Five things to look for in a dentist website builder

Website builders for dentists are sold with the same five adjectives on every landing page, and none of them tells you whether a given builder is good. Here is the checklist we would hand a friend, in the order the failures actually cost money.

1. Speed on a phone, measured not claimed

Google's mobile research found 53 percent of mobile visits abandoned past three seconds across a sample of 900,000 sites, so this is not a design opinion. Ask for the builder's own marketing site tested on a phone, or their published Core Web Vitals. A builder whose own pages are slow will not make yours fast, whatever the template gallery shows.

2. Who owns the files and the domain

Ask what you can take away if you cancel. Some builders answer "nothing, logs out, site dies". The correct answer is a zip of the finished site, and a domain registered to the practice. Ownership is also the reason we price the tiers the way we do: the site is yours at $249, and the files are literally the product.

3. What a change actually costs after launch

Almost every dental site needs a change: a new associate, holiday hours, a service added. Ask, in writing, what a change costs once the site is live. A monthly that includes unlimited tiny edits you will never need is usually priced around the edits you will: ours is $25 a month on hosted tiers, or $250 a year, and the build never recurs.

4. Where the content comes from

Builders that generate generic copy for every practice produce sites that say the same sentences as the last practice the builder touched. The honest model is the one we use: the site is built from your public listing, so your hours, your services, your review quotes, and anything unsourced is left out (how it works).

5. What happens if you never pay

Ask directly. A good vendor's answer: nothing is published, nothing is owed. Ours is exactly that, because the draft is built before any charge and no means the files get deleted and a quiet thank-you.

Run every offer you are looking at through those five. If one answers badly, the pricing advantage it advertised was never the part worth investigating.