES or NO Page indexed in Search Console: YES or NO Biggest single blocker on this page: ___

The brief you send your developer. Short, specific, measurable.

Subject: Core Web Vitals fixes on three pages Hi, we audited three pages using PageSpeed Insights field data at the 75th percentile, mobile and desktop separately. Results attached. Please address, in this order: 1) mobile LCP above 2.5 seconds on the homepage and the service page, 2) layout shift above 0.1 caused by the banner and the review widget, 3) delay above 200 ms on the booking button tap. Please confirm which element is the largest contentful paint on each page and what you plan to change. Do not redesign anything. Re-test the same three URLs after deployment and send the before and after numbers.

The front desk reality check. Hand this to whoever answers the phone.

Take your own phone off the clinic Wi-Fi. Open our website from a Google search, not from a bookmark. Try to book a new-patient appointment for next Tuesday afternoon. Stop as soon as something is confusing or slow. Write down the exact step where you stopped and how long it took. Do not fix anything. Just report it.

What never to do

Do not judge your site by a single lab score on office Wi-Fi: Google's own documentation says lab measurement is not a substitute for field measurement.
Do not start with a redesign: a new theme can break LCP and CLS while looking better in a mockup.
Do not audit twenty pages at once: you will collect data you never act on, and nothing ships.
Do not bury hours, services or address inside images or scripts: content that is not textual cannot be read or cited.
Do not add special AI files or extra markup hoping for AI visibility: Google says no new machine readable files or AI text files are needed.
Do not block snippets on pages you want surfaced: a page must be eligible to show a snippet to be used as a supporting link.
Do not let the booking path depend on a PDF or an email form: every extra tap is a patient you may not hear from again.

When to hand it off

If you have graded the five checks and the failures sit in code, hosting or a booking widget you did not build, that is the moment to bring in help rather than guess. We run a free website audit for clinics in Ontario and Quebec: you get the field numbers for your three money pages, the tap count on your mobile booking path, and a short list of what to fix first, in order. Start with the free website audit, or book a 30-minute call and we will walk through your scorecard together before you spend a dollar on design.

FAQ

Do Core Web Vitals really affect whether patients book? They measure loading, interactivity and visual stability, which is exactly what a patient experiences while trying to reach your booking button on a phone. Google publishes the thresholds, so you can grade yourself objectively instead of arguing about design taste.

What are the exact numbers I should aim for? LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP of 200 milliseconds or less, and CLS of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads, mobile and desktop separately. Those figures come straight from Google's Web Vitals documentation.

Do I need special markup or an AI file to show up in AI Overviews? No. Google's AI features documentation states there are no additional requirements and no new machine readable files, AI text files or markup needed. The page simply has to be indexed, eligible for a snippet, and carry its important content in textual form.

My page has no field data in PageSpeed Insights. What now? Low-traffic pages often lack real-user data. Use the lab diagnostics to find obvious issues, then focus your audit on the pages that do have field data, usually the homepage and your main service page.

How long does this audit take? One afternoon if you limit yourself to three pages and one phone. Pulling the numbers takes under an hour; most of the time goes into walking the booking path and writing down exactly where it breaks.

Should I fix everything myself or wait for a redesign? Fix the measurable failures first. Oversized images, a shifting banner and a slow booking widget can usually be addressed without touching the design, and you will know whether a redesign is justified once the numbers are clean.

Darly Robert Cham, founder of IntelliAIScale. Former Clinical Research Coordinator at Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont in Montréal, CCRP, CCRC and CCRA certified (CRA School). IntelliAIScale helps clinics in Ontario and Quebec answer every call and every review.

Sources

https://web.dev/articles/vitals (read on 2026-11-09)
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features (read on 2026-11-09)