4 Critical Areas to Audit When Evaluating Your Health Organization’s Website 

Multi-location health and wellness organizations face challenges other businesses simply don’t encounter. Your website needs to drive consistent growth in patient acquisitions while maintaining a cohesive look with consistent functionality across every location. 

It also needs to provide an inclusive, accessible experience while navigating HIPAA compliance requirements. Plus, you need to stay current with every security update because your patient data is a prime target for cyberattackers.

With so much emphasis put on your website(s), where do you start when critical issues arise like drops in organic traffic or unexpected security alerts? You may have suspicions about your site’s load times or other details in your analytics reports, but you need to ensure any next steps will bring you closer to your goals.

At times like these, expert guidance about the challenges you face provides a way to comprehensively examine your needs and set priorities for what’s next. Whether you’re looking to verify your suspicions or expand on the improvements already on your radar, a systematic audit transforms creates an actionable roadmap for growth.

The interconnected reality of digital performance

The critical components of your digital marketing platform don’t operate independently. Google factors your website’s real-world user experience into its rankings using a set of metrics called Core Web Vitals. Google uses these metrics to offer high rankings to websites that demonstrate excellence across security, accessibility, performance, and user experience. 

When you make changes to your website’s backend in a way that improves page loading times, you also boost your SEO rankings. Websites that comply with accessibility standards offer a more inclusive user experience and rank higher as well.

The interconnected nature of these best practices explains why addressing issues in isolation is less effective than a comprehensive approach. If you want to optimize correctly for search engine performance, you have to also address your website’s accessibility, user experience, and security.

How to audit the four pillars of your digital presence

Understanding where your website stands across these interconnected areas requires experienced evaluation that goes beyond surface-level observations. When you work with GLIDE, you gain a strategic framework that either validates your instincts about what your website needs or clarifies your next priorities

Security Audit: protecting your most valuable asset

Health and wellness are inviting targets for cyberattackers. Unlike credit card numbers that can be quickly canceled, medical records contain permanent details about patient identities, treatments, and conditions. 

Our Audit Includes:

• Hosting and security configuration to identify vulnerabilities in your infrastructure.
• User management ensures proper authentication processes, password policies, and access control.
• Malware and threat detection scanning your website for phishing risks and unauthorized access attempts.
• SSL/TLS encryption standards verifying data protection compliance with GDPR, CCPA and PCI DSS.

When your website is compromised, Google responds with bright red warning banners that appear before visitors access your site. Email providers blacklist compromised domains, and search engines drop hacked sites from results, wiping out months of SEO investment. Outdated security, weak authentication, and other vulnerabilities expose your health organization to downtime as well as significant financial risk and reputational damage. 

Our comprehensive security report provides your organization with a detailed risk assessment covering infrastructure, access controls, and vulnerabilities. Plus, you’ll gain actionable recommendations to fortify your website’s defenses before problems impact your patients.

SEO Audit: ensuring patients can find you

Poor SEO creates an invisible barrier between your organization and its goals. Many organizations like yours recognize their search visibility needs improvement but struggle knowing where to start optimizing your website for ranking and conversions.

Our audit reveals technical errors, content gaps, and missed opportunities to ensure your site attracts, engages, and converts your target audience. 

Our SEO Audit Incorporates:

• Technical analysis to ensure search engines can crawl and index your site while also assessing site architecture and Core Web Vitals.
• On-page evaluation to review title tags, meta descriptions, internal linking, and content hierarchy.
• Content and keyword strategy involving competitive analysis, keyword research, and content recommendations.
• Authority building by identifying toxic backlinks and growth opportunities for off-page SEO through quality link-building.
• Tracking & analytics to ensure accurate reporting for traffic and conversions.

The SEO landscape continues to evolve. Search algorithms consider your holistic brand presence across all digital touchpoints, including social media mentions and PR coverage. To be effective, your SEO strategy must integrate with your broader marketing efforts to support users arriving from email campaigns, social media, and other channels.

Our report delivers a deep dive into your site’s SEO health with recommendations to resolve issues and boost performance. Rather than tackling everything simultaneously, our process prioritizes pages closest to top search positions with low keyword difficulty and high search volume to deliver quick wins to your organization.

Accessibility Audit: expanding your patient base while reducing legal risk

Accessibility isn’t just about compliance; it directly impacts your ability to serve your community. An inaccessible website can lead to lost patients, legal risk, and damage to your brand reputation.

Organizations receiving government funding are legally required to comply with WCAG AA accessibility standards. However, even private practices benefit from accessibility improvements because they enhance user experience for all website visitors.

Our Audit Includes:

• WCAG compliance review to ensure your site meets industry standards.
• Manual and automated testing to identify accessibility barriers with human and AI-driven analysis.
• Assistive technology testing to assess compatibility with screen readers, keyboard navigation, and other tools.
• Alt text and content structuring to improve readability for users with visual impairments or other disabilities. 

Accessibility considerations must be integrated from the beginning of any design process, not retrofitted later. Our audit report provides a detailed analysis of compliance issues with a remediation roadmap to address key gaps in your website’s accessibility.

UX & Quality Assurance Audit: converting visitors to patients

Even the best-designed sites can suffer from hidden technical issues, usability flaws, and tracking errors that negatively impact performance. Our QA audit identifies the issues standing  between your organization and a reliable, high-performing website that drives results.

Our QA Audit Includes:

• Functional testing to check for broken links, navigation issues, and form failures.
• Cross-browser and device compatibility to verify seamless performance across all platforms.
• Performance optimization that identifies your website’s slow-loading pages and any Core Web Vitals issues.
• Security and compliance checks verifying SSL certification and accessibility compliance.

The audit ensures critical website functionality like appointment booking systems, form submissions, and other interactive elements function as intended across desktop, mobile, and tablet devices. Our report provides a detailed analysis of issues with priority recommendations for immediate and long-term improvements that deliver engagement and engagement from your users. 

The Continuous Improvement advantage

Staying competitive in the health and wellness sector requires ongoing attention in our rapidly evolving technological landscape. Algorithm changes, security threats, and accessibility standards continue advancing, making one-time fixes insufficient for sustained success.

Continuous improvement provides a way to identify issues before they impact current prospective patients. It supports your broader marketing efforts across all channels and adapts to emerging technologies and changing user behaviors.

For WordPress sites, ongoing maintenance becomes particularly crucial. Theme updates, plugin management, and security patches require continuous attention to avoid a decline in website performance and potential security vulnerabilities.

Your health organization’s digital presence requires the same attention and maintenance that you offer patients. Whether you’re concerned about security vulnerabilities, poor search visibility, compliance requirements, or conversion performance, a strategic audit approach provides the clarity and roadmap needed to transform your digital presence into a competitive advantage.

Does this sound like the kind of proactive approach to website improvements that will help your organization reach its goals?

Get in touch with your most pressing challenges here and we’ll get started.