We scanned 749 med spa websites. Here's what's costing them bookings.

We loaded 749 med spa homepages on a simulated iPhone and measured what a patient sees in the first few seconds. The biggest problem was the Book button: 3 in 10 sites (29.8%) had no Book button on the first phone screen, and 1 in 10 had no visible Book button anywhere on the homepage. Almost a quarter (22.8%) had no tap-to-call phone link, and 37% weighed more than 3 MB.

The sites came from nine metro areas in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee, and we scanned them in early October 2026. Most of the businesses in our list data had strong Google ratings. Their websites are where the trouble starts.

Below are the full numbers, how we measured them, what the scanner can't see, and a 10-minute checklist you can run on your own med spa website today.

The headline numbers

Percentages use the 749 homepages that loaded in our scanner. Twenty more listed websites didn't load at all; we cover those under dead sites below.

The good news is in the bottom rows. Almost every site was responsive, secure and loaded without a server error. The basics of web hosting are solved. What's left is how the page is arranged for someone deciding whether to book.

How we scanned 749 med spa websites

We built a list of independent med spas (no chains, franchises or hospital groups) in nine metro areas, then ran every listed website through the same automated check. Here is exactly what the scanner did, so you can judge the numbers yourself.

• One page, one load. The scanner opened each site's homepage once in headless Chromium, set up as an iPhone: a 390 × 844 pixel screen, an iOS Safari user agent and touch enabled. It waited for the page's load event plus 2.5 seconds, then took its measurements and a phone screenshot. It gave up on any page that hadn't loaded in 45 seconds.
• Book button. It looked for any visible link or button whose text or label contains "book," "schedule," "appointment," "consult" or "reserve," and recorded how far down the page the highest one sits. "First screen" means within the top 844 pixels. A link hidden inside a closed menu doesn't count, because the patient can't see it.
• Tap-to-call. It counted links that start with tel:. A phone number typed as plain text doesn't count, because tapping it does nothing on many sites.
• Page weight. It added up the file sizes the server reported for everything the page downloaded. Streaming video isn't counted, and files sent without a size header count as zero, so these weights probably understate the real download.
• SEO basics. It checked for a title tag, a meta description, at least one H1 and at least one JSON-LD structured data block. It didn't test whether the structured data is valid.
• Weak title. A title was flagged if it was under 20 characters or didn't contain the business's city. One quirk: any title containing the letters "fl" passed, so Florida titles are likely under-flagged.
• Stale copyright. It read the latest year after a © or "copyright" in the page text and flagged 2023 or earlier. Footers stuck on 2024 or 2025 weren't flagged, so this count is conservative.
• Broken images. Images that finished loading but had no pixels, which usually means a dead file.
• Dead sites. Pages that wouldn't load, parked or "reconnect your domain" pages, "coming soon" pages, and pages that returned an HTTP error code.
• Platforms and booking tools. It matched the page's HTML against signatures for 11 website platforms and 16 booking vendors.

We didn't measure Core Web Vitals, PageSpeed or Lighthouse scores, Google Business Profiles, or anything beyond the homepage. More on that in the limitations section.

Problem 1: the Book button isn't on the first phone screen

This is the one we'd fix first. A patient who taps through from Google or Instagram is usually deciding in seconds. If the first screen is a full-height photo, a slideshow or a welcome paragraph, they have to scroll to find out how to book. Some will. Many won't.

223 of 749 homepages (29.8%) had no Book button on the first phone screen. They split into three groups:

• 79 sites (10.5%) had no visible Book button anywhere on the homepage. Some had a "Contact us" link instead. Some had a booking link only inside the menu.
• 94 sites (12.6%) put the first Book button more than two full screens down. On a phone, that is a lot of scrolling past photos and text.
• 50 sites (6.7%) had it one to two screens down. Closer, but still below what most visitors see first.

One pattern stood out. Sites where the scanner found no recognized booking vendor were much more likely to bury the button: 37.3% of them had no Book button on the first screen, against 21.0% of sites with a booking tool linked from the homepage. A site that sends people to a real booking page seems to be built around that button. A site that relies on calls and contact forms often isn't.

Problem 2: the phone number isn't tappable

171 homepages (22.8%) had no tel: link. The phone number was either missing from the homepage or typed as plain text. On a phone, that means the patient has to copy it, switch apps and paste it, or remember it. Some patients would rather call, especially before a first visit or an expensive treatment.

86 sites (11.5%) had both problems: no tap-to-call link and no Book button on the first screen. For those sites, a phone visitor has no one-tap way to become a patient from the top of the page.

The fix is usually a five-minute edit. Wrap the number in a link like <a href="tel:+18135550100">(813) 555-0100</a>, or use your website builder's phone or "click to call" button.

Problem 3: heavy pages on a phone

Half the homepages downloaded less than 2.3 MB. But 278 (37.1%) were over 3 MB and 77 (10.3%) were over 6 MB. The heaviest was about 33 MB. 104 sites (13.9%) loaded at least one image of roughly 1 MB or more, which is almost always an uncompressed photo straight from a camera or a stock site. And 209 sites (27.9%) played video on the homepage, which our weight numbers don't count.

We want to be careful here. Our scanner ran on a fast connection, and the median homepage reached its load event in about 1.3 seconds. Only 8 sites took longer than 8 seconds. So we're not claiming most med spa sites are slow; we didn't measure that properly. What we can say is that a third of them ask a phone on a cellular connection to download a lot more than it needs to. Google uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking (Google's mobile-first indexing documentation), so the phone experience is the one that counts.

The usual causes are a full-width hero image saved at camera resolution, a slideshow that loads every slide up front, Instagram feed widgets, and several web fonts. Compressing the hero image alone often takes a page under 3 MB.

Basic SEO gaps: titles, H1s, meta descriptions and schema

These matter less to a patient already on the page and more to whether the page shows up and gets clicked in Google.

• Weak titles: 320 sites (42.7%). Most of these left out the city. A title like "Home" or just the business name tells Google and the searcher nothing about where you are or what you do. 80 titles (10.7%) were under 20 characters. Google says titles should be "descriptive and concise" and warns against vague ones like "Home" (Google on title links).
• No H1: 148 sites (19.8%). Usually the main headline is styled to look big but isn't marked up as a heading, or the "headline" is text baked into an image.
• No meta description: 146 sites (19.5%). Google builds snippets mostly from page content, but it sometimes uses the meta description when it describes the page better (Google on snippets). Without one, you leave that choice entirely to Google.
• No JSON-LD structured data: 138 sites (18.4%). LocalBusiness structured data tells Google your hours, address and other details in a machine-readable way (Google's LocalBusiness documentation). Many platforms add some automatically, which is why most sites had at least one block. We didn't check whether it was correct.

For how titles, treatment pages and city pages fit into a ranking plan, see our guide to med spa SEO and city pages.

Signs of neglect: stale footers, broken images and dead sites

Patients notice when a site looks unattended. These are the smaller signals, and the one large one.

• Copyright year 2023 or earlier: 60 sites (8.0%). 30 of them showed 2022 or earlier, and the oldest said 2015. On its own a stale footer is cosmetic. It usually means nobody has touched the site in years, and that tends to show up elsewhere: old prices, staff who've left, discontinued treatments.
• Broken images: 43 sites (5.7%). A blank box where a treatment photo should be.
• Dead sites: 40 of 769 (5.2%). About 1 in 20 businesses listed a website that a patient couldn't use.

(One more site failed because of a scripting error on our side, not theirs. We left it out of the 40.)

A dead website is worse than a weak one. Google may still show the link on your Business Profile, so the patient clicks, sees an error and goes to the next result. Check your domain's renewal date and turn on auto-renew. If you've moved to a new domain, update every profile that links to the old one.

Which website platforms med spas use

WordPress ran 43% of the homepages we scanned. The rest were spread across the big website builders.

Squarespace sites in our sample were the most likely to miss both the Book button and tap-to-call: about half did. Webflow sites were the heaviest but always had a tap-to-call link. Duda sites were the leanest and cleanest, but there were only 16 of them.

Don't read this as "switch platforms." Every one of these builders can put a Book button and a tappable phone number on the first screen and serve compressed images. The differences more likely come from popular templates and from who set the site up. The platform with the most problem sites, WordPress, also had plenty of clean ones.

Which booking platforms med spas use

The scanner looked for links or scripts from 16 booking vendors in the homepage HTML. More than half the homepages had none of them.

12 sites linked to more than one vendor, so the vendor rows add up to slightly more than 749.

The vendor list is long and fragmented. That's useful to know if you're choosing one: there is no default med spa booking system, and patients won't expect any particular brand. Pick the one your front desk will keep up to date, then make sure every Book button on your site goes to the right service in it.

Results by region

We scanned nine metro areas. Charlotte includes a few South Carolina suburbs, Rock Hill and Fort Mill.

Percentages use the sites that loaded in each metro. With 71 to 124 sites per metro, a gap of a few points is noise. The bigger gaps are worth a look:

• Nashville and Charlotte had the most homepages missing both basics: over a third had no Book button on the first screen and over a third had no tap-to-call link. Nashville also had the most dead sites (8).
• Atlanta had the heaviest pages: 46% were over 3 MB.
• Tampa Bay was best on tap-to-call (12% missing), and only 1 of its 124 listed sites was dead.
• Southwest Florida had the most homepages with no Book button on the first screen among the Florida metros (37%) and the highest share with no recognized booking vendor (61%).

If you run a med spa in one of the weaker metros, that's an opportunity. When a third of the local competition makes booking hard on a phone, a site that makes it easy stands out.

What the scanner can't see

Automated checks catch layout and code. They miss what's wrong with the content. When we reviewed the phone screenshots of the lowest-scoring sites by hand and then looked at the live pages, the same problems kept showing up:

• Book buttons that go nowhere useful: to a contact page, a 404 or a broken booking URL. The scanner counts these as a Book button.
• Conflicting hours, prices, phone numbers or addresses between the homepage, the footer and inner pages.
• Leftover template text and placeholder content nobody replaced.
• Expired promotions still advertised on the homepage months later.
• Pop-ups and cookie banners that cover most of the phone screen on arrival.
• Social icons that point to the website builder's own social accounts instead of the med spa's.
• Hijacked domains. At least three domains in our hand-reviewed set redirected to gambling or spam pages. Several more had lapsed into parked-domain redirects. Our scanner didn't always flag these as dead, because a spam page can have a title, a heading and a tappable link.

The listing data we collected also had review counts for 557 of these businesses. Their median was 74 Google reviews, with a median rating of 5.0, and the businesses with Book button or tap-to-call problems weren't much different (median 61 reviews, 5.0 stars). We didn't re-check those numbers one by one, but the pattern was clear: these are mostly well-reviewed businesses with websites that don't match their reputation.

How to check your own med spa website in 10 minutes

You don't need our scanner. Here is the same check, by hand, in roughly the order we'd fix things.

1. Open your homepage on your own phone, on cellular data, not Wi-Fi. Don't scroll. Can you see a Book button? Can you tell what you offer and where you are? If not, that's your first fix. (2 minutes)
2. Tap the Book button. Does it open your booking tool, on the right service, in one tap? Try it from your two most popular treatment pages too. A Book button that lands on a contact form or a generic calendar loses people. (2 minutes)
3. Tap your phone number. Your phone should offer to call. If nothing happens, ask whoever manages your site to make it a tel: link, or use the builder's click-to-call button. (30 seconds)
4. Check page weight. On a computer, open your homepage in Chrome, press F12, open the Network tab, turn on the device toolbar and set the screen to 390 × 844, then reload. The bottom bar shows how much the page transferred. Over 3 MB? Find the biggest image files in the list and compress them. Or run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights, which also reports real-user speed data if your site gets enough traffic. (2 minutes)
5. Look at your title and description. Google your business name. Does the blue title link say what you do and the city you're in? Then right-click your homepage, choose "View page source," and search the page for <h1, meta name="description" and application/ld+json. Each should appear at least once. (2 minutes)
6. Scroll to the footer. Is the copyright year current? Do the address, phone and hours match your Google Business Profile exactly? (1 minute)
7. Check your domain renewal. Log in to your domain registrar, confirm the expiry date, and turn on auto-renew with a card that won't expire soon. If you don't know who your registrar is, read our guide on who owns your website, domain and accounts. (30 seconds if you know the login)

If steps 1 to 3 pass, you're ahead of about a third of the med spas we scanned. For the full list of what a booking-focused site needs, from treatment pages to before-and-after rules, see our med spa website design checklist.

Limitations of this study

We'd rather you trust these numbers for the right reasons. Here is what they don't tell you.

• Homepage only. A site might have a perfect treatment page and a weak homepage, or the reverse. Many patients land on inner pages from Google.
• One load per site. We loaded each homepage once. A site that was briefly down, or a pop-up that appears only sometimes, could change the result.
• No speed scores. We didn't run PageSpeed, Lighthouse or Core Web Vitals, and our load times came from a fast connection. Page weight is an approximation from server-reported file sizes and likely runs low.
• Text-based Book button detection. A button that says "Get started" or shows only an icon wasn't counted. A "Book now" link that goes to the wrong place was.
• Heuristic title check. "Weak title" mostly means "no city name," and the Florida quirk means it under-counts there.
• Not a random sample. These are independent med spas we found in nine metro areas of four Southeastern states. We built the list partly to find businesses we might help, so treat the results as a picture of independent med spas in these markets, not of every med spa in the US.
• A snapshot. We scanned in early October 2026. Websites change, and some of these have likely been fixed since.

We publish aggregates only. We won't name or share results for any individual business.

Frequently asked questions