What must an Indian clinic website have, so patients, Google and AI answers trust it?

Most clinic websites are built to look good. Fewer are built to survive a check: does a patient believe this is a real, registered doctor? Does Google see the same address everywhere? Does an AI answer have a safe fact to repeat? The list below comes from what the rules actually say, not from generic web-design advice.

What must every page show about the doctor?

Start with the two facts a patient (and a regulator) will look for first: who is treating them, and are they really registered to do it.

In practice: put the doctor's full name, the registration number and only real, recognised qualifications somewhere a patient does not have to hunt for, ideally the header or an About section, not buried three clicks in. Unrecognised titles or honorary letters after the name are what reg. 1.4.2 rules out, however impressive they look on a signboard.

Do you have to publish your fees?

You are not just allowed to. Reg. 3.7.1 requires a physician to clearly display fees and other charges on the board of the chamber or the hospital visited. Several states also require clinical establishments to display a rate list for services and facilities, in the local language and in English, under their own clinical establishment rules; check what applies where you practice.

A website is not a substitute for that physical board, but showing the same consultation fee and common procedure charges online does two useful things: it saves your front desk repeating the same numbers on the phone all day, and it gives a patient one less reason to call three clinics before deciding whom to visit.

Does your website have to match your Google profile?

Nothing in NMC's rules requires this. Google's own guidelines for representing a business do, and so does the plain fact that ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overview build their answers about your clinic from whichever pages mention you, your website included, as our guide to AI answers for clinics covers in more depth.

If you haven't set up or claimed your Google Business Profile yet, our guide to Google Business Profile for doctors walks through it step by step. Get that page right first, then make your website say the same thing.

There is also a second, quieter way AI tools read your website: a block of code called schema markup that states your clinic's name, address, phone number and services in a format built to be parsed directly, instead of guessed from paragraphs. Our guide to schema markup and AI answers covers what to add and how to check it is working.

Do you need WhatsApp and call buttons?

Yes, and they need to work on a phone with one tap, not a contact form a patient has to fill in and wait on. Most enquiries to a clinic website now happen on a phone, often from someone in some discomfort who wants an answer today, not a callback tomorrow.

• A WhatsApp button that opens a chat directly, not a page that only shows a number to copy.
• A call button that dials on tap, placed near the top of every page, not only on a Contact page.
• Both visible without scrolling on a phone screen, since that is genuinely where most of this traffic comes from.

How fast does the site need to load on a phone?

Google measures this with three Core Web Vitals, and publishes what counts as a good result: the largest piece of content should appear within 2.5 seconds, the page should respond to a tap within 200 milliseconds, and the layout should not visibly jump around as it loads.

The most common reason a clinic site misses this is large, uncompressed photos of the clinic or the doctor sitting at full camera resolution on the homepage. Resizing and compressing images before they go on the page fixes most of the problem without touching anything else.

What does a privacy notice need to say?

A clinic website that collects a patient's name, phone number or health details through a booking or contact form is processing personal data under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. Before or alongside asking for that, the Act requires a notice.

This does not need to be a long legal document. A short paragraph linked from your booking form, covering those four points in plain language, does the job. Our longer explainer on the DPDP Act for clinics covers consent, WhatsApp chats and data breaches in more depth once it is published; this page only covers what belongs on the website itself. Not legal advice.

Does the website need to be accessible to patients with disabilities?

Partly settled, partly not, and worth doing anyway because the fixes are cheap. Two separate pieces of central government law touch this, and neither is website-design advice you can find in a generic checklist.

For a solo clinic, whether that definition already reaches you on its own is genuinely unclear; it depends on a specific government notification naming your kind of establishment. The Health Ministry has since removed that doubt for healthcare specifically.

None of this means hiring an accessibility auditor. It means the same handful of habits any web developer already knows: alt text on every image, so a screen reader can still read out your fees and phone number if the photo fails to load; body text large enough to read without zooming; a WhatsApp or call button that a screen reader announces as a link, not a picture of a phone number; and not using colour alone to show which button does what. Not legal advice; no court has yet tested how this notification applies to a single-doctor clinic specifically.

Can you show patient testimonials or before-after photos?

Be careful here, more than most clinic-website advice admits. Reg. 7.17 of the 2002 code bars a doctor from publishing a patient's photograph or case report in an identifiable way without their permission, and self-promotion sits close to the code's restrictions on soliciting patients. Even with a patient's consent, a quote presented as proof of results tends to read as an outcome claim.

The safer trust-builders are the ones this page already covers: a correctly registered doctor, honest fees, and a website that says the same thing everywhere else you are listed. Those hold up under a regulator's reading of the rules in a way a testimonial slider does not.

What does a trustworthy layout actually look like?

Below is a plan, not a design. It shows where each fact from this page belongs on a typical homepage, in an order a patient can scan on a phone in a few seconds.

What's the full checklist?

Print both lists, or keep them open while you go through the site page by page.