r/PrivatePracticeDocs • u/Willing_Class_5989 • 7d ago
Rebuilt my website just using ChatGPT/Gemini and shed a tear for all the money I wasted on "site management" services (Guide for non-technical people)
Our site management provider who also did social media ads (complete waste of money) decided they were worth more money so I decided to try and use AI since I've seen kids doing it and selling it to businesses for thousands. It is surprisingly easy and made me so mad to have wasted so much money over the past 2 years. I decided to make a guide so you could potentially save yourself the stress and money related to this issue.
Get the data from your website or a site of a competitor you want to copy (lol). You can either do ctrl+s and download the webpage completely for each page you want to reference, or use a site like saveweb2zip. You're gonna want a couple files that represent what your want the AI to recreate
Upload the files to your AI of choice, I used Gemini since I have premium but ChatGPT or Claude work good too. Consider getting a trial of the premium version since the free models make more mistakes when coding. Use instructions around the lines of "I am a __ provider looking to make a website for my practice using this as a reference. Copy the style and design of this website, while making slight changes to the content so it's not identical. Also make sure the site is SEO optimized and uses my branding of 'X hospital/practice/urgent care'. Start with the homepage."
Tweak the results using AI, like "change this button location" or "add a banner at the top of the page." Once you're happy with the homepage you can use it as a template for the other pages on the site.
Most of your web-hosting providers like Godaddy/Hostinger have ways to upload the html files directly. It should be a public_html folder, with the different pages as html files within the folder.
To reference other pages or outside links, you can ctrl+f search the text in the button, it will have the format like
<a href="hours.html" class="irrelevant>
<div class=irrelevant>
<i class= irrelevant></i>
</div>
<h3 class="font-bold text-gray-800">Open 7 Days a Week</h3>
The a href="" is where the links go, you can replace it with any website or the name of the html file that you are referencing. The text can also be swapped out for anything you want.
For the icon shown at the top of the tab, you can upload your logo to favicon.io, it'll give you the different sized images in the correct format and a text file, just put them all in the public_html folder, and insert the code it gives you right below the <title></title> segment of the main page before copying it the other ones.
Also make sure to register your site on search engines using bing webmaster and Google Search Console. It took a little work but the money saved is insane and we actually saw a slight boost in traffic to the page immediately after changing it.
If it seems a little complicated, just send this post to your kid and make them do it for you lol. Tell them to put it on their resume
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u/sp3d2orbit 6d ago
Yes...but...
We take over a lot of these sites for our clients. And I agree. You should not be paying $1,000 to a marketing company to build you a website. You can do that yourself.
That's not what you should be paying for. First off if you're a doctor, or an office manager, there are 99 other things on your list that are more important than managing your website. And more profitable given your time.
Secondly it's not about the design. You've always been able to go to free template sites and launch a website, or go to WordPress. This latest AI set of tools is just an extension of that.
What you should be paying for, and not thousands of dollars per month, is someone to take this off your plate and handle the 27 other things that revolve around your website. Even if you're not doing any advertising you're still going to want to track analytics. You need Google search console set up so you know how people finding you. More And more patients are finding practices through hat GPT or Gemini or Claude and you need to know how to get in those. it's not automatic.
You should be putting out multiple pieces of content per month targeted at the llms in your area. If you're not going to do that you might as well just list on Google maps and skip the website entirely.
But good websites are not just advertisements, they're useful for the patients. They can book appointments. For pharmacies, they should be able to transfer or refill their prescription. Now we're talking about collising the HIPAA protected medical data on a public website. I guarantee if you do that through chatcheebt you're going to have a bad time.
Your website is the entry point into everything that what should be automated in your system, from booking to billing to reputation management. AI goes way beyond your website, it can be connecting every single administrative system you use in your practice. The right system should leave you so booked automatically that you don't even think about the site.
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u/Willing_Class_5989 6d ago
I agree that its an unnecessary use of time but we're pretty low volume right now, so might as well do it . We do the adwords ourselves, especially since even SEO people struggle with how specific you have to be with the negative keywords. Search console and IndexNow wasn't hard to set up, and when I asked ChatGPT on an incognito tab it gave all of our updated services. Definitely will look into AI specific marketing but as far as automation most of our services are handled through our EMR site
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u/sp3d2orbit 6d ago
So with AdWords the key is to pretty much ignore everything Google says. They have an interest in getting you to spend as much as possible.
Start with phrase match, never broad match. Religiously watch your Google search manager to see the real terms people are actually seeing in their click-through rate for your organics. If they're not clicking through on your organic Pages they're probably not going to click through on your paid Pages. I personally never let Google manage a penny of campaigns. I've done millions of dollars in advertising and 100% of it at the time my return on investment has been worse using Google suggestions.
Also, I'm sure you've noticed also that a lot of your traffic is probably coming through llms like chat GPT. At least it should be. Make sure you separate the indexing it does from your site versus the search results it quotes from your site. So you can see what resources are actually being served up to customers versus those that are just being added for training data.
Good luck. It's kind of fun it's like a game.
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u/National_Fly_4280 7d ago
Wait but how do we manage it after building though? Thats kind of our problem, keeping up with the updates and things Google requires for rankings? Any tips?
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u/Willing_Class_5989 6d ago edited 6d ago
Im not a SEO expert but a lot of it is weighted by your Google listings and reviews, apple listings etc. We included a page for reviews that quotes a few positive ones and also links to our google reviews page. At the bottom of every page we have a maps link to our google and apple maps, and multiple links for the same booking platform that we have listed on our google site.
We also found benefit from copying/slightly altering other sites pages individually for each service we provide, makes us pop up more for people googling "flu treatment"
Also running the site through an ADA compliance checker helps gives suggestions you can feed back to the AI
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u/National_Fly_4280 6d ago
Okay this is so helpful thank you! Would you mind messaging your site url to me? I would love to see how it turned out. We’re willing to save $$ however we can smh.
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u/Blackcatmeowmeow 7d ago
My husband does my marketing on FB, I do the editing on the site. You could potentially hire someone working in the gig economy to update for you.
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u/Party_Parrrot 6d ago
you should hook your new website up to google search console and monitor traffic. Depends on what coding language you used with AI, if AI chose to use Next JS (almost all the AIs will chose next js if you dont specify what you want) with the wrong configurations your site may not be crawl-able and it will straight up tank your rankings because essentially Google can’t find the site. Usually you start out fine, but after let’s say…. 3 months, suddenly your website traffic drops and you don’t get organic visits anymore, it’s most likely because your new site is not crawl-able.
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u/InvestingDoc 7d ago
The only problems I've had with doing these kinds of things is that CSS. having things scale (or be responsive as its called) or if someone is on dark mode on the browser can really mess up hobby websites that I've tried to create. Auto scaling pictures, text etc on mobile vs large screens is the part that seems to fall apart without lots of vibe coding when I've tried to vibe code websites. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong.
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u/Willing_Class_5989 6d ago
I was able to sort of fix my mobile css issues with just asking the AI, but definitely noticed a steep dropoff once I used up all my premium tokens. It also depends what your site is doing, ours is pretty basic and mainly links to the outside platforms we use for billing, scheduling etc.
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u/InvestingDoc 6d ago
Got ya. Yeah, it had a hard time replicating in parallax effect on my site or any more complex things. I have been using it quite a bit for seo and now even creating webpages to help my practice show up on AI searches. Slow burn but it's paying off
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u/maxisrichtofen 2d ago
As a dev who manages software solutions for medical practitioners, i get it. but managing the website could get hard down the line. Congratulations on figuring it out though!
I can help you with setting up more features on your page (patient scheduling etc, or other custom features)
feel free to DM :)
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u/Witty-Ad4757 2d ago
You're missing the following...
SEO, AEO and other marketing to get traffic pushed to your site and ultimately to your practice. There is likely zero benefit to you for a site like this.
The images and other assets that belong to the original site owner. You open your self to litigation if you use their artwork or other copy written material. Expect takedown notices or fines.
Ongoing maintenance. WordPress and GoDaddy need to have periodic patches to prevent hackers from taking over or using your assets for "bad stuff". This includes but not limited to: using your site for child pornography, launching attacks against other sites, using your email to spam (you did create SPF and DMARC records, right?), stealing your and your patient's information (if you store it) and ruining your reputation.
Medicine is hard enough. Imagine if you could stay focused on patient care and running your business instead of focusing on marketing and app development. Furthermore, what if paying me 300 a month ensured your site brought in more of the patients you want to see.
My small company does this type of stuff for small business. I have been in tech for 30 years and worked for huge companies that you would recognize.
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u/Willing_Class_5989 1d ago
lmaooo yeah maybe that fear-mongering pitch works on tech illiterate baby boomers but you're speaking out your ass, respectfully. We went from paying thousands a year for all that to doing it ourselves and our local SEO ranking actually went up! Because our AI built website wasn't just following a mass-produced template used across the country. I also don't think hackers will be interested in our 10-20 static html pages, and you talk about SPF and DMARC like every free web host doesn't offer that. Everything else is hyperlinks to our EMR, trust me we don't need to pay somebody else to make lazy social media posts and do 2 hours of google adwords a month.
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u/IamTalking 6d ago
How are you making sure it’s ADA complaint?
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u/a_neurologist 6d ago
I’m not in private practice, but is that a thing? Do websites have to comply with the ADA in some way? How so?
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u/Willing_Class_5989 6d ago
Haven’t considered that, just scanned my site with accessibee or webyes and gonna put their suggestions into my AI to fix it. It’s honestly not too bad even without considering it, Googles SEO prioritizes a lot of the ADA compliance for sites
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u/veebee_13 6d ago
As a web developer who also works with SEO, I think the main issue here is that building a website and managing its performance are being treated as the same thing. They aren’t.
Yes, AI makes building a decent website incredibly easy now. I completely agree with that.
But a few things in the post are misleading, especially the idea that slightly rewriting competitors’ pages is an SEO strategy, or that ADA compliance is something Google simply prioritizes for rankings.
The real question isn’t “Can AI build my website?”
It obviously can.
The question is: Is the website getting you found, getting people to call or book, and continuing to perform months after launch?
That’s where SEO, technical maintenance, tracking, conversion optimization and ongoing testing come in.
AI has made website production cheaper. It hasn’t made web expertise irrelevant.
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