Moving a physiotherapy clinic off a free subdomain
A single-practitioner physiotherapy clinic has run its site for four years on a free builder subdomain, physio-rehab.builder.site. It has 22 pages, gets about 340 organic visits a month, and 62% of those visits are on mobile, where the booking form sits below a hero image that takes 6.8 seconds to load. The contact form still sends to an email address the practitioner stopped using last year. The Google Business Profile is unclaimed and shows three reviews and the clinic's former address. She has now bought the domain physio-rehab.com and asks whether to rebuild from scratch or point the old site at the new one. She has no technical staff and about €600 to spend.
1. Sort the work into 'must fix before launch', 'fix at launch' and 'after launch', and give a reason for each placement.
Read the worked answer
The organising principle is: stop the ongoing loss first, then move, then improve.
Must fix before launch
- Contact form recipient. It routes to a dead inbox, so every enquiry for the last year has been lost. It costs nothing to fix and is losing money every day the site stays up.
- Mobile load time. 62% of 340 visits is about 211 people a month on a page that takes 6.8 seconds. Decide the target image size and template before building, because changing it after launch means redoing the platform work.
- URL map. Write down the old URL for each of the 22 pages and its new equivalent. Miss this and the migration silently breaks.
Fix at launch
- 301 redirects from every old URL to the closest new one, submitted sitemap, one canonical domain only.
- Do not also redesign the content and structure in the same week: if rankings move, you will not know whether the domain move or the rewrite caused it.
After launch
- Claim and correct the Google Business Profile, replace the old address everywhere, ask recent patients for reviews, then refresh the design. These are valuable but do not block the move.
2. She wants to keep the old builder subdomain live as a backup and skip the redirects. Argue against this, and state what to do instead.
Read the worked answer
Keep both live and you compete with yourself.
- Two copies of the same 22 pages, on two addresses, target the same local queries. Search engines have to choose one and link equity and reviews get split, typically to the worse page.
- A patient who finds the old site reaches a form that goes nowhere - the backup actively loses bookings.
- Nothing on the old subdomain carries brand trust; it is a builder subdomain, not an asset worth preserving.
Instead:
- 301-redirect each old URL to its closest new equivalent - not everything to the home page, which is treated as a soft 404.
- Keep the redirect in place for at least a year and keep the subdomain registered so the redirect keeps working.
- Update every citation that points to the old address or site: Google Business Profile, directories, insurance listings, business cards, the review request template.
- Watch Search Console for 404s and fix them as they appear.
The one legitimate use of the old address is a holding page before the new site is ready, replaced by redirects the day it launches.
3. Which single change is most likely to raise bookings in the next 30 days? Justify using the numbers given.
Read the worked answer
Fix the contact form recipient.
Reasoning:
- It is the only change that affects people who have already decided to book. They are the highest-value traffic on the site and their enquiries are currently discarded.
- It is independent of rankings, ad spend and design - no waiting for anything to be re-indexed.
- It costs almost nothing, which matters against a €600 budget that also has to pay for a rebuild.
Why not mobile speed first: it is genuinely important (211 mobile visits a month at 6.8 seconds), but a faster page that still emails a dead address converts nothing. Speed raises the rate; the form fix rescues the existing demand. Do the form today, the speed work as part of the rebuild.
Caveat: 340 visits a month is a small base, so even a doubling of the form conversion rate will be a handful of bookings. That is the honest expectation to set - and the reason the Google Business Profile claim matters so much alongside it.