CHLA Website

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles relies on its website as a core operational and communications platform, supporting patients, families, clinicians, and internal teams across the organization. When we were brought in, CHLA had recently completed a complex migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 under challenging conditions, including significant team turnover and compressed timelines. While the site was live, it lacked the structural consistency, performance insights, and scalable systems needed to operate as an enterprise-grade digital platform. 

The site faced inconsistent templates, limited UX standardization, and minimal performance baselines, making it difficult to measure impact or prioritize optimization. At the same time, the website carried high visibility and high stakes, functioning as the hospital’s primary digital storefront and a critical driver of engagement. This created an opportunity to move beyond maintenance and instead establish a foundation for continuous improvement, performance measurement, and long-term growth. 

We collaborated with CHLA as an ongoing digital partner, focused on continuous improvement rather than one-time execution. The approach centered on strengthening the website’s foundation while incrementally enhancing the user experience, ensuring updates could scale over time and support evolving organizational goals. 

We focused our efforts on building consistent, flexible page structures, improving usability across key areas of the site, and creating clearer paths to engagement. In parallel, we worked in partnership with Drumline to introduce stronger measurement practices and more consistent tracking, enabling the team to better understand performance and make informed decisions about future enhancements. 

Regular collaboration and structured touchpoints allowed the teams to move quickly, adapt to changing priorities, and maintain momentum. Rather than cobbling together one-off solutions, the development team drew on deep Drupal and Symfony expertise to build on the framework’s native APIs, plugin architecture, and established patterns. This approach accelerated delivery while ensuring each component remained aligned with Drupal core conventions, minimizing friction during future upgrades and reducing long-term maintenance burden. By investing in durable systems and repeatable patterns from the outset, the website was positioned not just to function reliably but to continually improve as needs and expectations evolve. 

The impact of this continuous optimization approach became visible quickly. Pages using the new templates began outperforming legacy layouts, with click-through rates increasing from single digits to double digits. For the first time, CHLA was able to establish meaningful performance baselines, unlocking future opportunities for A/B testing and data-driven optimization. 

Beyond metrics, the website began functioning as a true growth and engagement platform rather than a static content repository. Internal confidence increased across marketing, digital, and leadership teams, reinforcing the site’s role as a critical organizational asset.