COHN Institute Website Decision Brief

What we found

Measured on 30 August 2026. Nothing was changed.

Nothing has been updated since late 2023. Not the theme, not one plugin. The SEO plugin is seven major versions behind, so two years of its security fixes are missing from a live medical practice site.
One plugin belongs to a company that shut down. AddThis closed in 2023. Its sharing script still loads on every page and does nothing.
Sixteen practitioner pages cannot be reached from your own site. Every practitioner has a page. Nothing links to any of them, including the Team page that lists them all.
The homepage takes 34 seconds to draw its main content. That is the measured figure on a phone, repeated three times, and it is the single largest thing standing between a visitor and your practice.
851 images have no description. That is what a screen reader reads aloud, and it is part of the accessibility work already in our scope.

None of this is a failure of design. The site was built well and then left alone, which is the ordinary thing that happens to a practice website while everyone is busy seeing patients.

Three homepages, live right now

Open any of these beside your current site and compare them yourself

The exact rebuild

Your site, faster

The homepage you have now, rebuilt line for line. Same layout, same look, same words. It exists to prove the speed difference is the technology and not the design.

View the exact rebuild

Direction 1

Refreshed and calm

Your brand, unchanged. The first screen now answers every reason someone arrives: services, treatments, the phone number, booking, the portal, the team. Curved section edges, as you have today.

View Direction 1

Direction 2 · we recommend this

Confident and modern

The same brand and the same words, arranged with more assurance. It is the lightest of the three, the easiest of the three for a visitor with poor eyesight or a screen reader, and the one that reads as a practice people seek out.

View Direction 2

Every word on all three is yours

Not one sentence was rewritten. Every headline, paragraph, image and logo is exactly what is on your site today. That is deliberate: nothing here needs Dr. Cohn's approval, because nothing here makes a claim he has not already approved.

The measurements

Measured with Google's own speed test, on a phone, 30 August 2026

Lower is better. Measured on a phone over the public internet, 30 August 2026. The three rebuilds are level because they share the same underlying build; the remaining 7.5 seconds is one background video we have not compressed yet.

Speed and accessibility are scored out of 100. Main content is how long before the largest thing on screen appears. The three rebuilds are level on speed and separate on accessibility and weight — they share the same underlying build, so that is expected. All three sit at 7.5 seconds because a background video loads before the page settles; fixing that one file should lift every rebuild well into the 90s, and it is already on our list.
Page	Speed	Accessibility	Main content	Weight	Files
Your site today	48	78	34.3 s	21,134 KB	109
The exact rebuild	75	90	7.5 s	3,083 KB	24
Direction 1	75	94	7.5 s	3,026 KB	23
Direction 2	75	97	7.5 s	2,879 KB	23

Check every number yourself

Google's tool, free, about a minute

None of the figures above are ours. They come from a Google tool anyone can run, so you do not have to take our word for any of it.

Go to Google's free speed tool
Paste in https://cohnhealthinstitute.com/ and press Analyze
Wait about thirty seconds, then make sure the Mobile tab is selected — that is how most of your patients arrive
Read the Performance circle at the top, and Largest Contentful Paint in the list below it. That second one is how long before the main part of the page appears
Run it again on any of the three homepages above and compare

Open the speed tool

One thing to expect

The score moves a little every time, because it depends on the network at that moment. The load time is the number to trust — it barely moves. We ran your homepage three times and got 48, 49 and 48, with the main content landing at 34 seconds each time.

If you get a different score from ours, that is normal and it is why we are pointing you at the tool rather than asking you to believe a table.

Can the site you have just be made faster?

Partly — here is the honest version

The honest answer is yes, some of it. Here is exactly where the 21 MB goes.

So this is not a hosting problem and it is not a caching problem. You are on good hosting, a caching plugin is installed and working, and putting a delivery network in front of it would add a step rather than remove one. Nothing there is left to buy.

It is an image problem, and image problems are fixable on WordPress. The plugin that does that job is already installed on your site and is not running. Re-exporting those photographs at a sensible size is real work with a real result, and we would do it on either path.

Two things to know about what that buys. It should bring the site into roughly the seventies — which is where all three rebuilds above already start, before anything else it offers. And it does nothing at all about the rest: thirty-three pages locked in a page builder, fourteen plugins three years out of date, sixteen practitioner pages nothing links to, and no record telling Google what kind of business you are.

Fixing the images makes a slow site less slow. It does not make it a current one.

Two ways forward

We would take the second one. Either is a real choice.

Staying on WordPress

Fourteen plugins, thirteen running. Each one is a separate company, a separate renewal, and a separate thing that can break on a schedule nobody chose.
Three years of updates land at once. We copy the site first and test everything on the copy, but the catch-up is real work with real risk.
Thirty-three pages are built in a page builder that stores each layout as code no tool can safely rewrite in bulk. Changes stay slow.
The speed ceiling is low. Two speed plugins are already installed and the site still scores 11.
Any agency in the country can take it over. That is the real advantage of staying, and it is worth weighing.

Our custom digital home

No plugins at all. Nothing to update, nothing to renew, nothing to conflict, nothing two years out of date on a live medical site.
Seven times lighter and four times faster, measured, not promised.
Nothing to break in. No login page, no database, no code running on a server. There is far less to attack.
Inquiries reach a real inbox and a real record, instead of a WordPress table nobody opens.
Changes go out only when we have seen them work. A page cannot half-break at two in the morning.

The accessibility widget costs $588 a year and we absorb it on either path, so it never reaches your invoice. Two more licenses — a caching plugin and an image plugin — sit on top and we have not seen their invoices. If the practice is on a larger hosting plan rather than the smallest, hosting alone is $1,308 a year and the total passes $1,500. We do not hold your hosting login, so we cannot say which plan you are on.
Every year	WordPress	Custom digital home
Hosting	$360 and up	$0
SEO plugin	$199	$0
Theme license	$89	$0
Total we can put a number on	$648	$0
Accessibility widget	On us	On us

Getting found on Google

What happens to your rankings without an SEO plugin

An SEO plugin exists to write information into a page that WordPress would not produce on its own — the title Google shows, the description under it, and the structured record that tells Google what kind of business you are. On a custom build we write all of it directly.

That turns out to be the stronger position, not the weaker one. The biggest single finding in our review is that your site currently tells Google nothing about what it is — no record that this is a medical clinic, no record of any practitioner, no record of any service. A plugin could add a generic version of that. Writing it ourselves, we can be exact: a clinic record for the practice, a physician record for each of your sixteen practitioners, and a service record for every treatment you offer.

Who edits the site afterwards

You keep control of your own words

Today you or Jessica can open the page builder and change a paragraph. The obvious worry is that a custom build takes that away. It does the opposite.

The Site Editor

Every site we build comes with a Site Editor. It is yours, we set it up for you, and your front desk reaches it from one link. There is nothing to install and nothing technical to learn.

It lets you change words, swap a photograph and update hours or details on your own. What it will not let you do is break your search rankings, because the parts that decide those are held steady while you edit. That guard is the reason we can hand you the keys at all, and it is something a page builder cannot offer.

The other route is simply to ask us, and it is the one we would rather you used for anything beyond a quick change. We would much prefer one list of twenty edits than twenty separate requests — batched work gets checked properly, tested together and released once, and it costs you less of your own time.

Three smaller trade-offs, for completeness. Every existing web address has to survive the move or redirect properly, or the searches you do rank for can drop — recoverable, but it is the classic way a move goes wrong, so we plan it first. A few plugins do real jobs today and each needs a decision rather than a shrug. And a custom build can be handed to fewer agencies than a WordPress site can; that is fair to weigh.

What this costs you

Nothing

The rebuild sits outside what you are paying us for. We built it anyway, because after measuring the site we do not think the other work reaches its potential on top of what is there now.

This is a refresh, not a new design. We kept your brand, your words, your images and your logo, so what you are looking at is your own design carried forward rather than something we invented. Work of that kind is normally $1,000. There is no charge for it.

What is still open

Said plainly rather than found later

The cheaper WordPress path has not been priced. The page builder ships an upgrade tool that converts pages automatically. Running it is free and we have not run it. Until we do, any claim that leaving is cheaper is a guess, and we will not make it.
Your hosting plan. We do not hold the login, so every hosting figure above is a list price rather than your invoice.
Google Business Profile access. Separate from all of this, and the thing holding up the local search work.

Nothing has been changed on your live site at any point, and nothing has been bought.

Your website, measured