More healthcare organizations are rethinking their websites, but should you opt for a refresh or a full rebuild? In this episode, Jenny explores this growing trend and breaks down the key differences. She covers when a refresh is the right choice—especially for improving accessibility, mobile responsiveness, and privacy compliance, including the impact of HHS Section 504 and WCAG 2.1. She also explains when a rebuild is necessary, such as enhancing the patient experience, rebranding, or integrating new technologies. Understanding these distinctions can help your organization align its website strategy with its goals, timeline, and budget.
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Connect with Jenny:
Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
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Hi, friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow and I am your host. And I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We’re a full-service and fully healthcare marketing agency. I am very excited to join you today to chat about websites. It’s really interesting running an agency that works with providers of all sizes across the country to see the trends of inbound requests over the last couple of months.
We have seen a huge number of folks coming to us to chat about redoing their website. We usually get a handful of requests on a regular basis, but the volume has really kicked up. So this is a big trend that we’re seeing right now. Folks have kind of gotten Covid finally and all of the impacts that made to their marketing team kind of in the rearview mirror.
A lot of folks feel like they have a handle on privacy and the shifts that caused over the last two years, and they’re really at a place now where they need to invest to improve their website in order to really jump-start a lot of their other marketing initiatives. In these conversations, there really are two distinct directions you can go with a website redo project.
The first is more of a facelift and the second is a comprehensive rebuild. And I want to walk through the two different directions and the objectives you may be trying to accomplish within your organizations to help you understand which direction may be right for you because you know, regardless, both Hedy & Hopp or any other agency there, or even if you do this in-house, there is a huge cost difference between the two.
And so you certainly don’t want to go down the road of a complete rebuild if really all you’re trying to accomplish is a refresh. So rebuild versus refresh. Let’s get into it. If you’re looking to improve the accessibility of your site, the responsiveness of your site’s mobile responsiveness, or if you have still privacy-related concerns about the technology that your website is using.
And it isn’t an easy thing to fix on its own, then you are looking probably for a refresh. The big difference here is you’re looking to move the existing content over to a new, better platform, but you aren’t really looking to change all of the content. You don’t want to create a new patient experience. As far as the, you know, methods of engagement, you aren’t necessarily adding new technologies like a find a doctor or schedule appointment tools.
You really just need to fix some of those core concerns. Now I will say, when you are thinking about accessibility, there are a couple of different things that we need to think about. A big situation that folks are coming to us to talk about is that Health and Human Services is now requiring an accessibility level called WCAG 2.1.
They issued a new regulation, section 504. And it has to be complied by in 2025 or 2026, depending on the size of your organization. I’ll actually link to a one-pager that HHS put out that’s kind of like a cheat sheet about how to comply. But basically, if you’re a healthcare provider, they want to make sure that folks with accessibility readers or any other sort of disability that are trying to access your site, if they need additional accessibility options, they can do that.
So if you’re in health care, this is another thing you need to be thinking about complying with. And if your current website can’t be modified to meet this level of accessibility requirement, this may drive you towards doing a refresh. Also, if you are not on a current platform that is mobile responsive, meaning on a cell phone, folks have a positive experience on your site.
That could be a reason to do a refresh. A huge percentage of folks in healthcare try to find an appointment, on their phone. The last time I looked at this statistic, it was over 50% and it’s just going to keep climbing. So you definitely need to be mobile responsive. The third is privacy. We talk about this all day long.
So I’m not going to go into it in this episode. But if you are unsure about the technology that powers your site or if you are sure because you did an audit, but the technology is so integrated into your current technology that it’s not easy to replace a refresh of your website could fix these three concerns, and it would be much less expensive because you would be moving over the existing site navigation and the site content.
So it’s a pretty easy lift, right? Relative. Nothing for a website radio is, easy. But it would be relatively simpler than doing a rebuild. And a rebuild is where you really step back from your current website and you rethink about the patient experience at a 10,000ft level. You know, what services do we offer? What technology can we integrate and what should the patient journey be on our site in order to maximize their experience?
This means a lot of new content will need to be created. Pages may be consolidated. Pages may be removed. You need to likely look at current site analytics to understand what current content is being leveraged heavily, what site content is getting inbound SEO and AIO traffic, and make sure that you maintain that with the new site build.
But this would be a much more comprehensive project. It would probably take more like eight months, whereas a refresh could take, a lesser amount of time. More like two months, 2 to 3 months. You know, if you’re really just rebuilding a new platform, but moving, just existing content over. So a rebuild is a great, direction forward if you have a brand refresh or a rebrand.
So we’re starting from scratch or really need to, like, make sure that there’s consistency in the visual brand, if you have updated content or want to create a new patient journey by minimizing the number of steps they need to take in order to find what they need, or if you have enhanced patient technology that will help them access care easier.
Whether it’s find a doctor, technology or book now technology. So those are really the three different directions. So again a refresh is great if you’re trying to really fix technical issues on the site. But from a content perspective, you either don’t have the time to do it, or you feel good about where you are and you want to stick with it.
Whereas a rebuild is where you’re willing to throw everything out the window and start from scratch and build a solid foundation, you know, all the way through. So hopefully this was helpful and gives you some terminology and goals as you’re thinking about a website redo project, chatting about it with your leadership team and the rest of the folks in your internal marketing team so you can get aligned on what are our core objectives, how much time and how much budget do we have?
Because these two directions are completely different. Both are great depending on what you need to accomplish. But again, it’s going to be a completely different price point and timeline, whether you do it in-house or if you outsource it to a partner like Hedy & Hopp. Hopefully, this was helpful. If you have any questions or are interested in what else, seeing as far as what technologies folks are integrating into their site in order to make patient experiences better, give us a call.
I’d love to chat with you. You can always reach me at jenny@hedyandhopp.com. And until next time, thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!
