The booking system you already pay for is almost always the right one to put on your website. We get asked to add a separate WordPress booking plugin surprisingly often, and the answer is nearly always no. Two calendars means double bookings, and your practitioners will keep working from the practice management system anyway.
So the real decisions are smaller and more practical: do you embed the booking page in your site or link out to it, where do the buttons go, and how do you know whether it’s working? For most practices our answer is to link to your existing system’s booking page from a clear button on every page, and track those clicks in Google Analytics.
Which systems we see on practice websites
Across allied health in the Northern Rivers, the systems we deal with most are Cliniko and Nookal, which are full practice management systems with online booking built in, and HotDoc, which is more common in GP clinics but also used by some allied health and specialist practices.
All three give you a hosted booking page with its own web address. Most also offer a way to embed booking on your own site, usually a snippet of code that displays their booking page inside yours. The exact options, what you can customise and which plan includes what change from time to time, so check your provider’s help centre for the current method before your web designer starts. At the time of writing, late 2026, all three support some form of website booking.
Embed or link: how they compare
| Embedded on your site | Link to the booking page | |
|---|---|---|
| Patient stays on your website | Yes | No, they leave to the provider’s page |
| Looks like your brand | Partly. The booking area still looks like the software | Only as far as the provider lets you customise |
| Works well on phones | Depends on the embed. Some are cramped inside a page | Usually good, since the provider designs for mobile |
| Speed | Can slow the page that holds it | No effect on your site |
| Tracking bookings in Google Analytics | Often limited, because the booking happens inside the provider’s frame | Limited, unless the provider supports tracking |
| Setup effort | More testing needed | Five minutes |
Our default for most practices: link to the booking page, but do it well. Put a clear “Book online” button on every page, open the booking page in the same tab on mobile, and make sure the booking page itself shows your logo and practice name so patients aren’t confused about where they’ve landed.
We embed when there’s a specific reason. For example, a practice that wants a dedicated “Book” page with explanation above the booking widget (which appointment type to choose, what to bring) can benefit from having both on one page. When we embed, we test it on a real phone, not just a resized desktop browser, because embedded booking frames are where most mobile problems hide.
Making it easy on a phone
Most new patients will try to book from their phone, often in the evening. Run this test yourself: from your home page on your phone, how many taps does it take to see an available time for an initial appointment with any practitioner?
Things that make it harder than it needs to be:
- Too many appointment types. If a new patient has to choose between “Initial Consultation”, “Initial Assessment”, “New Patient (Extended)” and “First Visit 45 min”, they’ll guess wrong or give up. Ask your practice software to show new patients two or three clearly named options, and describe them on your website.
- Choosing a practitioner first. Many patients don’t care who they see, they care when. If your system allows “first available”, turn it on.
- Forced account creation. If the system requires a login before booking, see whether that can be switched off for first bookings.
- A booking button hidden in the menu. On mobile, the menu is behind a tap. A sticky button at the bottom of the screen or a button in the header is better.
- Long intake forms before the booking is confirmed. Collect the essentials to book, then send the full intake form afterwards through the practice software.
That last point also matters for privacy. Detailed health questions belong in your practice management system’s secure intake forms, not in a website contact form that emails them to reception in plain text.
Track whether it’s working
If you can’t measure bookings from the website, you can’t tell whether a redesign, an ad campaign or a new service page helped.
At minimum, track clicks on every “Book online” button as an event in Google Analytics 4. That tells you how many people start booking from your site and which pages send them. It won’t tell you how many finish.
To count completed bookings, you need either the booking provider’s own tracking support (some let you add an analytics ID or conversion tracking, some don’t) or a comparison in your practice software. A simple version: ask your software for the number of online bookings by new patients each month and compare it to button clicks. If 100 people click “Book” and 15 book, the problem is on the booking page, not your website.
If you run Google Ads, this matters even more, since you’ll want to know which ads produce bookings rather than clicks. It’s part of what we set up in our digital marketing work.
Common mistakes we fix
Old booking links. Practices change software, and the old booking URL stays in a button on one forgotten page. Search your site for the old provider’s name after any switch.
Booking buttons that go to the contact form. If you offer online booking, every “Book” button should go to booking. Sending people to a form that says “we’ll call you to arrange a time” when they expected to book adds a day of delay.
No information about which appointment to choose. A short paragraph on your booking page saying “New to the practice? Choose Initial Consultation (45 minutes)” prevents most wrong bookings.
No fallback. Online booking doesn’t suit everyone. Keep the phone number beside the booking button for people who’d rather talk, or whose situation is complicated.
Practices where online booking isn’t appropriate. Some services need triage first. For psychology and counselling, for instance, many practices prefer an enquiry or intake call before the first session. We cover that in websites for psychologists and counsellors.
Before you change anything
Write down three numbers from last month: online bookings from new patients, phone bookings from new patients, and website visits. Then make your changes and compare in two months. Booking is one part of a bigger picture covered in what a health practice website needs to do for new patients.
If your current site makes booking harder than it should be, we can sort out the buttons, the embed and the tracking as part of a practice website build or refresh.