We measured five dental practice websites in Castle Hill and Norwest on the things a patient can check, not on design opinions.
The practices are not named. Measured 27 September 2026; sites change.
What we found
| Check | Result across five sites |
|---|---|
| Responded, and quickly | 5 of 5, all under 0.4s to first byte |
| Tappable phone number | 4 of 5 |
| An enquiry form | 2 of 5 |
| Any online booking language | 4 of 5 |
| Health fund or HICAPS mentioned | 4 of 5 |
| Mobile viewport declared | 5 of 5 |
| Structured data present | 5 of 5 |
| Page weight | 95 KB to 827 KB |
The first row is genuinely good news and worth stating plainly: every one of these sites answered fast. Speed is no longer the differentiator in this category.
The pattern: contact is optional on half of them
Three of five had no enquiry form at all. One had no tappable phone number.
Put those together and on some of these sites the only way to get in touch is to read a number off the screen and type it into your phone.
For a dental practice specifically, that is a bigger problem than it sounds, because of when people look. A patient with a toothache is searching at 9pm or 6am — outside practice hours, when calling is not an option. The form is not a convenience feature for this audience. It is the only available action at the moment the need is highest.
The practice with 19 separate booking references and 18 tappable phone links is not over-engineered. It has understood that the visitor arrives wanting to do one thing.
The spread on health funds
Four of five mentioned health funds, HICAPS or a named insurer. One mentioned none.
This is not a design question, it is the second question every patient has after “can you see me”. A practice that does not answer it forces the visitor to either ring and ask, or check the next practice — and the next practice is one tap away.
★ Insight ─────────────────────────────────────
The measurable gaps in this category cluster around a single idea: the site is built to describe the practice rather than to let somebody act. Services, philosophy, team biographies and surgery photographs were universally present and well done. A form, a fund list and a price were not. Describing is the thing a practice naturally wants to do; acting is the thing the visitor came to do, and the two get confused because only one of them feels like marketing.
─────────────────────────────────────────────────
Page weight, and why 827 KB matters here
The heaviest site was nearly nine times the lightest.
For a patient on mobile data in a car park, that is the difference between a page appearing and a page still loading while they go back to the results. High-resolution surgery photography is the usual cause, and it is the easiest thing on this list to fix — modern image formats and correct sizing typically halve a page like that without any visible change.
What all five got right
Worth saying, because healthcare websites get criticised freely.
Every site had a mobile viewport, structured data describing the business, and a fast server response. Five years ago that would not have been true of five out of five. The remaining gaps are specific and fixable rather than a general judgement about the category.
The six-point check for a practice site
Run this on your own site, on a phone, on mobile data:
- Tap the phone number. If it does not open the dialler, it is text or an image.
- Find the way to book or enquire without calling. Time how long it takes you. If there isn’t one, that is the finding.
- Is there anything about health funds? Name them if you accept them.
- Is there any indication of price? For a first visit or a check-up. If you publish one, the rules on how prices must be displayed apply.
- Can somebody tell whether you are open right now? Opening hours, and ideally a note about after-hours emergencies.
- How long did the page take to appear? Count the seconds.
What we could not measure, and why it matters
Three things this method cannot see, stated so the findings are not over-read.
Whether the booking actually works. We measured whether booking language and links are present, not whether the system behind them accepts a booking at 9pm on a Sunday. A booking button that leads to a form that emails reception is not online booking; it is a contact form with a confident label.
Whether the practice answers. A form nobody reads until Tuesday is worse than no form, because the patient believes they have made contact.
What the site looks like. Nothing here is about design, and design does affect trust in healthcare more than in most categories.
The honest scope of this exercise: it finds the gaps that are objectively absent. It cannot find the ones where something is present and does not work, and those are the more common failure in practice — which is why the last item on the checklist is to use your own booking system as a patient and see what happens.
The one worth doing first
If you have no form, add one. Not a contact page with an email address — a form, on the page a new patient lands on, with three fields.
Every one of these practices is spending money to be found. Three of them are sending the visitor who found them to a phone that is not answered at the hour they are looking.
Cosmos Web Tech builds websites for healthcare practices and small businesses across the Hills District and Western Sydney. Hosting and IT come from Cloud Geeks, patient apps from Awesome Apps, and we are part of Ganda Tech Services.