Referrals
The Referral-Readiness Checklist: A 15-Minute Self-Audit for Group Practices
How to use this
Open your practice's website on your phone. Not your laptop. Your phone, because that's where referrers and families actually check you. Walk through the ten items below and give yourself a pass or fail on each. Be strict, because a referrer will be. Fifteen minutes is plenty. One thing to keep in mind before you start: this tests what your site communicates, not how it looks. A plain site that passes all ten will out-refer a beautiful site that fails three.
The ten checks
**1. Current clinician roster.** Is every person listed actually at your practice today, with credentials shown? One departed clinician casts doubt on everything else on the page. **2. Services described the way people search.** "IOP for adolescents" and "anxiety treatment for teens," not just your internal program names. If a school counselor can't match a student's need to your services page in ten seconds, it fails. **3. Insurance and payment clarity.** You don't need a full payer grid. A referrer just needs a rough sense of whether their family can afford you. Silence here reads as expensive and evasive. **4. A contact path that works on a phone.** A short form, or a tappable phone number, ideally both. If the only option is a phone number and your office closes at five, everyone searching in the evening stalls. **5. A stated response expectation.** "We respond within one business day" changes how safe it feels to reach out. An unstated response time reads as never. **6. Load speed on a real phone.** Count the seconds while your homepage loads on cellular data. Past three or so, a real share of visitors are gone before they see anything. **7. Accurate basics everywhere.** Address, hours, and phone consistent across your site, your Google Business Profile, and Psychology Today. Mismatches erode trust and search ranking at the same time. **8. A current date signal.** Footer year, a recent update, a dated announcement. Something that proves a human touched this site recently. **9. Accessibility fundamentals.** Can you read every page comfortably? Are there images of text where real text should be? Can you get through it with a keyboard alone? Behavioral health serves people with disabilities at above-average rates, so this is table stakes, and increasingly a legal exposure. **10. Privacy-conscious forms.** Your contact form should ask for the minimum needed to respond, and should never promise confidentiality that email and web forms can't technically provide.
Scoring
**Eight or more.** Your site is referral-ready. Your job now is maintenance. **Five to seven.** You're losing referrals at the margin, and you almost certainly don't know which ones. **Four or fewer.** Your website is filtering families away from your practice. Fixing it is probably the highest-leverage marketing work available to you this quarter.
Want the graded version?
This checklist is the self-serve version of our free Referral-Readiness Audit. The audit is the same lens applied by a person, in writing, with specifics: what referral sources see, how accessible your site is, how fast it loads on real phones, and whether you're structured to show up in search and AI answers. No sales call.