Best-in-Class Digital Experience for Orthopedic Patients on WordPress Multisite
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Spire Orthopedic Partners had to make a strategic investment. A rapidly expanding network of orthopedic practices, Spire needed to modernize their online presence to reflect their commitment to high-quality patient care. With each new practice acquisition, Spire’s web presence was getting harder to manage.
Spire partnered with Modea, a digital consultancy specializing in patient-facing web experiences for healthcare organizations, to help build a robust, flexible website solution.
Most independent physician practices have very basic websites. We wanted to design one best-in-class website that could be tailored to reflect Spire’s unique brands and offerings. If we had a unified website platform, each Spire practice could retain its brand equity, and we would have one centralized backend for ease of maintenance and future growth.”
- Nicole Monsky, CMO at Spire
Here’s a Lighthouse snapshot of the new website platform performance:
- Accessibility: 92 and above
- SEO: 99 and above
- Best practices: 96 and above
These web improvements led to an important patient engagement marker: a 25% increase and more in online bookings. Read on for the details.
Why Pantheon: Support and Compliance
Spire’s challenge was twofold: First, they needed to create a unified platform for simplified management and customization of each practice's site. Second, they required a hosting solution to meet stringent security and compliance standards, while offering reliability and customer support to minimize any risk of website downtime.
Modea recommended Pantheon as Spire’s new website platform due to its reputation for robust support and its ability to ensure compliance — key concerns for healthcare websites.
Our goal at the end of the project was to enable the client to build new landing pages and spin up environments without needing third-party assistance. Pantheon’s robust support and the Managed Updates solution meant that highly technical CMS updates would not be a burden for Spire’s marketing team.”
- Mohamed Gaily, Senior Software Engineer at Modea
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The Nuts and Bolts of Migrating a Multisite
While Modea was building the new websites on Pantheon, the orthopedic practices kept running on WP Engine.
Modea built three different types of sites - six practice sites using the same template, the main corporate site, and a few ambulatory surgery sites, also using one template. The Multisite structure was ideal because the sites shared many similarities in components, templates, and the need to aggregate data across sites, which was easier with a shared database.
For practice sites, Modea created a new site in the Multisite using the same template and migrated data in a cookie-cutter fashion. They used the default Twenty Twenty-Four theme as a base and added custom styling.
Content migration involved a lot of manual work, along with using the WP All Import plugin, because the new templates required restructuring the content. There were hundreds of pieces of content, such as articles and provider profiles, to migrate for each site. Spire led their own content audit to decide what content to keep or discard.
For Gaily, Spire was the first project on Pantheon. He was pleasantly surprised to discover Multidev environments that allow developers to fork entire stacks and work independently before merging the code into the main project.
“One of the biggest challenges with deploying a whole bunch of sites is that you have to update some files for search engines to recognize your URLs. So Multidev turned out really useful. We taught marketers at Spire how to spin up a new branch with Multidev, make modifications and test it. All of this without a need to be super technical! That was another reason why Pantheon worked out great for them, ” shared Gaily.
Results: Empowered Marketing Team and Peace of Mind
Since launching new sites on Pantheon, Spire’s practices have experienced a marked improvement in patient engagement. The Orthopaedic and Neurosurgery Specialists practice saw a 25% increase in the overall website conversion rate (online scheduling and calls). Middlesex Orthopedic and Spine Associates registered a 37% increase in conversions (forms and calls). Following the introduction of online scheduling, the conversion rate went up to 109%.
Patients can now find the information with ease, thanks to Modea’s work on streamlined navigation, doctor profiles, and clear calls to action that drive appointment scheduling.
Orthopaedic Surgical Associates saw a 25% increase in new users and site sessions. Orthopaedic Associates of Manhasset reported a 15% increase.
With Pantheon, Spire’s marketing team can efficiently update sites, expand the platform for new practices and focus on broader marketing initiatives. For a growing network of orthopedic practices, Pantheon’s stability, scalability and support have been transformative, making Spire’s goal of a centralized, patient-friendly digital presence a reality.
The Pantheon platform centralized our web assets, and that has made a huge difference in our day-to-day operations. It’s one web platform that meets all our needs, drives strong results and maintains strong compliance standards.”
- Nicole Monsky, CMO at Spire