A redesign that skips the discovery phase is just an expensive refresh. Before we open a design tool, we run every practice through this 32-question checklist across brand, conversion, compliance, and technical readiness. The point of the checklist isn't to slow things down — it's to make sure the pixels you eventually push actually serve a strategy instead of a mood board.
Most redesigns fail for one of three reasons: the practice never defined what a 'good' website means for their goals, the intake and booking flow is designed around internal convenience instead of patient behavior, or the team ships a site that violates HIPAA because tracking was set up on autopilot. Every section below is designed to catch one of those failure modes before it costs you 40k and six months.
01. Brand & positioning
- Who is your ideal patient in one sentence? (age, gender, income, primary concern)
- What are the three competitors your patients compare you to?
- What is the single feeling you want visitors to have in 5 seconds?
- If someone described your practice to a friend in one sentence, what would you want them to say?
- What proof do you have that this positioning is true — reviews, outcomes, credentials?
If you cannot answer these five questions in a shared document that your entire team agrees on, you are not ready to design a homepage — you are ready to run a positioning workshop.
02. Conversion & booking flow
Every extra field on your intake form drops conversion by 4–6%. Every extra click between the hero and the booking action drops conversion by 8–12%. The redesign is the moment to audit every step of the funnel, ruthlessly cut anything non-essential, and instrument the path so you can prove what actually moves the needle after launch.
- How many clicks from homepage to booked appointment today?
- What is your mobile booking conversion rate today?
- How many form fields are required today, and which are actually used?
- What is the primary CTA on your homepage — and is it visible without scrolling on mobile?
- What happens after a form is submitted — is there a confirmation email in under 30 seconds?
03. HIPAA & compliance
HIPAA enforcement around website tracking has escalated dramatically since 2022. If your redesign inherits your current chat widget, form provider, or analytics setup without a compliance review, you are launching a new site with an old liability.
- Are chat widgets configured to strip PHI from logs?
- Do your intake forms send data over an encrypted channel to a HIPAA-compliant destination?
- Have you signed BAAs with every third-party service touching patient data?
- Is your Meta Pixel configured with server-side filtering on any page mentioning conditions?
- Does your session-replay tool mask form fields by default?
04. Technical readiness
The technical section is where most redesigns quietly break. A beautiful site that loads in six seconds on 4G will lose to a plain site that loads in two. A site with broken redirects will lose the rankings you spent two years earning. Handle the boring stuff first.
- Do you have a full inventory of current URLs and their inbound backlinks?
- Do you have a 1-to-1 redirect map from the old site to the new one?
- What is your target LCP, CLS, and INP for launch — and how will you verify?
- Who owns Search Console access, and is the property verified?
- Have you scheduled a staging-site crawl before the DNS cut-over?
Answer every question in this checklist honestly before you draft the first wireframe. The teams that ship redesigns without regret are the teams that treat discovery as a deliverable, not an afterthought. Two weeks of disciplined answers now saves two quarters of rebuilding later.
