Considering a hospital website redesign? As intimidating as these projects can be, they’re well worth the effort when executed correctly.
Revamping your hospital’s website enhances your existing search engine optimization (SEO), funnels more leads to your hospital, and streamlines your patients’ digital journeys. Ultimately, the right redesign improves the overall patient experience from start to finish.
But how do you know when the time is right to revamp your website? We perform regular maintenance on our homes, appliances, vehicles, and even our wardrobes. Does the same logic apply to hospital websites? Actually, yes. Experts agree your website needs an overhaul about every three years.
How to tackle a hospital website redesign
Hospital website redesigns are a massive undertaking with considerable consequences. Understanding the redesign process is the first step to ensuring you get the best possible result. Apply these tips to your next website redesign project to optimize your results and deliver a better experience for your patients.
1. Revisit your mission and vision
What is your hospital’s goal? It’s a simple question, but when you really take the time to consider, the answer might not be so obvious. For the best results, your answer should be as unique as your hospital.
Understanding your hospital’s goals, mission, and vision before redesigning your website provides focus. Your website should deliver a best-in-class user experience and support your SEO strategy. At the same time, you need to clearly communicate your hospital brand. Since your goals, mission, and vision represent a distillation of your brand, every component of your new site should reflect these aims. As the project moves forward, frequently check in to make sure your design is syncing with your mission and vision.
When prospective patients visit your website, they should be able to readily identify what your hospital wants to do, whether you aim to impact the local community, train future leaders in the medical field, or treat rare genetic disorders. Checking in means your hospital branding will be consistent and connecting with your identity will be easy for new patients.
2. Get input
After identifying your focus, the next step is learning how your current website resonates with users. Create questionnaires for internal stakeholders and the general public to gather their thoughts about the existing website and what changes they’d favor.
This data is an ideal resource for learning what, exactly, your audience expects from your website. Understanding and meeting those expectations is necessary for a hospital website redesign to succeed.Surveying those who use your site the most provides helpful keyword insights and content opportunities for the next iteration. Use the first-party data you gather from users to develop an optimized content plan and reach more prospective patients.
3. Evaluate what’s working and what’s holding you back
Regularly monitoring your website’s analytics tools is how you learn more about your site’s performance. Although time-consuming, exploring data page by page ensures you’ll leave no stone unturned as you revamp your website.
Focus on the highest- and lowest-performing pages to find the most impactful insights. Note the metrics of those pages and use them to detect trends you can incorporate (or avoid) on the next version of your hospital’s site.
4. Organize your site
A website is only as good as the internal organization. You could have the best content in the world, but on a disorganized website, there’s a chance users won’t even find it. As you plan the next iteration of your hospital’s website, create a clear structure using a sitemap.
Sitemaps are useful visual representations of every page on your website and show where each page will reside. Take this process a step further by adding schema markup since sites with schema usually rank higher in Google searches than those without.
5. Set a deadline
When undertaking a hospital website redesign or other large marketing project, you must create a timeline. A website has many moving parts, and establishing a timeline organizes the many tasks ahead.
Think of the milestones on the timeline as benchmarks or mini goals you’ll reach on the way to the final product. Create deadlines for each of these milestones in addition to setting a target date for completing the project. Website redesigns are complex projects that don’t happen overnight, so give yourself plenty of time to reach each goal without compromising quality.
Are you ready to start your website redesign? We’re here to help.