2026-10-09 ยท All notes
What to change on an old dental website, in order
A change list for the dental site you already have, ranked by how much each fix is actually visible to patients.
Not every dental practice needs a new website. Plenty have one that is mostly fine and full of fixable details which quietly cost patients every day. Here is the ranked list we give anyone who asks, ordered by how much each change is actually seen by people who land on the page.
1. Hours and phone number, correct and tap-capable
Check the opening hours against your Google listing, and make the phone number plain text so a phone opens a dial with one tap. This is the single highest-yield fix on any old site: patients look it up to confirm you are open and to call. If your site says Saturday hours your listing does not, someone drove there for nothing and told Google about it in a review.
2. What is above the fold on a phone
Open your homepage on your actual phone. The name, what kind of dentistry you do, roughly where you are, and either the phone or the address should all be in the first screen. A rotating banner, a stock photo, or a paragraph about your founder should not come before any patient answer.
3. Symptoms, not treatment names
A patient types "broken tooth" or "tooth hurts", and finds nothing, because your services page says "restorative dentistry" at heading level two. Rewrite service names in the language the front desk is asked them in, and keep the technical term for the tooth.
4. Load time
Google's mobile research, described in another post, found 53 percent of mobile visits abandoned past three seconds. If your site is a page builder plugged to plugins, this fix usually means replacing the builder layer rather than trimming it.
5. Anything unsourced
Read your site for claims you cannot source: testimonials you cannot verify, certificates nobody on staff recognizes, statistics on cosmetic outcomes. These are liabilities on a page a patient reads before trusting you. Anything without a source is a candidate for being simply removed.
When the list stops being worth it
If your site is a page builder, tracks patients in a system you do not control, and is slow on mobile, the fixes above are patches on a floor that is wrong underneath. That is where a hand-built one-time site is the cheaper choice at $249, or $399 on your own domain (pricing, how it works). Common questions are answered in the FAQ, and the start form is a link away whenever you want a comparison site built from your own listing.