Clinic Website Redesign That Keeps What Already Works

Signs a clinic site needs more than a refresh

Not every tired website needs rebuilding. A new colour scheme and better photos can sometimes do the job. A full redesign makes sense when the problems are structural, for example:

• Patients phone to ask questions the website should answer, such as prices, parking or what a first appointment involves.
• Treatments are buried in long pages or a single "services" list, so none of them can be found on their own in search results.
• Your team cannot update fees, opening hours or staff profiles without paying for help.
• The site is slow on a phone, or parts of it do not work with a keyboard or screen reader.
• Clinicians have left or joined, and their profiles, qualifications and register details are out of date.
• Old pages make claims your clinic would not make today, or promote treatments that the advertising rules do not allow you to promote.

Step one: an audit of the current site

Before suggesting changes, we look at what you have. The audit covers four things:

What is already working

Using your analytics and Search Console data, if you have them, we list the pages that bring in visits and enquiries. Those pages keep their addresses where possible. Where an address has to change, it gets a permanent redirect to the most relevant new page, so neither patients nor search engines hit an error.

What the copy says

We read every treatment page against the CAP Code. Section 12 asks for evidence behind objective health claims^[1], and the ASA's guidance on cosmetic procedures warns against exaggerated claims, including through before and after images^[2]. Any phrase that was never checked against these rules needs a second look. We flag each one with the reason and a suggested rewrite.

How the site handles data

We check what each form collects, where the submissions go, and whether the privacy notice describes it accurately. A notice written for an old contact form may no longer match what a newer booking widget collects. The ICO's guidance on the right to be informed sets out what people should be told when their data is collected^[3].

Accessibility and speed

We test key pages with a keyboard, a screen reader and at 200 per cent zoom, and measure loading on a mid-range phone. The findings are listed in order of how much they affect patients.

Step two: a plan that keeps the good parts

The audit becomes a written plan: which pages stay, which merge, which are new, and which are retired with a redirect. You see the full list of old and new addresses before anything is built. For clinics with a CQC rating, the plan also shows where the rating, the report link and the CQC website address will appear, since the regulations require them on every website the provider maintains that describes its services^[4].

Step three: rebuild and move

The new site is built on a staging address that search engines are told not to index. You and your clinicians review every page there. On launch day we switch the domain, apply the redirects, submit the new sitemap and check that forms deliver to the right inboxes. For the following weeks we watch for errors and broken links and fix them as they appear.

If your current site uses a booking or practice management integration, we test it on staging first. Where the integration is provided by a third party, we coordinate with them before launch day rather than after.

What a redesign does not have to change

You do not have to change your brand, your domain or your booking system to get a better website. Keeping your domain is usually the right choice, because it carries the history search engines associate with your clinic. Changing booking systems at the same time as the website doubles the number of things that can go wrong on launch day, so if both need changing we suggest doing them in separate steps.

How long a redesign takes

We plan for seven to eleven weeks, including the audit. The extra week compared with a new build covers the audit, the redirect map and the content migration. The process page sets out each stage and the decisions you make at each one.

Content to review for retirement

Every redesign is a chance to remove pages that no longer help patients. During the audit we flag four kinds of content for a decision: pages about services the clinic no longer offers, news items that are out of date, duplicate pages that say the same thing in different words, and pages whose claims the advertising rules would not support today. Each flagged page gets a recommendation: keep and improve, merge into another page, or retire with a redirect. You make the final call, and the redirect map records every decision.