Merging Department Microsites Into the Main Domain: A Hospital Consolidation Plan

This post is for the digital head or group marketing director of a hospital that grew a separate website for each department. The cardiac centre has one domain, the IVF unit has another, oncology has a third, and the main hospital site tries to tie them together. It lays out a plan for folding those microsites into the main domain: inventory, triage, redirect mapping, launch and follow-up.

Microsites usually start for good reasons. A department head wanted a distinct brand, a campaign needed a landing page fast, or an agency built something outside the hospital's CMS. Years later the group has three or four sites, each with its own analytics, its own phone numbers, a different design and thin authority. Patients meet different versions of the hospital depending on which door they enter, and each site competes with the others for the same search terms.

Consolidation is a site move, and Google documents site moves carefully. Its guidance on moving a site with URL changes is the reference for everything below. The principles are simple: map old URLs to relevant new ones, redirect permanently, keep the redirects in place, and verify. The effort is in the content decisions and in not breaking lead tracking.

When consolidation is the right call

Merge when most of these are true:

• The microsite serves patients of the same hospital and the same city, and a patient would reasonably expect it on the main site.
• The microsite has little unique backlink equity or brand search of its own.
• Maintaining separate sites costs more than the benefit of separate branding.
• The main domain has stronger authority and a CMS that can host department sections.
• The microsite duplicates content that exists on the main site.

Think twice when the microsite has a separate legal or brand identity that patients recognise, a different regulator-facing registration, or a genuinely separate audience such as international patients served in other languages. In these cases a subfolder on the main domain might still work, but the move needs more care on branding and legal wording. Always check whether any registration or licence details your specialty must display will be carried across on the new pages.

Step 1: Inventory every site and every URL

Before any decision, list what exists.

For each microsite, collect:

1. A full crawl of all live URLs, with status codes, titles, word counts, canonical tags and inlinks.
2. The sitemap, if one exists, and the Search Console property data.
3. Search Console performance by page and by query for the last 12 months.
4. Backlinks: referring domains and the target URLs they link to.
5. Analytics: sessions, enquiries and appointment requests by page.
6. Operational dependencies: forms, booking tools, tracking phone numbers, chat widgets, CRM integrations, WhatsApp click-to-chat links, and email addresses on the domain.
7. Ownership: who runs the domain, hosting, DNS and SSL certificate, and when each expires.

A spreadsheet with one row per URL and columns for the above becomes your master plan. Add columns for decision, destination URL and owner.

Do not skip the operational inventory. A microsite often has the only copy of a form that feeds a department coordinator's inbox, or a call-tracking number printed on brochures. Moving the content without moving these breaks lead flow quietly.

Step 2: Triage the content

For each URL, assign one of four decisions.

Apply clinical review to anything that describes treatment. Microsites are often the oldest content in the group and the most likely to contain outdated clinical statements or claims that would not pass current internal review. A migration is a good moment to reset them, and a poor moment to carry them across unchecked.

Use evidence for decisions: impressions, clicks, enquiries and backlinks. A page with no traffic, no links and no enquiries needs a reason to survive. A page with a few high-quality links needs a destination even if the content is retired.

Doctor pages

Doctors who appear on both the microsite and the main site need one profile. Choose the stronger version, merge unique information, and redirect the other. Be careful with profile accuracy; if a consultant has since left, do not migrate their page as live. We cover that decision separately in our approach to provider page optimisation.

Step 3: Decide the new structure

Place each department under a clear folder on the main domain, for example /heart-institute/, /ivf/ or /oncology/. A subfolder, not a subdomain, is the usual choice because it keeps authority and reporting in one place. Google's guide to URL structure recommends simple, readable URLs, so use words patients use.

Keep the hierarchy shallow. A department page, then condition and procedure pages, then doctor pages and a contact page is enough. Our condition and treatment SEO work treats each treatment as a separate page that doctors and department pages link to.

Reconcile naming. If the microsite said "Cardiac Care Centre" and the main site says "Cardiac Sciences", choose one and use it in titles, headings and internal links. Mixed naming confuses patients and weakens relevance signals.

Step 4: Build the redirect map

This is the heart of the migration.

Rules:

1. One old URL maps to one new URL, by hand or by rule, with the most relevant destination.
2. Use permanent server-side redirects (301 or 308). Google explains the differences in Redirects and Google Search.
3. Avoid mapping everything to the home page. Google warns that redirecting many old URLs to one irrelevant destination can be treated as a soft 404. Where a page is retired, either redirect to the closest relevant department page or return a 404 or 410 if no relevant destination exists.
4. Avoid chains. Old URL to new URL in one hop. If an old URL already redirected somewhere, update the rule to go to the final destination.
5. Preserve parameters you need, such as campaign tags, where your analytics depend on them.
6. Redirect every host and protocol variant of the old domain: with and without www, http and https.
7. Test the whole map with a crawler in list mode before launch. Every row should return a 301 and land on a 200.

Where a microsite is on a different domain, the redirects live on the old domain's server. That means the old domain, its hosting and its SSL certificate must stay active. Google advises keeping redirects in place for as long as possible, generally at least a year. An expired certificate on the old domain breaks redirects for visitors using https, so put the renewal dates in a calendar and assign an owner.

Step 5: Protect lead tracking and attribution

Search is only one part of the consolidation. The rest is what happens when a patient enquires.

• Phone numbers: if the microsite used tracking numbers, move them to the new pages or forward them. Update print and signage plans, and keep the old numbers live until printed material is replaced.
• Forms: rebuild each form on the new pages, test submission, and check that the right department receives the lead. Use a source field so your CRM can tell which department form produced the enquiry.
• Analytics: use one measurement setup for the whole domain. Create views or reports by department folder so each team can see its own numbers, which removes a common argument for keeping separate sites. Our analytics tracking service covers the structure.
• Conversion events: keep the same event names across old and new where possible, so before-and-after comparisons are meaningful.
• Search Console: verify the old domains, the main domain and the new folders as properties before launch. If you are moving between domains or subdomains, Google's site move guide describes the Change of Address tool, which is not needed for moves within the same domain.

Step 6: Prepare and launch

1. Benchmark the last 12 months of clicks, impressions and enquiries for each microsite and for the main site.
2. Build on staging with noindex and a login. Remove noindex only at launch and check robots.txt did not come along with the staging copy.
3. Update internal links on the main site so they point to the final URLs rather than through redirects.
4. Update external profiles: Google Business Profile website links, social bios, directory listings, brochures with QR codes and email signatures.
5. Contact the most valuable referring sites and ask for links to be updated to the new URL.
6. Move one microsite at a time, not all at once. A phased approach limits risk and gives you a pattern to repeat. Start with the least critical site to test the process.
7. Submit the new sitemap and keep the old sitemaps available temporarily so Google can find the redirected URLs.

Launch early in the week and avoid campaign peaks, such as a health awareness month the department depends on.

Step 7: Monitor and repair

For the first month, review daily and then weekly:

• Search Console Pages report for new 404, soft 404 and redirect errors.
• Crawl stats and server logs to confirm Googlebot is following redirects.
• Rankings and impressions by department folder against the benchmark.
• Enquiry volumes by form and by phone line.
• A crawl of the old URL list to confirm every row still resolves correctly.
• Referring pages that still link to old URLs, for outreach.

Expect some fluctuation as Google processes the changes. Do not promise a result to stakeholders. Present the plan as a way to remove duplicated effort and combine authority, and agree in advance what changes would count as a problem.

Worked example, hypothetical

A 300-bed hospital group in Bengaluru has three microsites: a cardiac centre, an IVF unit and an oncology service. The main site is thin on specialist content.

• Inventory: the cardiac site has 60 URLs, the IVF site 45, the oncology site 80. Many are duplicated blog posts. The IVF site has a tracking phone number printed on a leaflet.
• Triage: each site is reduced after removing duplicates and expired campaigns. The IVF site's pricing page is rewritten and clinically reviewed before migration.
• Structure: /cardiac-sciences/, /ivf/ and /oncology/ on the main domain.
• Order: oncology first, because it has the weakest brand identity and the most duplicated content. IVF last, because of its leaflet numbers and specific regulatory display requirements.
• Result measured: not promised. The team agrees to compare clicks and enquiries per department folder against the benchmark after eight weeks.

Pre-launch checklist

• Inventory complete for URLs, forms, phone numbers, tracking and domain ownership.
• Content decisions recorded with a clinical reviewer named for treatment pages.
• Redirect map tested in a crawler, with no chains and no mass redirects to the home page.
• Old domain, DNS and certificate renewals assigned and calendared.
• Forms, calls and analytics events tested end to end on staging and again after launch.
• Internal links, sitemaps and external profiles updated.
• Benchmarks saved and a monitoring schedule agreed.

A website redesign or technical SEO audit often carries this work, because the inventory and redirect mapping are the same tasks either way.