Immunize.org: A Website Redesign to Drive a Million Monthly Views

In 2020, "Coronavirus" was the most popular search word and news item in Google search rankings. Hundreds of millions were looking for information about the pandemic online and following the vaccine development updates. 

During this timeline, Immmunize.org and VaccineInformation.org became the lifeline for healthcare professionals, patients and people of all ages to receive accurate and factual information about disease prevention and immunization. Immunize.org is a nonprofit supported by educational grants, donations and partnerships with like-minded organizations, such as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

Overwhelmed by the growing public demand for information, Immunize turned to Pantheon’s strategic partner Proven with the goal of enhancing online presence and increasing access to critical health updates. The Proven team identified three critical opportunities for improvement: website hosting, user experience and search engine optimization (SEO).

“Immunize is seen as a bridge between CDC and the public,” said Chintan Parikh, CEO at Proven. “Especially post-COVID, people would turn to Immunize for trustworthy guidelines and condensed information. So, Immunize began working with Proven to redesign the site and help people find the right content quickly and easily.”

Proven recommended the Pantheon platform to the healthcare nonprofit to ensure enterprise-grade security, scalability and performance. Proven appreciates Pantheon’s developer tools, especially the Autopilot feature that makes version control easy to manage.

Site Structure and Search Function Overhaul 

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Immunize.org runs on WordPress and has almost 3,000 pages. The content ranges from clinical resources and official guidance to expert advice and newsletters. For example, the Ask the Experts section has 1,400 questions on various medical issues and is one of the most popular destinations for healthcare professionals. Finding the answers by keyword only was no easy task.

Hosted on GoDaddy, the old site was clunky and overwhelming. The search function was lagging and slowing user browsing. PDF downloads – some of the most important markers of the website's success – were often impacted by the site’s lackluster performance.

The Proven team started with stakeholder interviews and a digital landscape audit. They provided the information architecture strategy and development to ensure crucial information would be scalable in accessibility in the future. The team restructured content into clearly defined categories, created new navigation labels and optimized the website for mobile. 

By introducing Pantheon, Proven was able to leverage a robust search functionality so it became easier for users to find answers. Proven chose an open-source search server with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, offering full-text search, real-time or batch indexing, facets, integration with WordPress, and it can handle document search.

Proven’s UX plan implemented a flexible solution that involved detailed taxonomy on the backend to produce easy search experiences on the front end.  They developed 25 custom post types with detailed filters to ensure content searchability. Users can now search fast by using intuitive filtering by disease, age, content type, vaccine and topics.

Traffic and Downloads Grow Twofold

The content migration took some time because the differences in structure between the old and new sites made it difficult to rely solely on automated migration tools. However, the results were worth waiting for. 

In one month post-launch, the Immunize.org traffic almost doubled to more than a million views compared to the same period a year before. Downloads went up by 45%. Google’s First Contentful Paint was at 0.5 seconds, a measure of good user experience. Largest Contentful Paint, a metric responsible for page load speed, was at less than a second, indicating an excellent performance score.

The overhauled site structure, a new homepage and enhanced content navigation gave a massive boost to Immunize’s SEO performance. Measured by Semrush, the site’s health score improved by 48% two months after the launch. 

The cherry on top was a boost in user satisfaction. Immunize.org saw a 13.4% increase in the Net Promoter Score, a measure of customer satisfaction.