A dental website costs more than a salon's and less than a hospital's, and the reason is specific: it has more pages, because each treatment the practice wants to be found for gets its own, and it has a patient intake form that carries health information and has to be handled by a vendor willing to sign a business associate agreement. Those two facts set the dental website cost more than the design does. This page sets out the lines of a practice site, which ones a dental marketing company bundles into a retainer, and how to price the site alone so an offer can be compared.
The pages and why there are more of them
A practice site is a home page, a new patients page, a treatments index and a page per treatment, a team page with the dentists, an insurance and payment page, a contact page and the legal pages. With eight treatments that is fifteen pages, and the treatment pages are the ones patients read and search for, so they are written properly rather than templated. That is the first reason a dental site costs more than a six-page brochure site: the count is higher and the hours per page are higher on the pages that matter.
The forms vendor is a line of its own
A new patient form that collects a medical history is collecting protected health information, and the practice needs the vendor that stores it to sign a business associate agreement. Many general website builders will not, so the intake is handled by a specialist patient forms vendor and embedded in the site. On the cost sheet that is a feature line with a setup cost and a monthly cost, separate from the website platform. Sites that skip this and email forms as plain text are cheaper and are carrying a privacy problem the practice will own.
Pricing the site without the retainer
Dental marketing companies commonly quote the site inside a monthly retainer for search advertising and review management, which makes the site's own cost invisible. On the website cost calculator, enter the fifteen pages, a higher hours-per-page for the treatment pages, the writer's cost per page if the practice is not writing them, the forms vendor's setup as the feature line, and the platform plus the forms vendor as the monthly line. That is the site alone. Whatever the retainer adds is advertising, which is a separate purchase with its own return.
Questions people ask about dental website cost
Why is a dental website more expensive than other small business sites?
More pages, because each treatment gets one, and a patient forms vendor that has to handle health information properly. Design is rarely the difference.
Can we reduce the cost by writing the treatment pages ourselves?
Yes, and the dentists are the right people to write them, because they know what a patient asks. Budget the hours honestly; a good treatment page takes an evening, not a lunch break.
Is the monthly retainer part of the website cost?
No. It is advertising and reputation management, and it should be judged on the patients it brings, not bundled into the price of the pages.