Your Neighborhood Doctor's Website Loads Faster Than the Hospital System's

Line up a neighborhood dentist's website next to the local hospital system's, and the small practice usually loads first. That is not the matchup most people expect. The hospital has the budget, the IT department, and the vendor contracts; the dentist has a handful of pages. Yet across 158 local medical practices we measured in Google's real-user field data, the small site is the quicker one, and the big system is the one that keeps patients waiting.

For a medical practice, the website is not a brochure. It is where a patient checks whether you take their insurance, reads up on a procedure, and taps to book an appointment. When that page is slow, the patient comparing three clinics at once does not wait. Speed on a practice site is booked appointments, and a slow booking page sends them to the clinic down the street.

The numbers here come from the Chrome User Experience Report, Google's record of how real people actually experience these sites on their own phones rather than a lab estimate, across hundreds of local practices ranking in search in 32 US metros. Two-thirds of them pass Core Web Vitals on mobile, one of the stronger figures of any sector we have measured, and comfortably ahead of the big hospital systems and insurers.

The readings come from the Chrome User Experience Report, which captures loading, responsiveness, and layout stability from real patients opening these sites on their own phones and networks, rather than from a synthetic benchmark. The healthcare sample was built the way a prospective patient encounters the sector in Google: 158 local medical practices, from dentists and dermatologists to family doctors, that appear in the results for service-plus-city queries in 32 US metro areas, alongside a separate national comparison set of large hospital systems and insurers.

This is deliberately a competitive-search set, not a census. It reflects the practices a patient actually sees when they open Google to compare clinics in their neighborhood, which is the set that matters for winning the appointment; it is not an attempt to inventory every medical website on the internet.

Passing Core Web Vitals means an origin clears all three of Google's thresholds simultaneously at the 75th percentile of its mobile visitors: main content painted in under 2.5 seconds (good LCP), interactions that respond in under 200 milliseconds (good INP), and a layout stable enough to score under 0.1 on cumulative shift (good CLS). It is a strict all-three bar, and two-thirds of local practices clear it.

Group the 158 practices together and 66.5% pass Core Web Vitals on mobile. The reason is structural. A practice website has a simple job: explain the services, introduce the providers, list the hours and location, and offer a way to book. On that kind of light, content-first site, responsiveness and stability come almost for free.

It shows in the metric split. Good INP runs 98.6% and good CLS 90.5%, both near the top of any sector we have measured. A few pages of text and a booking link give a phone almost nothing to choke on and nothing that lurches around as it loads. The practice site is quick because it is light, and that lightness carries two of the three metrics on its own.

The single thing keeping the sector from an even higher pass rate is loading. Good LCP is 78.5%, the weakest of the three metrics, and the median practice paints its main content in 1.9 seconds, comfortably inside the good range. The cause is almost always the same: a large hero photo of the office or the team, or a gallery of before-and-after images, loaded at full size before anything else appears.

The spread is wide, and it maps directly to image discipline. The fastest practices are genuinely quick, a dermatology group at 0.7 seconds and a PT clinic and med spa at 0.9 to 1.0 seconds, while the slowest image-heavy sites drag out to 3.7 to 4.4 seconds. That gap is a configuration difference, not a budget one, which is why loading is the single lever worth pulling on a practice site.

Set the local practices against the large hospital systems and insurers and the picture flips. In a separate national healthcare set, less than half of the big brands passed. Kaiser Permanente's site loaded in 7.1 seconds, the clinical reference UpToDate in 6.0, and insurer sites like Aetna and UnitedHealthcare failed on layout shift as their pages jumped during load.

The reason is not that big systems care less. Their busiest web property is usually a patient portal or an insurance login, a heavy application with authentication, scheduling, records, and billing all loaded on the page. A single-location practice carries none of that weight. Healthcare web speed is not a story about big budgets winning; the light local site is the faster one.

Big hospital systems and insurers, measured separately, pass under 50%.

For a local practice this is an encouraging and specific diagnosis. Responsiveness and stability are already near-universal in this sector, at 98.6% good INP and 90.5% good CLS, so a practice sitting in the failing third is almost always losing on loading alone, where the sector reads 78.5% good LCP and a median of 1.9 seconds. The spread shows this is a fixable configuration problem rather than a budget one: the fastest sites here, a dermatology group at 0.7 seconds and a PT clinic and med spa at 0.9 to 1.0 seconds, run the same kind of light site as the slowest, which drag to 3.7 and 4.4 seconds under full-size hero photos and before-and-after galleries. The fix is the standard one. Compress and size the hero images and put the site on faster hosting with caching, then trim any heavy theme or booking-widget code down to what the practice actually uses.

That advantage is worth protecting, because the comparison set shows what happens once a site gets heavy. The big hospital systems and insurers, carrying patient portals and login-gated applications, pass under 50%, with Kaiser Permanente loading in 7.1 seconds and UpToDate in 6.0. The neighborhood practice wins on structural lightness, so the whole job is keeping the images and the hosting in check. A booking page that appears in a second instead of four holds the patient who is comparing three clinics at once, which in this sector is the difference between a full schedule and an empty one.