Why the homepage, and why these 25

Someone who lands on a clinic's homepage, perhaps on a phone and mobile data, wants three answers fast: is this the right place, is it real, and how do I reach it? The checks below test whether the homepage answers those questions, using things a machine can measure reliably: tags, sizes, timings and links.

The checks fall into five groups. A check either passes or fails, and some fails get partial credit. Each group gets its own 0-100 score, plus one overall score.

1. Speed (6 checks)

Speed is easy to miss, because a site can feel fine on office Wi-Fi.

1. Google mobile performance score of 50 or more. This is the Lighthouse performance number from PageSpeed Insights on the mobile setting. Test it at pagespeed.web.dev and read the Mobile tab, not Desktop.
2. Server responds in under 800 ms. If the first byte takes a second or more, every page feels slow. curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{time_starttransfer}\n" https://yoursite.com/ shows it in seconds.
3. HTML under 300 KB. Page builders can add a lot of unused markup. curl -sL https://yoursite.com/ | wc -c gives the size in bytes.
4. 20 or fewer external scripts. Every old chat widget, tracker and slider plugin adds one. Remove what you don't use and defer the rest.
5. 6 or fewer render-blocking stylesheets. Stylesheets in <head> keep the screen blank until they load. Combine them.
6. Images lazy-load. If a page has more than 3 images, at least 40% should have loading="lazy". Leave the main image at the top as it is.

Many speed problems come down to the same short list of fixes: compress images to WebP, remove plugins you don't use, and use decent hosting or a CDN.

2. Mobile (3 checks)

7. Viewport tag set. One line: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">. Without it, a phone shows a shrunken desktop page.
8. Zoom allowed. Some templates add user-scalable=no or maximum-scale=1. Remove them. Many clinic visitors are older and need to zoom.
9. Readable text. No more than 3 inline font sizes under 12px. Body text of 14-16px is a sensible minimum.

The quickest test is to open the site on your own phone and read the first screen without zooming.

3. SEO basics (8 checks)

These don't make a site rank on their own. But if they're missing, Google has to guess what the page is about.

10. Title of 20-70 characters that doesn't start with "Home" or "Welcome". Aim for 30-60 characters: service, area, clinic name.
11. Meta description of 50-170 characters. This is the text under your link in Google. Keep it factual: services, area, timings, how to book.
12. Exactly one H1. One heading that says what the clinic offers. Run document.querySelectorAll('h1').length in the browser console.
13. XML sitemap at /sitemap.xml, or listed in robots.txt.
14. robots.txt with a User-agent line. Adding a Sitemap: line covers check 13 as well.
15. Canonical tag, e.g. <link rel="canonical" href="https://yoursite.com/">, so www and non-www versions don't compete.
16. Open Graph tags (og:title and og:image), so a link shared on WhatsApp shows a proper preview. Without them, a shared link shows up as a bare URL.
17. Structured data. A JSON-LD block of type MedicalClinic (or LocalBusiness) with your real name, address, phone and hours. Check it with Google's Rich Results Test. Don't add star-rating markup for patient reviews.

4. Trust (5 checks)

18. HTTPS. The final URL should be https://, and http:// should redirect to it. Free certificates from Let's Encrypt or Cloudflare cover this.
19. Phone number visible, ideally as a tel: link in the header or footer.
20. Email or contact details: an email, an address, or a clear Contact page link.
21. Favicon. It's small, but a blank tab icon makes a site look unfinished.
22. No broken links. The automated check samples up to 8 links and counts 404, 410 or 5xx responses. You should check all of them, especially old doctor-profile or "services" pages that were renamed.

5. Conversion (3 checks)

This is where a clinic site turns a visitor into a call or a message.

23. A clear call to action, a button whose text says what to do, such as "Book an appointment" or "Call the clinic". Keep it factual. Medical advertising rules (in India, the National Medical Commission's guidance) mean free offers and discounts for medical services are best avoided.
24. WhatsApp or click-to-call. A wa.me link and a tel: link. On a phone, one tap is the easiest way to get in touch.
25. A short contact form or booking widget (name, phone, message) for people who don't want to call. Ask only for what you need to call back, not medical history.

How to use this list

• Start with what blocks enquiries. If checks 19, 23, 24 and 25 fail, fix them first. They're usually small changes in the header or footer.
• Then fix speed and mobile. They affect every visitor.
• Then fill in the SEO basics. Most are one-line tags in <head>.
• Re-test after each change. The automated score caches a result for up to 6 hours, so the manual checks in the repo are quicker for checking a single fix.

What an automated check can't tell you

A score like this looks at the homepage only, reads public pages only (no login), and doesn't test security in depth. A good score doesn't guarantee rankings, enquiries or patients. It means the basics are in place. And what the site says still has to follow the medical advertising rules that apply to the clinic: no testimonials used for promotion, no outcome promises, no "best" or "No.1" claims.

Try it

• Run all 25 checks on your homepage: chikuos.com/score. It's free and needs no login. It usually takes about 30 seconds, 60 at most.

Originally published on chikuos.com. Drafted with AI assistance and checked against the score tool's code on 26 October 2026. Editorial responsibility: ChikuOS.