Few industries are accelerating faster than healthcare technology. But staying relevant in the fast-evolving health tech industry means delivering a modern customer experience through every touchpoint. And, since your website is an essential part of attracting high-quality leads and directing them down the sales funnel, keeping it up to date should be part of any effective digital health marketing strategy.
Website redesign is par for the course when you scale, evolve your brand message, and refine your solution to match the needs of your market. When done right, a new site can help you deliver an engaging digital experience, drive more targeted traffic, generate converting leads, improve search engine rankings, and offer a modern brand experience that builds trust and confidence.
That being said, redesigning and migrating a website is a complex process, with many nuances to understand and pitfalls to avoid. Luckily, an experienced healthcare website design agency can help you navigate the steps and achieve the best outcomes. Let’s dive into how we help our clients with healthcare website development.
Revamping Your Online Presence: How to Navigate Healthcare Website DesignWe ask Erica Pierce, Creative Director and Spot On Partner, to share firsthand advice about ensuring a smooth and successful website redesign.
The scope of a website redesign project might vary from a complete overhaul to a phased redesign — which we call a “launchpad.” Though the approaches are different, both redesign projects begin with strategic planning to inform the process.
"When we do a launchpad for a client, we update pages in stages, beginning with high-impact pages, such as the home, tour and demo pages, for the first phase," says Pierce. “Along with those high-impact pages, we simultaneously update the branding of the remaining pages to match the new look and feel.”
It’s a win-win for companies who need a cohesive, polished update quickly.
“A launchpad offers a fast way to improve website performance while allowing us to layer in the other pages over time,” Pierce says.
Since a website redesign project could involve different levels of engagement, you should first clarify your expected outcomes and get on the same page to avoid issues down the road. A healthcare website design agency can evaluate your existing website, budget, timeline, and objectives to help you identify the best approach for your business.
All visual elements on your website should share the same design language. That's why we create style tiles to determine the best way to translate your look and feel to the web before starting the design process. The design direction guides how various components will look on the site to ensure a coherent brand experience for your online visitors.
"We establish style tiles to show how the website will come across and how individual components will look," says Pierce. "For example, we determine the treatment for a testimonial section, slider, or call-to-action (CTA) button. We build this kit of parts we later apply to various sections to streamline the healthcare website development process and ensure a consistent user experience."
As exciting as it is to jump into designing each page, don't overlook the importance of this stage.
Web design projects often get delayed because the client team takes a significant amount of time to review and provide feedback or approval. The secret for mitigating this? Limit your approval process to a select person or group.
"Avoid having too many cooks in the kitchen because it can create a lot of confusion, leading to delays and misunderstanding," says Pierce.
When you work with a healthcare website design agency, appoint a primary decision-maker to handle all the feedback and approval. "While you can gather input from others internally, give this person the authority to make final decisions and sign off on deliverables," says Pierce. "Plus, having a single point of contact helps streamline communications."
Making changes after your website is built can be expensive and time-consuming. While it's relatively simple to update certain content components or swap out images, altering the layout, custom code, or core functionalities often requires a substantial amount of work.
"Decide what you want from the outset with clear website strategy, wireframes and design, rather than adding pages and elements after the development phase starts. The changes may require your healthcare website design agency to update the backend structure or integrate different coding languages — adding costs and delaying the timeline," says Pierce.
Redesigning your website gives you opportunities to refine your on-page and off-page SEO strategies. For example, you can add keywords to your content and metadata, improve formatting with header tags and bullets, clean up your code for faster load time, and improve your internal linking structure.
However, it’s perfectly rational to worry about losing your SEO rankings when migrating to a new site. The good news is that you can mitigate this risk with some planning. For example, we help our clients review their analytics to identify pages with significant traffic and maintain the same URLs for the new site to avoid any search engine declines.
"Set up redirects for pages if you're changing their URLs or taking them down. Otherwise, visitors who click on a bookmarked page or a backlink with the old URL will get a 404 error," says Pierce.
Broken links and 404 errors impact the user experience, increase bounce rates, and hurt your site's SEO rankings.
An experienced healthcare website design agency will conduct a thorough quality assurance (QA) review to ensure everything looks and functions as intended. The team also checks any original web pages that may remain to ensure your content is migrated with updated branding and will provide a seamless user experience.
Pierce also recommends archiving the existing website by running a backup and taking screenshots before transitioning to the new one to use as a reference or as a secondary option if you experience errors during the switchover.
Redesigning your healthcare website can help you deliver a modern user experience, improve your online presence, clarify your messaging, boost your SEO, and convert more visitors into leads. A trusted healthcare website design agency helps you navigate this complex process to avoid common mistakes and get the most out of your investment.
Spot On helps healthcare SaaS companies develop and implement their website strategies. We’ll work with you to design a fresh, on-brand website that hones your message and gives customers a clear path to convert. Book a meeting to see how we can help you leverage your website as an effective part of your end-to-end marketing strategy.
