Healthcare Website Redesign Guide

3. Audit your website content

An audit gives you a clear picture of what is and isn’t working about your overall website (and individual URLs). This sets you up for the rest of your hospital website redesign. You’ll know exactly what to do with each URL and which new pages to create.

How to do it:

• Look at the data: Use Google Analytics, Semrush, Ahrefs, or the platform that’s hooked up to your CMS. Learn where users are coming from, which keywords are pulling traffic, and how pages are performing when it comes to engagement and conversion.
• Take inventory of your content: The larger your website, the more likely it has outdated or duplicate information hiding under the surface. List your existing URLs to see what you have.
• Look for content and keyword gaps: What information is your website missing? Where can you expand your topical authority?
• Assess your website structure: After years of adding service lines or products, it’s easy for your site structure to get a little wonky. Sometimes new pages don’t fit neatly into categories, and you don’t have the option to create new subfolders right away. Determine if your website is easy to navigate. To start, ask patient-facing stakeholders if patients ever share feedback about it.
• Run a qualitative audit: Identify content that’s outdated, redundant, or not aligned with your brand or business strategy.

How to decide what to do with each URL

Every URL requires a decision: Are you going to keep the page as-is? Sunset it? Rewrite it? Merge it with another?

You don’t have to rewrite every page. Use what you have to the fullest without carrying over content that’s inaccurate or provides a poor user experience.

Our criteria:

• Keep: The content is accurate, meets brand standards, and follows best practices. (Woohoo!)
• Rewrite: The content doesn’t meet the standards above or doesn’t fit the new page template easily.
• Merge: The page contains duplicate content or competes with other pages on the same topic (either on a single website or across multiple sites).
• Sunset: The content is outdated, thin, or doesn’t serve your audience.

4. Create the new sitemap

Your sitemap organizes your webpages and maps out the structure of your healthcare website. It tells you what pages will exist on your new site, where they will live, and how they will connect. See an example of a sitemap for a health system’s website:

5. Build your new website strategy

Use your audit findings to inform your strategy for your healthcare website redesign. Don’t let it live in your head — build a governance playbook with your content team for future reference. Define and document:

• Your page types and each page’s goals
• Content outlines for each page type
• Your sitewide SEO and GEO strategy
• Standards for navigational cues, such as CTAs and navigation bars
• Your internal nomenclature (What constitutes a program vs. clinic page?)
• User journeys and forward pathways

Working on your healthcare website strategy? Read this to future-proof your approach to search optimization: The CRISP Framework: How to Prepare Your Content for Agentic AI

Key questions to answer for healthcare website mergers

If your organization is going through a merger or acquisition, your website won’t be the only marketing channel impacted by the shift. Zoom out and document the broader strategy:

• Who are we now? What’s the enterprise brand identity? Has your audience shifted? Do you have a new voice or new differentiators?
• Which channels need merging? Think beyond the website. How are you approaching social platforms — are regional hospitals keeping their own profiles? Are you consolidating blogs or email newsletters? What about any microsites or apps?
• What happens to merged channels? Do you have a plan for the domain(s) and social profile(s) that will no longer be used?
• What operational challenges would affect the redesign? Knowing as much as possible about location pages, operations, and provider profiles will help you think through your merger.
• How will you communicate this transition to your audience? What information does your audience need about the merger or acquisition, and how will you deliver it? Do you need a cohesive messaging campaign?

6. Run a roadshow to earn stakeholder buy-in

A roadshow is a walk-through of your strategy. It’s where you “sell” the vision to stakeholders (including clinical leaders, department heads, and execs), answer questions, and shut down any drama that could crop up.

During the roadshow, you’ll cover things like:

• The website’s new look: Discuss how the new site will look and how the healthcare website redesign will benefit patients, referring providers, and other audiences.
• Where content is going: Explain why certain content is going away. Bring the data to support your decisions.
• Stakeholder involvement: Share how you’ll include stakeholders in the process and explain their role — to factually approve the content, not weigh in on design.

Your content agency can help you present the new strategy. Sometimes things land differently when coming from a third party who can say, “This is what we’re seeing in the competitive landscape.”

Why share the website redesign strategy with stakeholders?

People don’t like change. After launching the new website, your stakeholders might have a strong reaction to it simply because it’s different. Structuring their service line in a new way could cause them to come back and say, “I hate the new website.” (We see this a lot.)

Navigating internal politics is one of the trickiest parts of the medical website redesign process. Stakeholder opinions can’t run the show, but they do matter. Looping in stakeholders early to explain the “why” behind big changes makes them more receptive.

7. Prioritize your content next steps

It’s great when you have the budget and time to rewrite every page that needs an update before your healthcare website merger or migration. This rarely happens. What’s more likely is that some pages will become a “Do Later.”

How to decide which URLs to prioritize:

• Start with priority service lines or products: What’s your health system or company known for? What is it best at? Which procedures or products drive the most revenue? Which have the largest growth goals?
• Look to the middle and bottom of the funnel: Strengthen your conversion drivers. For hospitals, they’re your treatment, procedure, and program pages. For B2B healthcare brands, they’re your product and service pages, case studies, comparison pages, and pricing content.
• Use the decision triangle: Every content decision should balance data, internal politics, and common sense. Understand what stakeholders need and want, bring data to balance out opinions, then gut-check with common sense. (Will this content truly help your audience?)

8. Rewrite your healthcare website content

This step can feel like a steep climb. If you’re building a healthcare enterprise website or merging 2 sites, you may need to rewrite hundreds of pages.

But everything you put into place leading up to this step will help streamline it — from choosing an agency with a proven process for healthcare website redesign projects to creating page templates and governance ahead of time.

9. Build and QA the website

After laying the groundwork, you’re ready to hand your content to your healthcare website design agency. To work more efficiently, deliver batches of pages for them to work on as the writing gets finalized.

Run quality assurance before launch:

• Test the website in the staging environment on both web and mobile.
• Search for broken links, typos, videos that won’t load, and missing metadata.
• Double-check redirects.

10. Post-launch: monitor, optimize, and maintain the content

You did it! Sit back and marvel at your new website. And then get up again because the job is not done.

Your post-launch checklist:

• Monitor performance: Use your analytics platform(s) to track conversions, engagement, traffic, and rankings.
• Gather feedback: Don’t just ask stakeholders. Set up on-site surveys to learn what users think about your website and where there might be friction.
• Set up heatmaps: These show you how people interact with your website to guide further improvement.
• Optimize: Regularly update content based on what you learn.

Need help with your healthcare website redesign or merger?

This is a long road, and there will be bumps. Things will come up that you can’t plan for unless you know where things go wrong. We have the experience to know what to look out for.

And we know what you need from a vendor:

• Need 1,000 pages written within 6 months? No problem — we’ve done it.
• Need your agency to handle their own? We schedule all of our interviews, QA every page, and make it easy to track each step, so you always know where we’re at.
• Need a nimble team that can pivot when page templates change mid-project? It happens — we’ll reformat it all and make sure nothing slips through.
• Need a partner who will tell you when something doesn’t align with your goals? That’s us.

We’ll help you make the right moves for your hospital, health system, medtech, or healthtech website — so you get the results that make this demanding process worth it. If you’re redesigning your website soon, learn how we can help.