A third of Michigan clinic and med spa websites show their phone number as plain text instead of a link. On a phone that means a visitor has to memorize ten digits, leave your site, open the dialer and type them in. I checked 456 of them: 154 had this problem, and 55 of those had nothing else wrong with their site at all.
What "not tappable" actually means
On your desktop it makes no visible difference. Your number sits there in the header looking exactly the way you want it to.
On a phone, one of two things happens. Either the number is a link and tapping it opens the dialer with your number already filled in — one tap to call you. Or it is plain text, and tapping it does nothing at all. The visitor has to hold ten digits in their head, leave your website, find the phone app, and type them in without a mistake.
Most people do that. Some people don't. The ones who don't were ready to call you thirty seconds ago.
Who this is happening to
This is the part I did not expect. The 154 Michigan businesses with an untappable phone number have a median Google rating of 5.0 and a median of 35 reviews. These are not neglected businesses. They are well-run clinics with happy patients.
And 55 of them — better than a third — had no other fault on the entire site. The site loaded fast, worked on a phone, had no errors, and had a clear way to book. The phone number was the only thing wrong.
Spread across the state: 25 in Lansing, 24 in Detroit, 22 in Grand Rapids, 8 in Troy, 6 each in Dearborn and East Lansing. Med spas most often, then general health clinics and medical practices.
Why it happens to good websites
Nobody chooses this. It is a side effect of how sites get built.
If someone types a phone number into a text box in Squarespace, Wix or a WordPress theme, it is text. It looks correct. It renders correctly. Making it tappable requires knowing that a phone number needs to be a specific kind of link, and most page builders do not do it for you or prompt you to.
So the number goes in, it looks right on the laptop it was typed on, and nobody checks it on a phone — because why would you check something that obviously works?
How to check yours in thirty seconds
Open your website on your phone. Not on your desktop. Find your phone number and tap it.
If the dialer opens with your number in it, you are fine — stop reading. If nothing happens, you have the problem, and so does roughly one in three of your competitors.
Check every place the number appears: the header, the footer, the contact page, and the "call us" text inside any banner. It is common for one to be a link and the others not.
How to fix it
The fix is one line of HTML. A phone number needs to be wrapped in a link that starts with tel:, with the digits and nothing else:
<a href="tel:+15175551234">(517) 555-1234</a>The text between the tags is what visitors see, so it can stay formatted the way you like. The part after tel: is what the phone dials — digits only, no spaces, brackets or dashes, and the country code at the front.
In most site builders this means switching that text block to a link and typing tel:+15175551234 where it asks for a URL. If your builder will not accept it, that is worth knowing about your builder.
Is it worth bothering with?
For a business people find on their phone and then call — which describes almost every med spa, clinic and wellness practice — this is the cheapest fix available. It takes minutes, costs nothing, and there is no downside.
It will not transform your business. It removes one small piece of friction between someone deciding to call you and actually calling you, on the device most of your visitors are holding. That is all it does. But you already paid to get them to the page.
Where the numbers came from
501 Michigan med spas, clinics and wellness businesses sourced from the Google Places API in August 2026. 456 had a reachable website, and each homepage was loaded once at phone width with no login and no interaction. A phone number counted as tappable if it appeared anywhere on the homepage as a tel: link.
This is one of seven faults I checked. The full results are here — the most common problem was not this one, it was JavaScript errors, on 47% of sites.
If you want to know what the audit found for your specific site, ask me. It is your own public homepage and you should know what it does on a phone.
Check your own site
The tappable phone number is one of seven things I check. You can run the whole set on your own homepage in half a minute.
Run the free website check — seven checks on your homepage at phone width, about thirty seconds, no signup and no email required. You get the findings and the fixes on the page.
A tool can only see so much. It cannot tell you whether your booking flow actually completes, whether enquiries reach your inbox, or where customers give up — which is usually where the money is. That is what the free 30-minute Operations Audit is for: I walk your site and your process the way a customer would and tell you what I find, including "you don't need me" when that is the answer. Book it here.
