URL map and site structure
One page per level of care per location, mapped before a design file opens. This is the single most common thing wrong with treatment center sites and the cheapest thing to fix.
The short answer
Healthcare web design is the build of a provider site around two constraints general web design ignores: search engines hold medical content to a higher standard, and the pages collect protected health information. For a treatment center that means one page per level of care per location so pages stop competing with each other, forms handled by a vendor that will sign a business associate agreement, tracking kept off pages where the visit itself reveals a condition, and WCAG 2.1 accessibility. The conversion is a phone call, so the phone number gets designed first.
2.5s
Google's threshold for a good Largest Contentful Paint
https://web.dev/articles/vitals
typical build timeline for a facility site — confirm with Tim
Kickoff to launch
What it includes
Healthcare Web Design: what it covers
Call-first mobile design
Most admissions searches happen on a phone, often after 9pm. Tap-to-call in the header, in the body, and in the footer, on a tracked number that tells you which page produced the call.
Insurance verification flow
The highest-value form on a treatment center site. Built with a form processor under a signed BAA, delivered into your CRM, never into a plain email inbox.
Program and level-of-care templates
Detox, residential, PHP, IOP, and outpatient each get a page built to rank for its own search and answer the questions that come before a call: who it is for, how long it lasts, what it costs, what insurance you take.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Google's threshold for a good Largest Contentful Paint is 2.5 seconds. The usual reason a facility site misses it is a hero video nobody watches.
Accessibility to WCAG 2.1 AA
Contrast, focus states, alt text, and keyboard navigation. HHS's 2024 Section 1557 rule makes this a regulatory requirement for covered entities, not a preference.
Structure before styling
We map URLs before anything gets designed. Treatment center sites accumulate pages the way a garage accumulates boxes: a detox page, a second detox page written by a previous agency, a blog post about detox, and a location page that also talks about detox. All four compete for the same query, split the authority, and cap each other below the first page. Consolidating them lifts rankings without a single new word.
The navigation follows how families actually search, which is by level of care, by location, and by insurance. Not by your org chart. A site organized around your internal departments makes a family in crisis do translation work they will not do.
Then the templates. Each level of care and each location gets a page built to own one query, with the questions that precede a call answered on the page rather than in a PDF.
Forms, pixels, and PHI
HHS's Office for Civil Rights published guidance on online tracking technologies in December 2022 and revised it in March 2024. The position that matters for you: when a regulated entity's tracking script collects an IP address alongside a visit to a page about a specific health condition, that combination can be protected health information, and disclosing it to a vendor without a business associate agreement is a HIPAA problem.
So the Meta pixel does not go on a page titled 'Do I need medical detox' the way your ads vendor wants it to. The insurance verification form runs through a processor that will sign a BAA, and the submission lands in your CRM rather than in a shared Gmail inbox. The chat widget vendor gets the same review.
Attribution still works. Call tracking and conversion measurement can be done without shipping identifiable health information to an ad platform, but it has to be designed in rather than bolted on by whoever installs the next tag.
Accessibility is now a rule
HHS finalized its Section 1557 rule in 2024 and set WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the standard for the websites and mobile apps of entities that receive federal financial assistance. Compliance dates are staged by entity size. confirm which Section 1557 compliance date applies to this entity — legal review
Separate from the regulation, accessibility failures cost you calls from the people most likely to need you. Low-contrast text on a light background is unreadable to an older parent on a phone in a parking lot, and that parent is your buyer more often than the patient is.
Free audit
Want this looked at on your site?
We audit your rankings, ads, and call tracking, then show you where admissions are leaking. Yours to keep either way.
Prefer the phone? (561) 269-2833
Who we help
Programs we run this for
Drug and alcohol rehab
Fourteen years in behavioral health, all of it spent getting rehab centers on the phone with people who need a bed. We know your competitors, we know which searches produce a call, and we know which ones only produce a report.
Drug and alcohol detox
Somebody decides to stop drinking at 11pm. Whoever comes up in the results and answers the phone gets the admission, and we build the system that does both.
Mental health centers
We market outpatient mental health, PHP, and IOP programs. Different searcher than rehab, different ad rules, same job: make the phone ring and know which dollar made it ring.
Psychiatry practices
We market psychiatry practices, telepsych groups, and med management clinics. The job is filling a named prescriber's calendar with the payer mix you want, and proving which channel did it.
Telepsychiatry providers
There is no office to map, no drive time, no service radius. What you have instead is a licensure map, and the site has to be built on top of it.
Further reading
Written on this in more depth
No gate and no form. These go further than a services page reasonably can.
FAQ
Questions we get asked
Will a redesign hurt our rankings?
It will if the URLs change without a redirect map, which is how most redesign traffic drops happen. We map old to new before launch, keep the pages that are already ranking, and watch Search Console daily for the first month.
WordPress or a custom build?
WordPress, unless there is a specific reason not to. Your marketing coordinator can edit it, the SEO tooling is mature, and you are not locked into us. Custom builds make sense when the site has to talk to an EMR or run a real application, and that is rare for a facility site.
Can we use a chat widget or an AI chatbot?
You can, and it needs the same review as any other vendor touching a page where someone might describe a health condition. Get the BAA before it goes on. Check your call data first: in most facilities the chat widget takes calls away rather than adding conversions.
Do we own the website?
Yes. You own the domain, the hosting account, the code, and the analytics properties. We will not build you a site you cannot take somewhere else, and you should not hire anyone who will.
How many pages does a treatment center site need?
One per level of care, one per location, one per specialized program, plus the insurance, staff, and admissions pages. That is usually somewhere between 20 and 60 pages before any blog content, and thin sites are the most common reason a facility cannot rank locally.
What does a site build cost?
website build price range — confirm with Tim. The variable is page count and whether photography and content are included or supplied by you.
Free audit
Find out where your calls are leaking.
We take apart your rankings, your ads, and your call tracking, then show you where the calls are going instead of to you. The audit is yours to keep whether we work together or not.
Prefer the phone? (561) 269-2833