How Much Does a Dental Website Design Cost?

Updated July 18, 2022, by Chris Scott

I looked at pricing from several dental marketing companies that design websites for dentists to determine how much dentists are paying for a new dental practice website as we barrel through 2021. Pricing for website design services for dentistry varies widely.

High-volume companies lease DIY websites to dentists for $50 – $500 per month. Some charge $3,200 – $7,200 upfront plus a monthly fee for a basic dental website. Seasoned dental marketing expert web designers can cost $8,000 – $17,500+ for a premium dental practice website that’s optimized for conversions.

Premium dental website design is available with no hefty upfront design fees for Dentists on the Cutting Edge.

In my opinion, you should steer clear of high-volume companies with hundreds or thousands of clients. The lower pricing model can be attractive, but there is no way a bigger company with 700+ clients is going to provide you with anything special. Their dental practice website designs are usually boxed up and cheap, and the same for all their clients. This will not help you to stand out. Nor will a company that size provide good customer service.

By reputation, high-volume web design companies are also not very passionate about each client’s success. Instead, they often have all of their strength on the sales team to get your money and fewer resources on true web design talent. They often outsource the actual work.

Instead, look for a smaller team of dental marketing experts that will work hard to grow your dental practice and know how to convert visitors into new patients with a website.

photo shows a dentist contemplating dental website design costs and pricing

How much does a dental website design cost?

A few examples of high-volume companies that provide, what I consider to be inferior, websites for dentists and have become way too big for their own britches are Prosites, Officite, The Online Practice, PatientPop, DoctorsInternet, and PBHS. This, of course, is only my opinion. You’ve probably heard of these dental website companies or may have even worked with some in the past. If so, you know what I’m talking about.

We are expert digital marketers and designers with fewer select clients, so we actually have the time required to work on boosting your practice each day. Compare a smaller niche firm like Cutting Edge to a bigger firm with thousands of clients. Do they have the time and give you the consistent effort required to actually grow your practice? Do they make themselves a valuable member of your practice team? Probably not.

Some dentists are even worse off and cut corners where it counts by using cheap or free platforms for their websites like Squarespace, Wix or Weebly.

Your website is the front porch of your practice. It needs to perform optimally at all times to spur growth and support your marketing efforts from all channels.

Going cheap with your practice website is like shooting your marketing budget in the foot.

Chris Scott – Google Certified Dental Marketing Consultant & Website Designer at Cutting Edge

For instance, I recently performed a complimentary analysis of an orthodontic practice’s online presence and marketing.

I provide a free quick analysis for dental practices who are considering Cutting Edge for their digital marketing and that reach out to me to download pricing. I email the results of my brief analysis along with a link to a customized pricing estimate.

This Orthodontist was spending about $3000 a month on a mix of Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and a few marketing tools but was only spending $15 per month for his website! He was doing most of this marketing himself. Needless to say, his whole online presence was suffering in both Google rankings and in conversions. His cheap website’s architecture was hindering growth and gimping all of his marketing efforts. The orthodontist clearly possessed some marketing skills and was running his own Google Ads, but it didn’t matter because his site was flawed. He could be doing much better with his ad spend and his practice success overall if he was simply using a better website architecture.

In addition to this, I wonder how much of his time he was spending trying to learn and manage all of this himself?

I shared my findings with him, including a brief analysis of the competition and his position among them. The very first recommendation I had for him was that he would benefit a great deal and get the best return on his marketing spend by replacing his cheap underperforming website with a premium dental website created and managed by a dental marketing expert.

In my opinion, his website was not working optimally. A problem like this leads to wasteful ad spending and can hinder the growth of your practice.

I also recommended he add a Certified Google Ads Professional to his practice team to get the most out of his pay-per-click (PPC) ad performance. A professional with these credentials and experience working with Google Ads for dental practices quickly pays for itself. Being certified by Google is like having a master’s degree in digital advertising. Certified Google Ads Experts have passed lengthy exams and have demonstrated performance and proven results in managing larger client ad budgets for years.

Google-certified marketers get results. The best results. They will make you money.

I suggested to the Orthodontist that he combine a new premium dental website that converts new patients with the assistance of a dental marketing expert who would work hard to improve his online presence, help him compete, and eliminate wasteful ad spending.

I recommended our All-In-One Dental Marketing Package for one monthly price. See Dentists on the Cutting Edge.

If you’re considering a marketing person or company to manage your digital marketing campaigns, then make sure they can provide a link to their certified expert credentials for your verification like this: https://www.google.com/partners/agency?id=8561217871 Simply ask them for their Google certification link.

If they do not have certification and a link to prove it, then they are not good enough. It’s that simple. I mention this because I’ve spotted a few popular dental marketing guys and several companies out there who’ve used fake Google badges on their websites. Be careful.

Advantages of premium dental website design:

Built with SEO by dental marketing experts
Ensures optimal display on all devices and screen sizes
Robust secure server architecture
Brands your dental practice as an authority & the best choice for locals seeking dental services
Keeps visual design in line with dental practice branding
Custom strategy based on your practice goals, market, and competition
Optimized for maximum conversions of locals into new patients
Outrank your competition

Premium dental website design is included for Dentists on the Cutting Edge.

I’ve found that “dentists often feel stuck” with their underperforming website provider and the cost to move and sever the relationship was a concern.

Removing hefty upfront design fees is my solution.

Our All-In-One package clients do not have to pay upfront design fees. Instead, we spread out the costs for your new Cutting Edge website over your first six (6) months with us. So don’t let thoughts of hefty design fees keep you from moving from your current website provider to Cutting Edge.

You own the Cutting Edge website we make for you.

We provide high-quality websites that are results-driven and pleasing to the eye. We don’t just build websites, we build SEO-optimized websites that represent your brand and convey your message in the strongest way possible. The dental websites we build are customized to fit your practice and your target audience with maximum results. Rest assured that all of the tools needed to convert your online audience into revenue are incorporated into our dental web design process.

Download our 2021 Pricing Guide

Best Dental Websites & Cost

Do certain dental practice websites have an advantage over the competition simply because of the website platform they’re built on?

website-design-with-wordpress-benefits Yes. WordPress is the clear winner for both rankings and for cost.

The WordPress platform has thousands of engineers and developers all over the world working on the back-end every single day to improve the security, quality, and performance of those that use it. Most top-ranking dental websites are built on WordPress.

WordPress is better than a boxed-up dental practice website from a large company because it is more customizable. Nearly every element of a WordPress website can be optimized for search engines and people. Boxed-up cheap website platforms are limited, usually very limited, in what you can edit and optimize.

I did some research to prove it!

I decided to do a little research to determine which website platforms the highest-ranking dentists of the nation were using.

I googled the generic but higher volume search ‘city, state dentist’ for each of the 20 most populated capital cities in the United States.

I ignored directory websites in the results and took the URL of the highest-ranked actual dental practice website, and slapped it into builtwith.com.

BuiltWith analyzes websites and displays the technology they are built on. Most top-ranked websites were built with WordPress. Few were built with something else.

Top-ranked dental practice website platform for the top 20 most populated USA capital cities:

Search at Google (desktop) = city, state dentist.

Montgomery, Alabama: WordPress
Phoenix, Arizona: WordPress
Sacramento, California: WordPress
Denver, Colorado: WordPress
Atlanta, Georgia: WordPress
Honolulu, Hawaii: WordPress
Boise, Idaho: WordPress
Indianapolis, Indiana: WordPress
Des Moines, Iowa: WordPress
Baton Rouge, Louisiana: ~~WordPress~~
Boston, Massachusetts: WordPress
Saint Paul, Minnesota: WordPress
Lincoln, Nebraska: ~~WordPress~~
Raleigh, North Carolina: ~~WordPress~~
Columbus, Ohio: ~~WordPress~~
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma: WordPress
Nashville, Tennessee: WordPress
Austin, Texas: WordPress
Richmond, Virginia: WordPress
Madison, Wisconsin: WordPress

Result: 80% use WordPress

I decided to take this test a step further and plug in the ten (10) most populated cities in the United States.

These are more competitive markets where SEO as a foundation for your dental office web design is extremely important.

Largest US Cities

Search at Google (desktop) = city, state dentist.

New York City, New York: WordPress
Los Angeles, California: WordPress
Chicago, Illinois: WordPress
Houston, Texas: WordPress
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: WordPress
Phoenix, Arizona: WordPress
San Antonio, Texas: WordPress
San Diego, California: WordPress
Dallas, Texas: ~~WordPress~~
San Jose, California: WordPress

Result: 90% use WordPress

Website design technology for each top-ranked dental practice website determined using builtwith.com

Another big advantage WordPress has over the competition is that your designer/developer can start with an already developed theme and customize it for your practice while implementing their conversion optimization expertise.

There are affordable WordPress themes out there that highly skilled designers created, often spending in excess of $50k-$100k out of pocket to develop. Licensed access to these developed themes to use for your dental website design costs far less than developing a totally custom website from scratch.

The code behind WordPress is very clean and simple, making it easy for search engines to read and index your dental office website’s content. In addition, each page, post, and image can have its own meta tag keywords, description, and title and be optimized for specific keywords, allowing for more precise dental SEO.

The design of a WordPress website is 100% customizable. The look and feel of the site can be 100% customized so your brand can shine through on your practice website and provide a unique online experience to your visitors, existing patients, and potential new patients.

Dental Website Design and Marketing Costs

You’ll get the best bang for your buck by finding a company that combines both dental website services with dental website marketing into one package. Web designers who are also dental marketing experts create great dental practice websites that convert. Combining these two services with an expert strategy will cost you far less than piecing the services out to different companies.

Dental Website Hosting Costs

The quality of your dental website hosting server also matters. Most high-volume companies will host your dental practice website on a shared server with hundreds or even thousands of other practices that share the same resources. This is not ideal. Shared servers are cheap and often are only worth about $5 per month. If you go cheap here, performance will suffer.

Your dental practice website hosting server is important. You should make sure your hosting server is high-end and loads quickly for your users while being secure.

In my opinion, your website shouldn’t be sharing server resources with hundreds or thousands of other websites.

For instance, here at Cutting Edge, each of our client websites are hosted on a unique cloud server just for them, managed by us. They’re built with Google infrastructure and integrated with Cloudflare. This makes them extremely fast for every user.

Premium hosting costs about $100 per month (included for package clients). This is a small price to pay for upgraded site security, up-time, and speed.

Having a good, fast premium server along with a pro who runs it will give your practice an advantage over competitors who are likely on slower shared servers.

Miscellaneous Costs For Designing a Dental Website

Domain name registration costs

Additional costs associated with your dental practice website include domain name registration. Owning a domain name is cheap, usually less than $20 per year, unless you’re considering purchasing a premium domain name which can have an initial one-time cost anywhere from $1000 – $10,000 or even more. However, not securing your domain name properly can be costly. If you already have a domain name or are purchasing one now, my advice is to register the domain name for 10-20 years. It only costs a few hundred bucks and is well worth avoiding the headaches that can come with an overlooked domain name expiration. Secure your domain name without the hassle by paying for a few decades at once.

*Register your own domain name. Avoid allowing anyone else to do this unless you absolutely trust them. A dentist recently posted on a popular message board about how his hosting company wants a $4,000 payment to “transfer” his own domain name to him because they registered it for him. He wanted to move on to better things and was letting them go. Their reaction was to hijack his domain name and send him a big fat invoice. What a headache that would be eh?

Costs to hire writers

Content is still very much king. Your website will do best if you have loads of optimized content for your potential new patients and for Google to discover. Adding new fresh content regularly also has a big impact when competing for search engine traffic.

Hiring skilled writers is often necessary to maintain a flow of new fresh content for your dental practice website. Your marketing team may or may not cover these expenses. We do.

Custom Photography

Dental practice websites full of stock photos of fake people will not work. Plain and simple. I don’t care what Prosites, Great Dental Websites, or PBHS says to you about them. Stock photos are a put-off and lousy at conversions. The photography for your website must be unique and be photos of you and your staff, your practice technology, etc.

Invest in a premium custom photography session with a pro. Invite your most passionate patients to sit in and be part of the session to have the most impact. Custom photography isn’t cheap but will likely pay for itself with one good patient case.

Investing your time

Proofreading all content and putting your own spin on it is effective. Anything you can do to add good compelling content to your medical practice website, do it. Record a video of yourself welcoming people to your practice, talk about your specialties, make short videos about complex cases, take before and after photos of all cosmetic patients and shoot them to your webmaster regularly to add to your website. Investing in your practice website content marketing with a little of your own time can pay off.

How long does a dental website take to create?

A truly effective website is never “done,”… only “ready.”

Your practice website should never be considered “finished.” Maintaining and creating your practice website requires ongoing effort & refinement that constantly improves your ability to capture new patients. With this approach, your site is an investment that evolves over time as part of your ongoing marketing budget.

Marketing clients on the Cutting Edge enjoy continued refinement to their web presence nearly every day, so your new website will never be “done” in our opinion. Your new Cutting Edge website will keep getting better and better over time.

Your web presence needs to be continuously refined and improved day in and day out. Otherwise, you will fall behind the competition which surely has a webmaster or team working hard on their web presence every day. Never let your practice website and online presence go stale.

The days are long gone when you could slap up an average website, and you’re “done.”

Successful dental practice websites that compete and grow are not set and forget one-off projects. That is exactly what is wrong with most practice websites out there today. They lack people who work on them daily. I very much believe that “life behind the content” is a Google ranking factor.

Generally speaking, we can have a new practice website created and running flawlessly for you in 3-4 weeks. Our goal is to completely revitalize your practice website and have it ready for you within 30 days. This way, you can give your current provider a months notice that you’re moving on to bigger and better things (if required). For brand new dental practice startups that have no existing website, the time frame to build out an entire dental practice website from scratch will be longer as intensive content creation is added to the timeline.

Selecting a dental website design company should be about more than just cost.

Some things to look for in a dental website design company:

PROVEN PERFORMANCE

Make sure the dental website designers you work with can provide client references from dentists who are happy with their work. Cutting Edge is one of the top-performing dental marketing teams. We’re Certified Google Ads Experts and partners with industry-leading technology providers to bring the latest and greatest to our clients. We invite potential dental practice clients to contact our references.

DATA-DRIVEN REPORTING

Transparency is important. Make sure your dental web designers and digital marketing team provide you with reporting. Shooting you a ranking report email once a month for a handful of terms is not enough. Keeping tabs on your dental practice website success is vital. Find a team that makes this easy and clear as day for you. With Cutting Edge, there is no need to wade through complicated spreadsheets or log in to 6 different websites when evaluating your online presence and digital marketing campaigns. All clients have access to our Marketing Dashboard, our comprehensive data, analytics, and marketing reporting platform all in one easy-to-access spot.

UNPARALLELED TRACK RECORD

Seek out web designers with good reviews and testimonials from dentists. For instance, at Cutting Edge, we have a 100% dentist client retention rate and a +100 Net Promoter Score that’s much higher than the nationwide average. Our client testimonials, dental marketing methodology, and decades of web design experience are the perfect recipe for a successful digital campaign.

LEADING DIGITAL EXPERTS

If you look closely you can easily whittle your choices for web design companies down to a few experts. 2021 web designers need to be strong in SEO and digital marketing. Your selection should follow well-established best practices. Consider dental SEO experts who are also Certified with Google for ads.

At Cutting Edge, we’ve been designing and marketing websites since 1999. We keep tabs on the latest and greatest design trends but measure the success of any site launch by how well the new design is able to impact practice goals. We’ve built successful websites across all niches.

LOCAL AREA EXCLUSIVITY

We offer local area exclusivity to our dental marketing clients. Our goal is for your dental practice to dominate your market area. We do not accept clients who conflict with our existing clients. Stay away from web designers and dental marketing agencies that do not immediately offer you local area exclusivity.

ABOUT CUTTING EDGE

Cutting Edge is an Internet marketing and consulting firm specializing in state-of-the-art dental web design, search engine optimization, and patient acquisition and retention solutions to help clients effectively manage customer relationships and achieve business objectives online.

Cutting Edge employs top professionals who share a dedication to their work and actively seek opportunities for collaboration with like-minded partners. The group unites a deep and broad knowledge of the industry with a passion for their work that translates into innovation and streamlined processes for the benefit of our clients and the marketing community.

The Cutting Edge team is comprised of professionals from all corners of the Web, including web engineering and programming, sales and marketing, business development, new media, and online creative.

Most Important Strengths and Core Competencies:

Employees are Internet professionals with at least 19+ years of industry experience. Experience runs the full life-cycle of Internet development.

Cutting Edge has a broad understanding of how technology, knowledge management, and marketing communications can be utilized to not only deliver high-value services at the point of need but reduce costs through automation and improve efficiencies.