The seven things a dental practice website has to do
Speed, tap-to-call, insurance clarity, real prices and service pages, plus the compliance rules on patient photos and testimonials for a dental office site.
- 1. Load in under two seconds on a phone
- 2. Tap-to-call in a sticky bar
- 3. Answer the insurance question in the first screen
- 4. Publish prices, or at least ranges
- 5. A real page per service
- 6. Photos of the actual office and the actual people
- 7. A form that asks for three things
- What to spend
- Frequently asked
21.5% of dental practices link no website from their Google profile at all. Among the ones that do, a large share are running a template a vendor built in 2016 that loads in eight seconds and answers none of the three questions a patient came to ask.
A dental website has one job: turn a person who is nervous, price-sensitive and comparison shopping into a phone call. Everything below serves that.
1. Load in under two seconds on a phone
Most of your traffic is mobile and most of it arrives with impatience. Run your homepage through Google's PageSpeed Insights. If mobile performance is under 60, the site is costing you calls.
The two usual culprits in dental sites are a hero video of a smiling family and a page builder loading nine scripts. Cut the video, compress every image to under 200KB, remove chat widgets you are not staffing, and remove tracking scripts nobody reads reports from. A fast plain site beats a slow beautiful one every week.
2. Tap-to-call in a sticky bar
The phone number must be a tappable link, visible without scrolling, and pinned to the bottom of the screen on mobile at all times. Not in an image. Not in the footer only.
Add a second sticky button for "Book online" only if your scheduler actually shows open times. If it collects a request that somebody answers Monday, call it "Request an appointment" and be honest.
3. Answer the insurance question in the first screen
This is the number one reason a patient bounces from a dental site. "We accept most major insurance" answers nothing.
Name the carriers and plans you are in network with, in text, on a dedicated insurance page linked from the top navigation. If you are out of network or fee-for-service, say that clearly and immediately, then explain what it means: you can still submit to their plan, here is roughly what they get reimbursed, here is what the fee buys them. Practices that hide their network status until the phone call generate frustrated callers and one-star reviews about being misled.
If you run a membership plan for the uninsured, put the monthly price and what it includes on the same page. That page is often the highest converting page on a dental site.
4. Publish prices, or at least ranges
Practices resist this harder than any other recommendation. The objection is always "every case is different," which is true and irrelevant to the patient trying to decide whether to call at all.
Give a range with what is included. "New patient exam, X-rays and cleaning: $89 for patients without insurance." "Single implant with abutment and crown: $3,900 to $5,200, depending on whether a graft is needed." "Invisalign: $3,800 to $6,200 depending on case length."
Two things happen. Price shoppers self-select out before consuming front desk time, and people who were putting off calling because they feared an unknowable number call.
5. A real page per service
One page each for implants, clear aligners, crowns and same-day restorations, root canal, extractions and wisdom teeth, emergency care, kids, cosmetic and whitening, and dentures.
Each page: what it is in plain language, what the appointment is actually like start to finish, how long it takes, the price range, financing options, and a photo of your operatory. Six hundred words is plenty. These pages are what Google ranks, what your ads land on, and what the AI assistants quote, which is covered in the AI search guide.
6. Photos of the actual office and the actual people
Every stock photo you use costs you trust. Patients recognize them instantly.
Shoot the exterior from the road, the parking, the reception, the waiting area, an operatory, the sterilization area if it looks good, and every team member. A phone camera and an overcast day is enough. Update the team photos when people leave, because a patient meeting a receptionist who is not on the site notices.
Now the compliance part, which is not optional. Do not publish a patient photo, a before-and-after, or any recognizable person without a signed written authorization that specifically covers marketing use. A treatment consent form does not cover it. The same applies to written testimonials that describe a patient's treatment: if you publish it with a name or identifying detail, you need authorization for that too. Google reviews are different, because the patient published those themselves on a platform you do not control, but pulling one onto your website with a full name attached puts you back on the hook.
The workable version: use before-and-afters only with signed authorization on file, use first name and last initial at most, and lean on doctor credentials and case counts rather than patient stories.
7. A form that asks for three things
Name, phone, and "what is going on." That is it.
Do not ask for insurance ID, date of birth, address, or a description of symptoms on a public web form. Every extra field costs completions, and the clinical ones create a record with protected health information sitting in whatever inbox your form provider uses. If your form emails submissions in plain text to a Gmail account, you have a problem worth fixing this month.
Set up an automatic text reply that fires within 60 seconds of a submission. The form is not the conversion; the reply is.
What to spend
A five to eight page custom site for a dental practice runs $3,000 to $9,000 built once, or $200 to $500 a month on a managed platform. Both are fine. What is not fine is $500 a month for a template you do not own, on a domain the vendor controls, that you lose entirely if you leave. Own your domain, own your hosting login, own your Google Analytics property.
The correlation in the benchmark data is stark: practices with a website carry a median of 103 reviews against 1 for practices without one. The site is not causing that on its own, but it marks the practices that are competing.
Frequently asked
Do we need a blog? Only if someone will write it. Four good service pages beat forty thin blog posts. If you do publish, write about the questions patients ask at the chair.
Should we use the DSO-style template our software vendor offers? It is faster to launch and it will look like the other 400 practices using it. Acceptable as a starting point if you are currently in the 21.5% with nothing. Replace it when you can.
How often should it be updated? Prices and insurance carriers whenever they change, team photos when staff changes, and a fresh look every three or four years.
If you want a site built, website design is one of the services in the free 14-day trial; we build the first draft in about a week and you own everything. Text or call (385) 832-6175.