Whether you’re striking out on your own and starting your own dental practice, or rebranding an existing practice, one of the factors that many dentists have questions about is how much a dental practice website costs. The truth of the matter is that a new website for a dental practice can range in price from a few hundred dollars, to several thousand.
Dreamscape Marketing has designed websites for all kinds of businesses in our 15-year history. One of the areas we specialize in is websites for dental practices. With that, we’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of dental practice website design.
Dental Practice Website Cost vs. Quality
As with many things in business, you get what you pay for. If a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is. If you find a web developer willing to design a new website for your dental practice for a few hundred dollars, while the price sounds nice, the quality is likely to be questionable. Make sure the developer you’re working with has a body of work and references to point to. A low-cost website promised on a short timeline may be using pre-built themes (thus lacking customization), sub-par security measures, and may lack user experience qualities that you’d expect to see on a well-built website.
Working with a web developer is no different than working with any other type of contractor. You want to know that who you’re working with is experienced and will deliver a quality product. You may end up paying more for their services than with someone lacking experience, but your website is going to represent your business on the worldwide web, and thus quality is extremely important. Make sure you’re doing your due diligence in vetting anyone you may choose to work with.
Factors That Go Into Pricing a Dental Practice Website
Several factors go into pricing a quality dental practice website. The number of pages on the site are just one factor — the more services you provide, the more pages you should expect to have built. A customized design, adequate security features (protection from spam and malware), a patient payment or appointment booking portal, and other optional features may add to the total cost, but are all worth the investment. If your patients can’t trust your site, this may reflect poorly on you and your practice.
Among other optional features of working with a quality web developer, you’ll want to ensure that your site will be optimized for search engine visibility to attract new patients. There are many tactics used to achieve this — for more information, be sure to read up on dental practice search engine optimization.
Ongoing Maintenance & Hosting
One part that’s often overlooked in developing a new dental practice website is ensuring that ongoing maintenance and hosting services are provided. If you simply purchase a website without an ongoing maintenance agreement, you may decide later on that you’d like to change up design elements or fix pieces of the website that may break over time as technology evolves. Making multiple one-time project deals may make the entire project more expensive, as opposed to having an agreement in place to make incremental changes over time. Working with a development team that also provides hosting, SEO, and other marketing services means that you only have one point of contact to go to for all of your web and digital marketing needs.
Work With Experienced Web Developers
Ultimately, the price of a website for your dental practice is dependent on several factors, so a definitive range can be hard to pin down, and you’ll want to seek quotes from experienced developers. Dreamscape Marketing has over 15 years of web development experience with several satisfied clients in the dental industry. If you own or operate a dental practice and you’re seeking a new website, contact us online or call 888.307.7304 to speak with our team today!