Rescuing a Critical Healthcare Website in 48 Hours

At 2 PM on a Friday, we received an email from Palouse Specialty Physicians in distress—their website had gone offline. They’d been given 60 days by their previous developer to find a new partner, but after struggling to find support, their site was ultimately shut down, leaving patients unable to access doctor information or pay bills.

Solspace quickly sprang into action. The initial assets provided by the previous developer were incomplete, with the critical database missing.

While reaching out to the former developer for a database backup, we used resources like The Wayback Machine to piece together content as a backup plan.

So with what we had, we began reviewing the site's technical setup, and an unexpected challenge quickly emerged. The site had been developed as a “headless” Craft CMS website—a choice that, while technically impressive, was unnecessarily complex for Palouse’s needs.

A headless CMS separates the back end, where content is managed, from the front end, where it’s displayed to users. It allows for flexibility and is useful for companies with highly complex, multi-platform needs—think of a brand distributing content across multiple websites, apps, or even kiosks. But for Palouse, whose site primarily served as a centralized hub for patients, this approach was overkill.

This reminded us of the Sears Automotive model from the ’90s, where customers were frequently upsold on unnecessary services. In Palouse’s case, they were left with a sophisticated but overly complex setup that complicated simple updates and hindered other developers’ ability to step in.