Medical Practice Website Redesign

During the discovery stage of the project, my research indicated that beyond the inelegant design, the website was saturated with poor construction – including massive image files (some up to 8mb), tons of unnecessary code, and a confusing navigation structure that was loaded with broken links. The home page had a catastrophic load time of 4.8 seconds, likely contributing to the 72% bounce rate. The website was also not truly responsive and mobile friendly; internal code was rendering out a specific view for desktop, and an entirely different view for mobile. Upon conclusion of my initial assessment, I told the client that I wouldn’t be able to fix their imminent problems in Wix and would instead guide them through a complete rebuild.

The original designs, in terms of art and aesthetics, were a bit symptomatic of the business owners’ generation – the logo leaned heavily on a Time New Roman style font and clipart literally ripped out of a Microsoft library. I offered the clients a logo redesign with a few different options as well as a fresh, more professional color palette. One of my main concerns was performance – thus, I compressed all files as much as possible, reduced image sizes and resource calls, and managed to reduce the average page load time from 4.8 seconds to 1.7 seconds. Another major concern was the practice’s absence from page one of Google when searching their own name. Starting from the basics of applying proper meta data, I researched and wrote relevant SEO copy that the owners would review and approve. To finish off my SEO revitalization efforts, I added a number of location-specific and service-specific pages designed to cater to targeted long-tail keywords.

The new Coastal Pulmonary Care website launched after three dedicated weeks of intense analysis, brainstorming, and coding. A 4-month post-launch review detailed incredible success and impact. The implementation of clean and clear navigation, paired with constant access to an intuitive contact form and the new appointment booking form/system fostered an experience that led to a monumental 281% increase in sitewide conversions. New SEO content and pages helped to boost organic visits by 312%. Smoother content and intuitive design reduced bounce rate by 33%, and genuinely useful content and the appointment booking system worked in increasing average user time on page by 210%. Now, it is important to note that the original website was little more than the digital equivalent of a paperweight, but the new digital experience has changed Coastal Pulmonary Care’s website from being merely a digital brochure into a powerful patient acquisition tool.