NIH Unveils Eight-Hub Website Redesign, Replacing A 700-Plus Site Structure

The National Institutes of Health is preparing to launch a new version of its website that reorganizes how the public finds information about health, disease, biomedical research, and grants. Instead of steering visitors through the agency’s institute and center structure, the redesign centers on eight thematic hubs: health, research, data, clinical studies, rare diseases, technology, cancer, and grants.

NIH officials told STAT the change is part of a broader effort to consolidate the agency’s digital footprint and make information easier and faster to find. Amanda Fine, NIH deputy director for public affairs, said the goal is “to make trusted NIH information across the agency easier and faster to find.”

Why NIH changed the site

The redesign addresses a web structure that had expanded over decades into more than 700 separate websites spanning millions of pages. According to STAT, those sites often ran on different backend architectures and hosting platforms, with information duplicated across five or six locations and sometimes presented in slightly different ways.

That fragmentation became more visible during the Covid-19 pandemic, when members of the public turned to the NIH and other federal science agencies for guidance. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication and former director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, told STAT the overhaul was “badly needed” and said the old website became “a dramatic illustration of a dysfunctional website whose dysfunction wasn’t evident pre-Covid.”

The strategic implication is broader than web design. For a research agency that also functions as a public information source, navigation is part of policy execution: if people cannot find grant, clinical study, or health information without understanding the NIH’s internal org chart, the agency’s public-facing reach is constrained even when the information technically exists.

What changes during the transition

The beta version was soft-launched this week and remains under development. NIH officials told STAT that some functions, including search, do not yet appear to be operational. During the transition, existing NIH websites will remain available and will be sunset on a rolling basis as “critical and mandated content is verified and redirects are put in place,” Fine said.

Fine also said the content on the new site is taken directly from health information already published on existing NIH websites. The agency used what she described as a data-driven process to understand how people reached NIH pages, where they got stuck, and which information they sought most often.

That suggests the redesign is not primarily about creating new content. It is about reducing friction across existing content and moving from an internal-agency architecture to a user-intent architecture.

The road to consolidation

STAT reported that the NIH began developing its first-ever five-year strategic communications plan in 2022 under President Biden, spurred by lessons from the pandemic. Working groups with more than 70 staffers from communications offices across NIH’s 27 institutes and centers proposed streamlining the hundreds of NIH-owned websites to one per institute, with rollout set to begin in 2025.

That plan was later scrapped when the Trump administration came in and fired hundreds of communications staffers as part of a government-wide reduction in the federal workforce. STAT reported that layoffs and mass cancellation of contracts in early 2025 effectively froze millions of NIH webpages for nearly 18 months, increasing urgency for the remaining dozen or so communications employees to continue consolidation under the new administration.

Once complete, the project is intended to reduce the number of NIH-owned websites from more than 700 to a single, fully connected web environment. The signal here is that administrative disruption did not stop digital consolidation; it changed the route. What began as a long-range communications strategy has become a practical effort to restore usability in a system that had become too fragmented to maintain efficiently.