The Dental Website Checklist

Contact and Conversion

This is the section that costs money when it is wrong. Everything here is about the gap between a patient deciding to act and being able to.

• Phone number visible without scrolling, on mobile

  Not in a menu, not in the footer only, not as an image. Visible on first paint.

• Phone number is a tappable link

  A number that has to be copied out and pasted into the dialler loses people. It should dial on one tap.

• A booking path that works on a phone in under a minute

  Test it yourself on your own phone, on mobile data, as though you had never seen the site.

• Contact form that does not demand unnecessary fields

  Every additional required field costs submissions. Ask for what you genuinely need to respond.

• Office hours and address on the page, not only in a map embed

  Map embeds load late and are often blocked. The text should be there regardless.

• Clear next step on every service page

  A page that describes a treatment and then ends is asking the patient to work out what to do next.

• New patient information is easy to find

  What to bring, what happens at a first visit, and how long it takes.

Trust and Credibility

Dentistry is a high-anxiety purchase from a stranger who will be near your face with instruments. Trust content is not decoration here.

• Real photographs of the actual practice and team

  Stock photography of models in scrubs is recognisable and it costs you credibility.

• Named dentists with genuine credentials

  Qualifications, where they trained, how long they have practised.

• Reviews visible on the site, not only linked to

  If you have a strong review profile and it lives entirely on Google, most visitors never see it.

• Treatment explanations in plain language

  Written for a nervous patient, not for a colleague.

• Fees or fee ranges addressed somewhere

  Silence on cost does not remove the question, it just sends people to look elsewhere for the answer.

• Anxiety and comfort options stated plainly

  A meaningful share of your market is avoiding dentistry entirely because of fear.

• Insurance and payment information

  Which plans you handle, whether you bill directly, what financing exists.

Local Visibility

Almost all dental search is local. These are the items that decide whether you appear when someone nearby is looking.

• City and neighbourhood named in visible page copy

  Not stuffed, but present. A site that never names where it is makes the connection harder to draw.

• Name, address and phone identical to your Google Business Profile

  Character for character, including suite formatting. Inconsistency here is one of the most common and most fixable local problems.

• A page for each location if you have more than one

  Sharing one page across two locations means neither ranks well for its own area.

• LocalBusiness or Dentist structured data with a real address

  Only if it is genuine. Inventing one is worse than omitting it.

• Service pages for the treatments you actually want more of

  If you want implant cases, there should be a page about implants.

Technical Basics

None of these are visible to a patient, and all of them affect whether a patient ever arrives.

• Every page has exactly one H1

  More than one, or none, muddies what the page is about.

• Unique title and meta description per page

  Duplicated titles across a site are common and they suppress everything.

• Canonical tag pointing at the correct URL

  Especially if the site has both www and non-www, or http and https, reachable.

• HTTPS everywhere with no mixed content

  A single insecure image can trigger a browser warning.

• A sitemap that matches what is actually published

  Stale sitemaps listing removed pages are a routine finding.

• Interior pages return 200, not 404

  This sounds obvious. It is worth checking every nav link by hand. Broken permalinks are more common than practices expect.

• Images compressed and sized for the web

  See our Core Web Vitals guide for why this matters most.

• Descriptive alt text on meaningful images

  Both an accessibility requirement and a small search benefit.

Compliance and Housekeeping

Less exciting, and the reason practices occasionally receive letters.

• Privacy policy that reflects what you actually collect

  Including any tracking or analytics you run.

• Patient images used with documented consent

  Consent for treatment is not consent for marketing.

• No claims your regulator would object to

  Superlatives, guarantees and comparative claims are restricted in several jurisdictions.

• Someone owns the domain, hosting and analytics accounts, and it is you

  If your agency holds them, you are renting your own practice's presence.

Frequently Asked Questions