What a dental website costs, and what the quote leaves out

The five lines behind one practice website

Domain and hosting

The cheap line, and the one a practice is most often sold up on. A domain is $10 to $20 a year at list price, and it renews at list — a one-dollar first year is a discount, not a price. Hosting is advertised at $2 to $10 a month for shared hosting and $3 to $25 for managed WordPress, with a VPS at $10 to $100 and cloud hosting at $10 to $200. A dental practice is usually budgeted higher, at $20 to $100 a month — $240 to $1,200 a year — because of the security expected around anything a patient form touches. A builder plan replaces this line rather than adding to it: Squarespace publishes $19, $29, $49 and $99 a month on annual billing ($25, $39, $65 and $139 month to month), and Wix publishes $19.77, $29.77, $39.77 and $159.77 on a yearly subscription paid in full, with a free tier at $0. HTTPS should not appear as its own charge; if it does, ask what it is for.

The build

The widest line on the page, because “a dental website” describes several different purchases. Start with the trade body rather than a vendor: the American Dental Association puts a basic customized practice site at about $6,000, a high-end one with additional features at up to $25,000, and hiring a professional marketer to build it at $10,000 to $12,000. A dental marketing agency publishing its own spread gives $3,500 to $30,000 and up. Below that, a local or independent designer is $2,500 to $10,000, and by tier: doing it yourself is $500 to $1,500, a budget custom build $3,000 to $6,000, mid-range $6,000 to $10,000, premium $10,000 to $15,000 and up. A designer who works only on dental sites quotes premium work at $8,000 to $17,500 and up. One agency sells the basic version as $3,200 to $7,200 upfront plus a monthly fee — and that monthly half is the part that vanishes when somebody lays it next to a one-off quote. By the hour, dental website design companies in one directory average $83. Six things decide where you land: page count, how many of those are procedure pages, template or original design, integrated forms and scheduling or merely linked, who supplies copy and photography, and what the recurring fee is.

Patient forms and online scheduling

The line a practice has that a plumber or an electrician does not, and the reason a dental quote is not a small-business quote. HIPAA-compliant patient forms are $50 to $150 a month, and they stop being optional the moment a form asks about medications or insurance rather than just a name. Online scheduling is quoted two ways: $50 to $300 a month for booking that sits alongside your calendar, and $200 to $400 a month once it writes into the practice management system, with one widely listed platform starting at $350. Take both lines at their widest and this is $100 to $550 a month, $1,200 to $6,600 a year — at the bottom of that range it overtakes a $6,000 build in five years, and at the top in eleven months, without a single page ever being redesigned. Two questions before you sign: does the integration write back to the practice management system or only read from it, and does a business associate agreement come with the form. On a Naratake site the Dental Clinic starting point already lays out a treatment menu, transparent pricing, a new-patient page, a book page and contact. On Storefront Pro a published site takes real bookings and real orders; Storefront is where you build them and preview them first. Payments use your own live Stripe keys, so the money is yours from the moment it clears, and we take no percentage of it. The pricing page has the rest.

Photographs, and a page per procedure

A session covering the practice, the operatory and the team is $500 to $1,500, and it is the line that most separates a real practice site from a template: somebody choosing a dentist is looking for the room they will sit in and the person who will be standing over them. The words are priced per page. A professionally written, SEO-optimized service page of 750 to 1,000 words is $400 to $1,200, and a practice publishing the ten procedures patients actually search for is looking at $4,000 to $12,000 of copy — which is why the build fee and the content budget are usually two separate conversations, and why the second one is often the larger. Ongoing content for a practice competing locally is quoted at $1,000 to $2,000 a month, or $12,000 to $24,000 a year, with $10,000 to $16,000 as an initial content budget for a startup practice. None of that is needed to open. Five pages saying what you treat, what it costs, who does it, how to become a new patient and where to park will carry a practice through its first year.

Upkeep, and the SEO retainer underneath it

Maintenance for a practice site is quoted at $100 to $500 a month, or $500 to $2,000 a year on an annual plan, with routine updates billed at $35 to $105 an hour; a separate website-management line runs $89 to $300 a month. Ask what one change costs before you sign rather than after — a fee schedule nobody wants to pay to edit is a fee schedule that goes stale, and a stale fee schedule is a phone call your front desk has to make. Then the retainer that dwarfs the website itself: dental SEO is $500 to $1,200 a month for basic local work, $1,200 to $2,500 for a comprehensive program, $2,500 to $5,000 for an aggressive one, with most practices at $1,000 to $3,000. Over twelve months that is $12,000 to $36,000 against a $6,000 build. The site is the smaller purchase, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you the site. Two exits worth knowing about if you would rather stop paying and keep what you have: Storefront Pro includes the source download, and the desktop LocalSite Studio is a one time payment with no monthly fee that exports the project as often as you like. Either way the test is the same — can you change a price or an opening hour yourself, on a phone, between patients?

Three routes to the same practice website

A builder subscription

One plan, one bill, hosting and the certificate included. Squarespace publishes $19, $29, $49 and $99 a month on annual billing — $25, $39, $65 and $139 month to month — and Wix publishes $19.77 through $159.77 on a yearly subscription paid in full, with a free tier at $0. Naratake works this way too: 40 industry starting points, of which the Dental Clinic one opens with the pages a practice needs already in place — home, book, new patients and contact, with a treatment menu and transparent pricing laid out inside them — plus 15 design styles, 111 components and 66 color sets to make it yours. Every cloud plan connects one custom domain, and published sites are served over HTTPS with nothing for you to install. What no builder solves on its own is the compliance line: a form collecting medical history needs a compliant destination whatever the pages were built with, and that is still $50 to $150 a month. The other trade is that the platform sets the ceiling, so read what your plan covers before you commit; ours is on the pricing page.

Hiring a designer or a dental agency

You are buying judgment and hours, and $2,500 to $30,000 is the distance between mostly hours and mostly judgment. A studio that works only on dental sites already knows what a new-patient funnel needs and what an insurance page has to say; a generalist will build you a handsome site and ask you those questions. Get two numbers, never one: the build fee, and the price of changing a fee, an opening hour or a provider afterward — routine updates are billed at $35 to $105 an hour, and an ongoing management line runs $89 to $300 a month. Ask three more things before the deposit: whose name the domain is registered in, who holds the hosting login, and whether the patient form submissions and the agreement covering them come with you if you leave. The answers should be yours, yours, and yes.

Leasing a templated practice site

A whole industry sells practices a templated site on subscription: they build it, host it, update it, and you do not own it. Published pricing runs $50 to $500 a month, with one guide putting a full subscription site at around $450 and website management alone at $89 to $300; one agency sells the same shape as $3,200 to $7,200 upfront with a monthly fee on top. At the low end it is genuinely cheap and genuinely fast, and for a solo practice with no time it can be the right call. At $450 a month the arithmetic turns: thirteen months is $5,850, and somewhere in the fourteenth you have spent the ADA's $6,000 basic build and own nothing at the end of it. Two questions decide it — what happens to the site, the domain and the stored patient form submissions on the day you stop paying, and whether the design is yours or shared with forty other practices in the state.

What you can strike off the quote

• The aggressive SEO tier, bought on day one. Dental SEO is $500 to $1,200 a month for basic local work and $2,500 to $5,000 for the aggressive version, with most practices sitting at $1,000 to $3,000. The top tier is priced for a saturated metro where six practices fight over the same three blocks. Start local, count the calls for two quarters, and buy the next tier with evidence rather than with the urgency that came free with the pitch.
• A page for every procedure before anybody has read one. Service pages are $400 to $1,200 each, so a full twenty-procedure list is $8,000 to $24,000 of copy written on a guess. Publish the five your front desk already answers questions about on the phone, watch which ones get read, and buy the sixth when a patient asks for it.
• Stock photography of somebody else's teeth. A session covering the practice, the operatory and the team is $500 to $1,500 and it is the one thing on the site a competitor cannot copy. The smiling model with the perfect veneers is on four hundred other dental websites and a nervous patient can tell. If the session is out of reach this quarter, honest photographs of your actual waiting room taken on a recent phone in daylight still beat the model.
• Charges that should not be on the quote at all. An SSL certificate as its own line, when the host's certificate has been free and automatic for a decade. A premium hosting tier for a five-page site, when a practice is budgeted at $20 to $100 a month and generic shared hosting is advertised at $2 to $10. And a guaranteed search ranking: nobody controls the results, so nobody can promise a position. What actually gets a practice found is duller than any package makes it sound — a Google Business Profile with the right hours, real photographs, and a book-now button that works on a phone.

Questions people ask about the price