A Clinic Website Technical Audit: What to Check Before a Redesign

A redesign usually starts with the design: a new style, new photos, a new home page. But the problems that make a clinic website lose patients are often invisible to the eye: requests that never arrive, doctor pages that are not in Google, a website that takes 8 seconds to open on a phone. If you do not find them before the redesign, the new website will inherit the same problems in a new design. Here is what to check — some of it you can do yourself in an hour.

In plain wordsAn audit is like an examination before an operation. Without it a surgeon may do everything flawlessly, but not where it hurts.

The most expensive fault on a clinic website is a request that did not arrive. The patient booked, saw “Thank you”, and the receptionist received nothing.

How to check yourself: from a phone, on mobile data, book on the website as a patient. Check that the request arrived where it is handled (email, CRM, MIS), how long it took, and whether the email ended up in spam. Repeat it in the evening or at the weekend: that is often when something breaks.

What the developer looks for: whether the request is stored on the website if the email did not arrive; whether the form works without errors on iPhone and Android; whether bot protection blocks it. How booking should ideally work is covered in the article on the website and the MIS.

Patients look for a doctor from a phone. Open PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev), paste the address of the home page and of one doctor’s page, and look at the three Core Web Vitals metrics.

What most often slows clinic websites: photos of doctors and treatment rooms without compression, a heavy theme with libraries the website does not use, and third-party scripts — chat, a booking widget, several analytics counters, embedded maps and videos.

A patient searches not for a “clinic” but for a specific service or doctor. If doctor and service pages are blocked from Google or duplicated, they simply are not in the results.

How to check yourself: type site:yourwebsite.ua and the surname of one of your doctors into Google, and then the name of one service. If the page is not there, that is a question for the developer.

What the developer looks for: an indexing block left over from development (noindex), the sitemap, duplicate pages with parameters, redirect chains, broken links. If the website has moved before, whether redirects from the old addresses were kept. How not to lose rankings during a redesign is covered in our guide to redesigns.

Markup is a behind-the-scenes description of a page from which Google understands that this is a clinic, what its address and opening hours are, and a doctor’s speciality. On schema.org there are the types MedicalClinic, Dentist and Physician for this. For a chain, it matters that each branch has its own page with an address and hours that match its Google Maps profile.

Look at what your analytics shows: only visitors, or bookings by channel. If there are no bookings, you do not know what brings patients and what is just traffic.

Separately, check that analytics and ad pixels do not receive patient data from the form: name, phone, service. Only the “booking” event should go there. Data in forms is covered in the article on consent and the privacy policy.

What the developer checks: versions of WordPress, the theme and plugins; plugins that are no longer supported; HTTPS on every page; whether there are backups, where they are kept and whether anyone has ever restored the website from them. And who has access to the admin area: often accounts of former contractors remain there, plus one shared login for all administrators.

Before a redesign, find out who the domain and hosting are registered to and whether you have access to everything. If the domain is registered to a former contractor, the move can stall right here.

A good audit is not an 80-page report from an automated check. It is a prioritised list of problems: what is losing patients now (booking, speed, indexing), what is risky (security, access) and what can wait. For each item: what to fix and how long it will take.

It depends on the size of the website and what we check: booking and speed alone take hours, a full audit of a chain with several branches and integrations takes days. Ask for a fixed price and a clear result: a prioritised list of problems. What the price of the website itself depends on is covered in the article on clinic website cost.

Often yes: booking, speed, indexing and security can be fixed on the existing website. A redesign is needed when the problem is in the structure itself: there are no doctor and service pages, or the website does not grow with the clinic. How to decide is covered in the article on template and custom websites.

They show the symptoms well: speed, broken links, markup errors. But they will not check whether a request reaches the receptionist or who has access to the admin area.

Before every redesign or move, after major changes to the website and, if the website brings in bookings, at least once a year.

• Booking. A test request from a mobile, a check of delivery and storage, form error logs, bot protection compatibility.
• Speed. Core Web Vitals field data (CrUX) and lab data; image weight, unused CSS and JS, third-party scripts, caching.
• Indexing. robots.txt, noindex, sitemap, canonical, duplicates with parameters, redirect chains and loops, 404s.
• Markup. MedicalClinic or Dentist for the clinic and branches, Physician for doctors; address, hours and phone match the Google profile.
• Analytics. The booking event in GA4 and ad accounts without personal data, a check that form fields do not get into the dataLayer.
• Security. Core, theme and plugin versions, vulnerable and abandoned plugins, user roles, two-factor authentication, backups with a test restore.

We audit clinic websites on WordPress: booking, speed, indexing, analytics, security and access — and give you a prioritised list of problems. After that you can fix the existing website or build a new one, with online booking into your MIS or CRM. Tell us about your clinic: within two working days we send a structure review, an indicative timeline and a price, with no obligation. See our clinic website page.