A dental practice website has two jobs that matter and a lot of jobs that do not. It has to calm down somebody who is nervous, and it has to answer the price question well enough that they pick up the phone. Everything else, the photography, the colour scheme, the slider on the homepage, is decoration around those two.
Most practice sites do neither. They open with a stock photograph of a model with unlikely teeth, list twenty treatments in alphabetical order, and put the prices behind a form. This is what to do instead, including the rules a dental practice has to work within, which are stricter than most businesses and worth getting right.
Who is actually on the site?
Four different people, wanting four different things, and a good practice site serves all of them within one click of the homepage.
- The nervous patient. Has not been for years, is embarrassed about it, expects to be told off. They are reading for tone. A line that says you see a lot of people who have been away for a while and nobody gets a lecture is worth more than any design decision on the site.
- The new arrival. Just moved into the area, wants to know whether you are taking patients, NHS or private, and how to register. They want a plain yes or no, quickly.
- The treatment shopper. Looking at implants, aligners, veneers or whitening, comparing three practices, and mostly looking for price and evidence. They will read a lot and take a week.
- The emergency. In pain today. They want your phone number, your opening hours and whether you can see them, and they are not reading anything else.
If your homepage answers "are you taking new patients" and "are you NHS, private or both" above the fold, you will save your reception team a good number of calls a week. Those two questions are most of the phone traffic at a practice.
The pages a practice needs
- Home. Taking patients or not, NHS or private, where you are, opening hours, phone number, and how to register.
- New patients. What happens at a first appointment, how long it takes, what it costs, what to bring. This page does an enormous amount of work for nervous people.
- A page per significant treatment. Not a list page with paragraphs. Implants, aligners, whitening, hygienist, emergency appointments each deserve their own page if you want them found.
- Fees. As plain as you can make it. More on this below.
- The team. Real photographs, real names, qualifications and registration numbers where appropriate.
- Contact and find us. Map, parking, whether the surgery is accessible, bus routes if you are in a town centre.
That is six to ten pages depending on how many treatments you split out, which is a normal small business site rather than anything exotic.
Should a practice publish its prices?
Yes, in a shape you can stand behind. The price question is the single most searched thing about private dentistry, and a practice that hides it loses the enquiry to one that does not, because a patient comparing three websites will simply skip the one that will not say.
How to do it without painting yourself into a corner:
- Fixed fees where they are genuinely fixed. Examination, hygienist appointment, standard white filling, extraction.
- A from price with an explanation for anything that varies. Implants and orthodontics are the obvious ones. Say what moves the number, in patient language: how many teeth, whether bone grafting is needed, which system, how long the treatment runs.
- The NHS band charges if you take NHS patients. These are set nationally and change, so check the current figures on the NHS website each time they are updated rather than leaving an old number on a page.
- Payment plans, if you offer them, and who runs them. If finance is involved, that brings its own regulatory obligations, so take advice on the wording rather than copying another practice's page.
- The date you last reviewed the page. One line, and it protects you.
What rules does a dental website have to follow?
More than most. This is not legal advice and the detail changes, so check the current position with the bodies themselves. The shape of it is this.
The General Dental Council publishes guidance on advertising and on the information a practice should make available, including being clear about who is treating patients and what they are registered as. Registration numbers and qualifications should be accurate and current on the team page.
The Care Quality Commission registers dental practices in England, and its rules cover what you should display about your registration. The regulators differ in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Advertising rules apply to your website the same as to any other advert. The Advertising Standards Authority takes an interest in dental and cosmetic claims, and prescription only medicines cannot be advertised to the public, which is why practices have to word facial aesthetics pages carefully. If you offer those treatments, get the page checked rather than guessing.
Accessibility is worth taking seriously for a healthcare site, because a decent share of your patients will have a reason to need it. Proper text size, real contrast, alt text on images, and a site that works without a mouse covers most of it.
Before and after photographs
They are the most persuasive thing you can put on a dental website and the thing most likely to cause you a problem, so handle them properly.
Use your own cases, never a stock library or a manufacturer's images. Get written consent for use on the website specifically, keep it on file, and honour a withdrawal of consent promptly. Show typical results rather than only the best one you have ever had, and do not retouch. If the lighting and angle differ wildly between the two photos, it reads as a trick even when it is not.
A short honest caption beats a slogan. "Upper and lower aligners, eleven months, treated by Dr Patel" tells a patient what they need to know and sets expectations you can meet.
Is online booking worth having?
It depends on how your diary works, and plenty of well run practices are better off without it.
Full online booking, where a patient picks a real slot in your live diary, suits practices with predictable appointment lengths and enough spare capacity that a badly chosen slot does not wreck a session. It genuinely reduces phone traffic.
A request form, where a patient asks for a time and reception rings back to confirm, suits everyone else. It captures the enquiry out of hours, which is the main benefit, without letting a stranger put a forty minute appointment into a twenty minute gap. It is also a great deal cheaper to build, because it does not have to talk to your practice management software.
Whatever you choose, test it yourself on a phone, from start to finish, the way a patient would. A booking journey that works on a laptop and falls apart on a five year old handset is a common and expensive problem.
Whichever you pick, put the phone number next to it. A lot of dental patients, particularly older ones, will want to speak to a person and will leave if that is not offered.
Put the reception questions on the site
Spend an afternoon listening to what the phone actually asks, and you have written your FAQ section for you. It is nearly always the same dozen questions, and every one you answer on the site is a call your team does not have to take.
- Are you taking new NHS patients, and if not, is there a waiting list?
- Where do I park, and is it free?
- Do you see children, and from what age?
- What happens if I am nervous, and do you offer sedation?
- Can I be seen today if I am in pain, and what happens out of hours?
- Do you take payment plans, and who runs them?
- Do I need a referral for implants or orthodontics?
- Is the surgery accessible, and is there a ground floor room?
- What happens at a first appointment, and how long does it take?
- Can I bring someone in with me?
Write the answers the way your receptionist says them, not the way a website normally would. That tone is the practice's biggest asset online and it costs nothing to use.
Getting a practice found
Dentistry is a local search business. Most of the work happens on your Google Business Profile rather than your website: correct opening hours, the right categories, photographs of the actual practice, and replies to reviews. The method is in getting found on Google when you only work locally.
The website's contribution is treatment pages that use the words patients use. People search "invisible braces" more than they search the brand names, and "dentist taking NHS patients near me" is one of the highest intent searches in the whole of healthcare. If you are taking NHS patients, say so in plain words on a page, and update it the day that changes.
Speed matters more than usual too, because a lot of this traffic is on a phone, in a car park, at the point of pain. Heavy practice photography is the usual culprit and it is fixable, as covered in why a slow website costs you work.
What should a dental website cost?
A practice site is a normal brochure site with more pages and stricter content, so the build is not inherently expensive. In the UK, a freelancer or small studio will usually quote £1,000 to £4,000 one off, and specialist dental agencies considerably more, often with marketing bundled in on a monthly retainer.
The specialist agencies are not a rip off, but be clear about what you are buying from them. A large part of that monthly figure is advertising management and content, not the website itself. Ask for the two separately so you can judge them separately.
On a rental, a practice usually lands in the ten page bracket, which with us is £149 a month excluding VAT, with the first three months paid up front and no setup fee. Hosting, SSL, business email, the gallery, the FAQ section, reviews and a yearly redesign are included, one design revision comes with the build, and content changes are unlimited and free, which matters a lot here because fees and NHS availability change and the page needs to keep up.
If you want to work out the number for your own list of pages first, there is a method in work out what your website should cost before you ask, or you can price up your website directly.
The short version
Answer the two questions your reception team answers all day, on the homepage. Publish your fees in a shape you can defend. Put your real team on the site with their real registrations. Use your own before and after photographs with consent on file. Then keep it current, because an out of date fee page is worse than no fee page at all.
