Dental Website Audit: A 20-Point Checklist for Practice Owners

A dental website audit doesn’t need special software. You need a phone, an hour and the list below. Most practice websites lose patients in the same few places: the page is slow on mobile, booking is hard to find, treatments are lumped together, or nobody can say which pages bring patients in.

Run the 20 checks in order. Each one has a simple test and a description of what good looks like. Where a check fails, the fix is usually smaller than a redesign.

What a dental website audit should cover

Six areas, in the order patients meet them:

1. 1Speed on a phone
2. 2Booking and contact
3. 3Treatment pages
4. 4Trust and GDC rules
5. 5How you show up on Google
6. 6Tracking

Do the whole audit on a mid-range phone using mobile data, not on the office computer. That’s how most patients see your site, and it’s where most problems hide.

Speed on a phone (checks 1 to 4)

• 1. The main content appears quickly. Put your booking page, not just the homepage, into PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile tab. Largest Contentful Paint should be 2.5 seconds or less.
• 2. Taps respond straight away. In the same report, Interaction to Next Paint should be 200 milliseconds or less. Try tapping a date in your booking widget: does it react at once?
• 3. Nothing jumps around. Cumulative Layout Shift should be 0.1 or less. Watch for cookie banners or pop-ups that push the booking button down as you go to tap it.
• 4. The hero image is sized for a phone. If the top image is several megabytes, it’s the most likely cause of a slow page.

There’s more on each of these in why a slow dental website loses patients and INP on booking flows.

Booking and contact (checks 5 to 9)

• 5. The booking button is visible without scrolling on a phone, and no menu or pop-up covers it.
• 6. Routine appointments can be booked online, such as check-ups, hygiene and new patient examinations, at any time.
• 7. The phone number is a tap-to-call button on every page.
• 8. Any form asks only for what you need (name, contact details, a short message) and shows a response the moment someone taps Submit. If it doesn’t, see why website form submissions are slow.
• 9. Every enquiry reaches someone. Send a test through each route (form, WhatsApp, phone out of hours) and check where it lands and how long the reply takes.

If enquiries arrive but wait hours for a reply, compare a contact form with online booking, or see what an AI receptionist handles for dentists.

Treatment pages (checks 10 to 12)

• 10. Each main treatment has its own page: implants, Invisalign or aligners, whitening, emergency appointments, new patient check-ups. One “treatments” page can’t rank for all of them.
• 11. Prices or “from” prices are shown. Patients comparing practices look for them, and a page without prices gives them a reason to keep looking.
• 12. NHS and private are clear. A patient should know straight away whether you’re taking new NHS patients and what’s private.

Trust and GDC rules (checks 13 to 16)

• 13. The team is shown with GDC registration numbers for the dental professionals named on the site.
• 14. “Specialist” is used only for dentists on a GDC specialist list. Otherwise avoid wording that suggests specialist status; even “special interest in” can mislead if it implies it.
• 15. Your complaints procedure is published, including who patients can contact if they’re unhappy with the outcome.
• 16. Reviews are visible and before-and-after photos are genuine, unedited and typical of the results patients can expect.

Check the latest GDC guidance on advertising before changing anything here.

How you show up on Google (checks 17 and 18)

• 17. Your Google Business Profile is complete: category “Dentist”, accurate hours including emergency arrangements, real photos, and treatments listed as services.
• 18. Your name, address and phone number match exactly on your website, your Google profile and directories.

How to rank higher on Google Maps covers the profile in more detail.

Tracking (checks 19 and 20)

• 19. Calls and online bookings from the website are tracked as conversions in your analytics, not just page views.
• 20. You can say which pages bring in patients. If you can’t, fix that before spending more on ads; we explain why in our dental Google Ads audit.

The checklist on one page

Going further than the 20 checks

If the 20 checks pass and enquiries are still low, three deeper checks are worth an afternoon:

• Search Console. Which searches show your site, at what position, and which pages get clicks. It’s real data from Google, more useful than any automated score.
• Structured data. Dentist or medical clinic markup tells Google your address, hours and services in a form it reads directly. Test a page with Google’s Rich Results Test.
• Three local competitors. Run the same checks on the three practices that appear above you on the map. The gaps are usually obvious: more reviews, a page per treatment, or online booking you don’t offer.

Also confirm the whole site loads over HTTPS with no browser warnings, including any booking widget it embeds.

What to fix first

Start with whatever stops a patient booking: a slow booking page, a hidden button, or enquiries nobody answers. Those cost you patients you’ve already won. Treatment pages and Google come next, because they bring more patients in. GDC items are quick to fix and shouldn’t wait.

For the wider picture of winning new patients, see marketing for dental practices.