Website rescue & takeover · 2026
A Beverly Hills women's health practice
A 430-page medical site where the patient enquiry form had quietly stopped reaching the CRM. Rebuilt, reconnected and hardened, without losing a single search ranking.
- independent SEO audit score
- 93/100independent SEO audit score
- search clicks, average position 7
- 119Ksearch clicks, average position 7
- load-blocking JavaScript
- −78%load-blocking JavaScript
What I walked into
Start with the worst of it: the patient enquiry form had stopped working. Submissions looked successful to the person filling them in and never arrived in the practice's CRM. Nobody knew how long it had been that way. Every one of those was a prospective patient who filled in a form, heard nothing back, and concluded they had been ignored.
The site around it was two websites stitched together. A modern custom build carried the homepage and service pages; an old WordPress site underneath carried the blog, the contact page and most of the deep service content. Different logos, different navigation, different identity. A patient clicking "Contact" on the homepage landed on what looked like a completely different practice.
Then the things nobody had flagged: the contact forms named the wrong legal entity, blog posts carried a previous contractor's byline, an old address was still published across the site, and an SEO audit had marked the practice weak on E-E-A-T: Google's experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust signals, which are held to their strictest standard on medical content. Pages were also carrying continuous WebGL animation that blocked the main thread on every load.
All of this on a site pulling roughly 119,000 clicks a quarter from search. Whatever got fixed had to be fixed without disturbing that.
Before: two builds
After: one build
What I did about it
The broken form went first, because every day it stayed broken cost the practice patients. I traced the submission path, found where it was failing between the site and the CRM, reconnected it and verified end to end that enquiries were landing.
The rest ran in fourteen phases with written sign-off at each one, behind two hard gates. Gate one: a full restorable backup of hosting, database, media library and DNS, delivered and acknowledged before a single change was made. Gate two: a complete URL inventory across both sites and an old-to-new redirect map for every page, so the timeline came from the real page count rather than a guess. Skipping either is how takeovers turn into disasters.
Then the consolidation: the legacy WordPress site folded into the new build, 506 redirects mapped so years of accumulated search equity survived the cutover instead of evaporating on it. This is not a quiet brochure site: 430 pages, 7.55 million impressions a quarter, average position seven, ranking for the terms the practice depends on for new patients. A migration that loses even a slice of that costs more than the whole engagement.
The E-E-A-T gap was the most interesting problem. Google holds medical content to its strictest quality bar, and the audit had flagged the site as thin on the signals that prove who wrote something and who stands behind it. So every article, around four hundred of them, got medically-reviewed attribution, visible credentials, and author and reviewer structured data, validated against Google's Rich Results Test rather than assumed correct. The independent audit came back at 93 out of 100.
Performance was blunter: continuous WebGL animation was replaced with static equivalents, cutting main-thread blocking JavaScript by around 78% and pulling first paint forward accordingly. Alongside that, a responsive rebuild and the usual accumulated debt: a broken service carousel, a logo that vanished against certain backgrounds and did not link home, mis-cropped images, overlapping elements on smaller screens.
The compliance and content pass cleared the wrong legal entity from every form, removed a previous contractor's bylines, corrected the outdated address, fixed credential wording, retired discontinued services, added a new service line, and surfaced the practice's health-certification seal site-wide. Google Tag Manager and GA4 went in so paid campaigns could finally be measured against actual enquiries.
The last piece was ownership, and it is the part most takeovers skip. I audited every account (registrar, DNS, hosting, analytics, Search Console, ad accounts, business profile), confirmed the practice owned each one, revoked the previous contractor's access, and handed over a written credential transfer log. A practice that does not own its own domain is one dispute away from losing its website.
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