DMedica: five years of inquiries that never reached the practice

DMedica is a specialist gynecology and obstetrics practice in Belgrade, at Slavija. Before launching Google Ads, they asked us to fix their website.

The reason is simple. An ad brings a person to the site. What happens next depends only on the site.

From the outside, the site looked tidy. Inside, we found three things nobody had seen for years.

Messages that never reached the practice

The site has an appointment form. People filled it in: name, phone number, what was bothering them, when they could come in. They clicked “Send”, saw a message saying it had been sent, and waited for a call.

The call never came. The practice did not even know about those messages.

Whoever built the site had left their own email address as the recipient in the forms. For about five years, every message went to them, not to the practice. (Nobody did it on purpose. Nobody checked, either.)

The messages had been sitting in the site’s database the whole time. Once we removed the spam, 476 real inquiries from patients were left.

We changed all 45 forms on the site to send to the practice’s email. On top of that, a reply from the email now goes straight to the patient, and the subject line shows the name of the person who wrote. The test message arrived.

The site had been hacked and nobody knew

The first traces of the break-in date from August 2024. Most of the activity happened between February and June 2026: a fake plugin, file upload scripts, code injected into the settings of an old caching plugin, and an administrator account that nobody at the practice had created.

The antivirus on the hosting cleaned some of the files. The door the attacker came in through stayed open.

First we made a backup of the entire site. Then, step by step, we:

• removed the leftover code, the fake plugin and the unknown accounts;
• updated WordPress and all plugins, and replaced unlicensed copies of plugins with licensed ones;
• moved PHP from version 7.4 to 8.5;
• moved the login to a different URL, disabled code editing from the admin and closed the entry points bots try most often.

Along the way we also found out why the database was 1.7 GB: thousands of old page revisions and hundreds of spam messages. It is now 70 MB.

On a phone, the home page took almost 12 seconds to load

Most people looking for a gynecologist do it on their phone. Often in the evening, often when something is worrying them. On DMedica, the main image on the home page showed up after 11.7 seconds.

The site runs on a ready-made theme and Elementor, with four more plugin bundles. Each of them adds its own files to every page. The home page weighed 5.5 MB.

We did not rebuild the site from scratch. We took what was there and removed the excess:

• 11,221 images converted to WebP, from 803 MB to 169 MB;
• the icon font cut from 454 KB to 3 KB, because the site uses 14 icons out of several hundred;
• nine requests for Google Fonts merged into one, and duplicate copies of Font Awesome removed;
• the styles for the top of the page load right away and the rest comes after, so the page is visible before everything has loaded;
• video sliders start only when you scroll down to them.

Google PageSpeed on a phone: from 60 to 91. On desktop: from 81 to 99.

This is also the limit for this site. As long as it runs on the theme and four plugin bundles, the home page loads 47 scripts, and going further is not possible without moving to a lighter foundation.

Google saw empty pages and lorem ipsum

No page had a main heading. On 52 of 69 URLs there was placeholder text: lorem ipsum, made-up questions, a fake phone number. There were empty pages, two or three pages for the same procedure, and URLs with typos.

Search Console was not connected, so nobody could see this. Google could.

• placeholder text replaced with real content, and the questions on the pages built from what people actually type into Google;
• 35 empty and duplicate pages removed, 37 old URLs redirected to the right ones, 244 internal links fixed;
• a main heading on 48 pages, search titles and descriptions on 20 pages, descriptions on 33 images;
• Google now knows this is a medical practice, with its address, opening hours and doctors;
• Search Console connected and the sitemap submitted.

One tap to the practice

On a phone, there are now three buttons at the side of the screen: call, WhatsApp and Viber. Phone numbers in the text have become links, so nobody has to copy them.