The ultimate guide: Design a dental website that generates patient appointments.

Do you know what distinguishes an excellent website from an ordinary one? Well, most of it lies in the website design and user experience.

The importance of having an online presence in today’s world goes beyond words. But just having a ‘good’ website is not enough to attract more patients. Your dental office needs a patient-friendly, ‘conversion-oriented’ website that can ideally convert more website visitors into new patient appointments for your clinic.

In this guide, we are solely going to discuss more on designing ‘excellent’ websites.

 

What are the marketing goals and objectives of a dental website?

Earlier, doctors and dentists never thought about dental digital marketing, as they were primarily satisfied with traditional marketing results. Many even felt that any type of marketing might make them look desperate.

However, 21st-century patients have moved online; today, more than 90% of Americans use the internet. A few years ago, what seemed attractive is no longer enough to capture patients’ attention today; they all lead fast lives and become increasingly tech-savvy. So dental offices, too, need to move where their patients have moved – online!

 

Therefore, your dental practice must undoubtedly have a well-optimized and tech-oriented website to offer what patients are looking for!

These are the goals that every dental website should have:

• Generate New Patient Appointment

The core target of every dentistry is to acquire more new patients. That also happens to be the prime challenge, given the high degree of competition in the industry. But with a website that designs based on user experience, you get the key to stand out amidst the crowd and convert more site visitors into new patient appointments.

• Search engine visibility

What use is a beautifully designed website that can’t be found by your target audience? Having an optimized website for search engines, like Google, helps increase your dental clinic’s visibility online.

• Maximize digital marketing ROI

When it comes to dental marketing, internet marketing is the most affordable and effective option. Having a well-structured website is fundamental for reaping PPC’s maximum benefits, SEO traffic, social media marketing, and other dental digital marketing strategies. But if your website is not designed correctly or unoptimized, it will only lead to a decrease in conversion rate and an increase in budget waste.

• Stay ahead of the competition.

Competition is uptight, and with the advent of the internet, it has become even stronger. With dozens of your competitors online and already with an established digital presence, you need to up your game with the right website. A content-rich and the ergonomically designed website helps you stay abreast of your competition.

It also enhances your search engine visibility as Google gives ranking preference to regularly updated websites and, most importantly, user-friendly websites.

• Brand Awareness

A well-branded website user interface (UI) follows the practice’s branding guidelines to develop a consistent brand image. It sets you apart from your fellow dental practitioners, enhances brand recognition and brand loyalty while propagating your brand story among the right people.

• 24×7 presence

The availability of your website 24/7 allows your potential patients to reach out to you at any time of the day and night, make an appointment without interacting with office staff, find answers to their questions through blogs and other knowledge resources on your website. It also frees up your back office staff time. Win-win!

• Measuring KPIs

Your website helps you decide whether your marketing campaign is on track to achieve your KPIs or falter. With various available tools like Google Analytics, it is easy to track KPIs and goals and find areas that need improvement or modification.

• Reputation

In today’s digital world, it is imperative to secure and strengthen your patients’ trust. A website is the building block for establishing such credibility.  When you share knowledge with new visitors via various resources on your website, it further augments your credibility. The result?

You received rave reviews on Google and social media and glowing testimonials on your website. And this, in turn, helps your SEO as Google assigns huge weightage to your online reputation as a ranking factor. Talk about killing two birds with one stone!

 

Website Structure

Your website structure is essentially the layout that strengthens it from the very core and involves organizing the content and information related to your practice thoughtfully so that visitors can easily find what they want.

 

A proper website architecture focuses on user-friendliness and should make it accessible for search engines like Google to crawl and index the website pages for SEO ranking.

Mentioned below are a few vital parameters that influence the structure of a website.

 

• Information structure

As the number of your website pages grows with loads of information, it may hinder the overall site structure and affect user experience. To ensure the website structure’s robustness, organizing the content and its flow throughout the website becomes crucial. The menus need to be categorized correctly to ensure that the structure stays in order even when new information is added to the site.

 

• Content relevance

The accuracy and quality of content and knowledge resources shared on your website play a significant role in attracting the right audience. It encourages them to revisit your website and rely on your brand and more likely to convert into new patient appointments.

From a technical standpoint, content hierarchy and internal linking between articles are especially relevant in website structure. It helps Google and other search engines crawl the website and accurately understand what each web page is about before indexing it and ranking it on search results.

 

• User experience

Your website’s layout or structure goes a long way in delivering a flawless user experience or UX. An intuitive UI and UX design help visitors fulfill their purpose quickly and increasing the user experience satisfaction rate, which plays a significant role in SEO ranking. 

For instance, integrating a booking engine into your website will simplify visitors’ appointment scheduling and increase your site conversions. It also sends a signal to search engines about your site’s good user experience, and they rank you higher on SERP.

• Internal linking structure

Internal links are vital to the primary navigational purpose of a website. The internal linking structure connects one webpage to another and enforces straightforward navigability for website visitors. It also ensures the correctness of the hierarchy of information available on your website, which ultimately boosts your search engine rankings.

A conversion-oriented site structure focuses on several aspects of your website that include:

1. Target audience and buyer personas
2. User Interface Design (UI)
3. User Experience (UX)
4. Website Responsiveness (Mobile Friendly)
5. Website Loading Speed
6. SEO Optimized

 

 

The Target Audience

Today, there are hundreds and thousands of dental websites that most of them have almost nil or a low patient acquisition rate. 

Why do you think this happens? Well, it is because they do not know who their website should be appealing to. It is crucial to develop a conversion-focus website based on your objectives, such that you can reach out to the right target audience or the perfect potential patients.

One of the first steps of developing the target audience is to create buyer personas and then using them to target the appropriate audience.

 

What is a buyer persona, and why is it so important?

A buyer persona is a fictional ideal patient type, developed based on various characteristic metrics. The right buyer persona helps you effectively build marketing campaigns, design your office, and create a website that attracts a particular group of patients.

Here are a few crucial steps to creating buyer personas:

• Define who is your potential patient. You need to go into more detail than a simple demographic and understand what your ideal patient needs. Here is the list of some characteristics we use at Dental Marketo:

• • Name
  • Gender
  • Age range
  • Job title
  • Education
  • Marital Status
  • Region
  • Salary
  • Insurance type
  • Oral Health problem
  • Lifestyle
  • Family size
  • …

 

• What are their interests?

Are they members of a group, local community, or shopping online? 

• How do they consume content? 

Are they reading a specific blog, following particular Instagram pages?

• Conceptualize three to ten buyer personas. Each buyer persona can have a specific design and marketing strategy.

Now is the time to share all these personas with every team involved in your practice growth strategy, including your website design and marketing agency. The buyer personas will create a clear pathway for your communication and marketing decisions, and once they are in place, targeting your audience will be more comfortable. 

 

“The more extensive the list of your ideal patient characteristics, the better the targeting shall be. “

User Interface Design – UI

The look and feel of the user interface (UI) are among the most critical factors of website design because it creates the first impression of your practice in patients’ minds. Research suggests that more than 75% of people decide to go with a brand based on how its website looks like. 

 

A poorly done UI is the main reason most people leave a website and never revisit it. On the other hand, a well-designed UI has many substantial benefits that provide your dental practice with a strong edge over your competitors. 

 

Why do you need a customized website for your practice?

The goal of designing a conversion-oriented website is to offer as much simplicity and efficiency to its visitors as possible. In this case, a customized website helps in achieving these targets and more. 

 

1. Every Dental practice is unique. Each dentistry offers various services and treatments based at different locations and has a diverse target audience. A template-based website fails to acknowledge and integrate these differences and adopts a ‘one size fits all’ approach, which deprives you of the opportunity to leverage your uniqueness. 

 

2. Customization is the essence of branding. And it is thus impossible to do proper and correct branding if you don’t have a custom website. Integrating the various branding elements unique to your website is not possible on a template website. You just won’t stand out from your competition, and the visitors will get a sense of deja vu when they visit your website, as they would have already seen your competitors’ website before. Ultimately, you’ll just end up losing potential patients to your rivals. 

 

3. A template-based website will have more or less the same content as your rivals do. This will severely hamper your SEO process as the website can’t be correctly optimized if it doesn’t have unique and relevant content that the audience is looking for. Your rankings will drop, and you’ll be losing YOUR patients to your competitors again. Ouch!

 

Customization makes your website not only useful but also interactive. Unlike standard templates, a customized website interface offers greater control to visitors, promoting better engagement. A customized website can dynamically cater to patients’ evolved expectations and help you stand out amidst the crowd, which static, standard templates fail to achieve.

 

 

What are the benefits of a good UI?

• Enhances customer satisfaction – Surveys conducted worldwide suggest that a great UI facilitates higher user engagement levels on a website and improves patient satisfaction, ultimately resulting in better conversion rates.

 

• Lower bounce rate – A study by Microsoft shows that humans’ attention spans are up to 8 seconds. So ideally, within these eight seconds, visitors on your website decide whether to stay or leave your site. If the UI and content are in sync, then it is likely that your clients will spend a considerable amount of time on your website.

 

• Boosts brand value – Great UI creates a lasting impression and builds credible brand value. Truth be told, if people don’t find your website good enough in terms of look and feel, then their idea about your brand also gets impacted.

Convert more website traffic – The internet is highly competitive, no doubt about that. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of local dentist websites that will offer the same kind of products or services you provide. A great UI makes your practice stand out of the crowd and generate more new patient appointments easier.

 

 

User Experience – UX 

The number one goal in designing a dental website is to generate new patient appointments. Before creating your website, make sure to keep your user experience in mind because how visitors interact with your site smoothly and seamlessly plays a massive role in user engagement and conversion rate. 

More than 70% of dental websites lose new patients to their competitors every day because of bad UX design.

 

What are some of the significant benefits of good UX?

1. Increase patient acquisition rate – The simple fact is that your website with a well-planned user experience is beneficial for the patients, gains their trust, and encourages them to make appointments with your practice.
2. Intuitive, easy navigation – Good UX indicates that website navigation should be easy and hassle-free to use and not take more than a couple of clicks to move from one page to another. An intuitive flow is essential to create a pleasant user experience and help them find all the vital information they are looking for, such as where to book an appointment, FAQ page, phone number, and address.
3. Great UX boosts SEO – Google’s search engine algorithm gives enormous weightage to various user experience matrix on a website like bounce rate, page load speed, content relevancy, and navigation structure to boost a website’s SEO rankings. A boost to SEO means increasing your website rankings on search engines, positively influencing your online visibility, more organic traffic, and generating new patient appointments.
4. Enhances patient engagement – Your patients will remain engaged with your website if designed using the right UX principles. This means that new patients will spend more time exploring your website, which will increase the engagement rates, lower bounce rate, improve ranking on search engines, and increase conversion rate.
5. A clear competitive edge – When competing with other dental clinics’ websites, a particular dental clinic can have an advantage, as far as patients’ interaction is concerned with a proper UX. Various features such as “optimization for mobile use” and “no need for double clicks for zooming” drastically improve the user experience, which in turn invokes the patients’ interests.

 

 

WEB PAGES

Why do people visit a dental website? Just to read pompous paragraphs saying how much better you are than your competitors? Not. People visit a dental website to get information that will help THEM. 

Here are 6 kinds of information they may seek on a dental website:

• Find the contact information of your practice, such as your address and phone number.
• Learn more about your team and your areas of expertise, ideally with some photo and video evidence
• Read patient testimonials that convince them that you may be the right dental practice for them.
• To schedule an appointment.
• To know more about dental procedures, they are going to need immediately or soon.
• To get dental and oral care tips that will help them maintain and enhance their oral health.

Without web pages that quickly provide patients such information, your website will fail to provide relevant information and knowledge to patients and create the desired impact. Whether it is educational content or business information that your visitors seek, you must include some web pages mandatorily to set the right impression.

A conversion-oriented website should include pages such as:

 

• “Meet the Team” Page

Potential patients want to fetch as much information as possible about the dentist they want to visit. Given the abundance of dental clinics today, it can be daunting to decide on the right one. Displaying details about credentials, specialties, and achievements of the dentist(s) is vital to establishing credibility and gaining the visitor’s trust.

 

Apart from that, a crisp yet informative “About” page that provides the much-needed information about your dental clinic, support staff, and their expertise, facilities, and other crucial highlights, will also be beneficial. Remember, providing authentic information is critical to offer confidence to new patients who want to visit your clinic for the first time.

 

• Financial Page

This page will offer all the details related to what insurances, payment plans, and methods acceptable at your clinic. It is crucial to keep the information as precise and understandable as possible to avoid any ambiguity.

 

• Office Tour

A virtual tour of your dental clinic provides a realistic idea of the office and facilities to patients who plan to visit for the first time. This is an effective way to create a solid first impression and garner trust.

 

• Forms

This page helps patients gain access to documents and paperwork; they can instantly fill out and submit or take a printout at home before they arrive for their appointment.

 

• Before & After

It is crucial to show the result of dental procedures undertaken at your clinic, before and after it happens. This is another way of gaining the trust of new patients and increases the conversion rate.

 

• Promotion

Use this page to your benefit by displaying deals and offers that prospective patients will find impossible to refuse. You can even use this page for online advertisements on Facebook Ads and Google Adwords.

 

• Service Pages

Website pages should include all critical services, like whether you treat children, provide cosmetic dentistry, low pain laser treatments, etc. It is better to have a separate page for each product and “related services” rather than cramming them into a single page.

 

• Location and operating hours

Having a consistent Name, Address, and Phone Number on your website’s home page and footer is essential. And dedicate a separate page for details like the NAP information, business hours, and map.

 

• Online Appointments

With the “online appointment booking” option, both your staff’s time and energy and the patients are saved. With a significant increase in tech-savvy patients, it is useful to have an option that allows them to directly book appointments instantly on the phone.

 

• Testimonials – Genuine testimonials from your earlier and regular patients help new patients better connect with your practice and create a sense of confidence and trust in their minds.

 

 

Add-on tools

Studies suggest that the general global attention span has significantly declined even compared to the average of 12 seconds recorded in 2000. With the instant availability of information on the internet, this observation makes more sense than ever. 

People search businesses on the go and prefer easily navigable sites and getting things done for them on their smartphones. Whether it is booking appointments online, or seeking answers to questions, integrating certain add-on tools like chatbots and online appointment booking tools on your website is a brilliant way to bring promptness and convenience to your visitors. Moreover, there are various benefits that you also derive here.

 

Dental Chatbot benefits for dentistry?

Chatbots are the latest means of garnering productivity out of your dental clinic’s website. Some of the most significant advantages of integrating chatbots on your website include:

Generate Patient Appointments: By answering patients’ common questions about booking appointments 24/7 and make appointment booking easy for the website visitor.

Saves time and effort: Chatbots can be programmed to carry out repetitive tasks like answering common questions and simple queries, things that do not necessarily require human efforts. This saves a lot of extra effort and time and frees up your human workforce to focus on more critical jobs.

No more waiting: Calling up your dental clinic only to stay in a long queue can be extremely frustrating for patients, especially when they have an urgent query like check the availability of free slots for a same-day appointment. Chatbots eliminate the waiting time for your patients – they can simply place their questions to the chatbots and get them answered quickly.

Feedback: Chatbots are an excellent means of gathering returning visitors and patients’ feedback about your dental clinic and its services. Getting feedback is one of the best ways to enhance the user experience, and using chatbots for the purpose makes the process streamlined and authentic.

 

Why is an online appointment booking tool vital for dental practices? 

Online appointment booking tools are beneficial not just for your patients but also for your practice. 

Firstly, your patients can quickly check availability, book an appointment, and reschedule appointments as per their convenience without calling your dental office or wait over the weekend to get a call back from your office staff. This reduces the duration of the entire appointment scheduling process and gives you an advantage over your competitors.

Now, wondering how your practice can benefit from this? Well, there are benefits aplenty like:

• All-time availability: Your dental clinic is practically always available to schedule appointments, even during non-business hours or holidays, whenever it is convenient for them. This service significantly increases the number of new appointment appointments.
• Customer experience: As we have mentioned earlier, booking engines offer a certain degree of convenience and flexibility to patients, which scores very high in customer experience.
• Reduces no-shows: If you require your patients to prepay for an appointment, you can be sure that those who have already paid will surely visit your clinic. This leads to lower or zero no-shows. Besides, the prepayment option automatically streamlines the financial transactions that take place.
• Business insights – Online booking engines offer an analytics dashboard that helps you evaluate and develop your marketing strategy, office staff proficiency, and patient satisfaction rate. Here are some useful insights you would get from your booking engine:
  • How many appointments confirmed
  • How many appointments missed
  • How many appointments confirmed for which service
  • How many appointments generates for each provider
  • Which promotions generated the most appointment
  •  this data available on the dashboard, and come up with strategies to grow your dental practice.

 

Website Responsiveness (Mobile Friendly)

Nowadays, along with general aesthetics, it is equally essential for a conversion-oriented website to have a mobile-friendly layout. Because people heavily depend on their smartphones. They continually check things on the internet, watch movies, shop, play games, and similarly want to book their medical and dentist appointment on the go.

For instance, a potential patient decides to visit your website on their smartphone and find that the website is too small or haphazard, and it is not compatible with their mobile device. It is sure to create a negative impression, even drive them away from your site!

“With more than 260 million smartphone users in the U.S., your website needs to offer a seamless user experience on all platforms, especially smartphones.” 

 

What are the benefits of a mobile-friendly dental website? 

Besides, a mobile-friendly dental website generates more new patients and leads; it also brings forth several advantages, such as:

• Website speed equals higher ROI

A responsive web design accounts for the optimal loading speed of your website on mobile phones. A website that loads faster leads to an impressive user experience. It also results in lower bounce rates and reduces the waste of your advertising budget.

• Fetch real-time metrics

Using smart tools like Google Analytics, you can easily monitor how many mobile phone-users from what kind of devices have visited or are visiting your website in real-time. This information clarifies how you can modify strategies and offer promotions to attract them.

• Suitable viewing on all devices – Users don’t like to pinch and zoom or adjust the website’s orientation on their mobile screens. The website’s layout should adapt automatically depending on the screen size to offer a streamlined viewing experience across multiple platforms and devices.
• Higher SEO ranking

Google and other search engines are now paying critical importance to mobile-friendly websites and user experience. Mobile-friendly websites are now highly favored by Google and other search engines. This means that websites with a mobile-friendly design will enjoy a certain competitive edge over others, as far as page ranking is concerned.

• Social media friendly

Social media sharing capabilities are one of the main factors of mobile-responsive website design. It offers a seamless user experience, increases user engagement, and brings with it endless business opportunities that you can leverage.

• Minimizes bounce rates

Responsive websites show lower bounce rates, and they load faster. By bounce rate, we mean how many visitors leave the website landing page without exploring the website. An optimum bounce rate is best for your website ranking and conversion rate, and responsive design helps achieve that.

 

 

Website Loading Speed

The site loading speed indicates how fast a browser can fully display all the contents of your website, each page at a time. It depends on the technology and architecture used for site development, the size of images, videos, other files present, database technology, and the design. 

 

What factors are affected by website speed?
Below mentioned are a few factors that can be impacted by the loading speed of your website.

 

• Conversion rate – The conversion rate indicates how fast patients can complete their desired actions. A fast website will swiftly facilitate patients to schedule dental appointments through a website or submit requests for online consultation in the dental industry. The bottom line is, the higher the speed, the better the conversion rate.

 

• Bounce rate – The bounce rate reduces by leaps and bounds when pages load faster because when visitors get bored of slow-loading websites, they tend to leave the site way before they are supposed to.

 

• SEO rankings – Even SEO best practices list the speed of the website as a critical factor. Slow websites are generally ranked lower by search engines.

 

• Affects UX: Studies suggest at least 40% of visitors leave websites immediately if it takes more than 5 seconds to load. It is crucial to deliver an impeccable user experience to acquire more new patients. Your website should download as fast as possible so that they do not leave impatiently before finding out how you can make a difference to them.

 

 

How to improve website speed

As people get more and more attached to their phones and the internet, their attention spans seem to be decreasing. Suppose your website loads faster than your competitors; you’ll get a higher ranking than the competition, and potential patients will find you more favorable. Here are a few tips on how to speed up your website:

 

• Page weight – Page weight refers to those resources that run once a page on your website starts loading, including video, audio files, heavy JavaScript files, CSS files.

 

• Server response time – If a website is hosted on a server in a faraway country, then the loading speed may be considerably slower than if it were hosted in the home town or state from where patients are visiting the site.

 

• Optimize Images: Optimizing images is reducing the size of image files on your website. This means that a browser has to download a lesser volume of bytes, which leads to faster loading of webpages, thereby improving website speed.

Browser Caching: Browser caching helps visitors navigate your website faster and does not load the entire site every time they come to your site. By leveraging browser caching, you can enhance user experience and improve website loading speed.

 

 

SEO Optimized Website

Dental SEO ensures that your website receives maximum search engine visibility, creates continual interest, and helps your dental office attain a steady stream of patients from online organic traffic. Using SEO for dentists give you the upper edge over your competitors and imposes your presence in the local search landscape. 

Your website needs to feature in the top search results. 

 

What are the benefits of having an SEO-friendly website?

 

• Boost in organic traffic

An SEO-friendly design ensures that search engines crawl and index your web pages successfully so that they can connect your website to relevant search queries instantly, thereby driving traffic organically towards it.

 

• More mobile traffic

With the volume of mobile internet traffic increasing to almost 52%, the need for being mobile SEO-friendly is also on the rise. Mobile-friendly websites usually rank higher in search results than others.

 

• More user-friendly

User experience is one of the crucial aspects of SEO and must meet for search engines to push your website to the topmost ranks. It augments your dental clinic’s credibility and makes the selection process easier. People generally consider toppers in the search results to be the best in their respective fields.

 

• Cost-effective

A well-designed, SEO-friendly website ranks better, and the traffic conversion rate increases. This translates to decreased budget waste and more ROI.

 

• Understand patient intentions

User behavior and traffic analysis help you understand what site visitors want and what keywords or subjects are more valuable than others. Once you have the data, you can customize your website content, refine PPC and SEO strategy accordingly to increase the influx of targeted traffic.

 

What are the characteristics of SEO-friendly websites?

 

• Unique, relevant titles and descriptions – When there is no ambiguity in titles and descriptions for all the pages on your website, it becomes easier for the search engines to understand the pages’ content and rank them accordingly.

 

• Properly structured URLs – URLs or the pages’ links should be well formatted and descriptive without being very long. These URLs help again in web page rankings on search engines.

 

• Website speed – The speed of the website is a salient factor. Search engines prefer fast loading websites; on top of being SEO friendly, optimizing the website’s loading speed is also critical.

 

• Quality of content – The content on your website’s pages decides how well it performs in SEO. Unique and quality content without the proper trial of keyword stuffing helps web pages to rank well on search engines. The most SEO-friendly websites have top-class content that is adequate and relevant. 

Use of tags – Image optimization for search engines using proper ALT tags and website structure should also be SEO friendly to ensure that a website ranks well on search engines.

 

 

BLOG

Blogging is an integral part of the content marketing strategy and involves creating high-quality, relevant, and informative content to cater to your target audience’s diverse questions and queries. It is also one of the most crucial factors that influence your website SEO ranking.

Why is blogging vital for your dental website?

 

• Fresh content boosts SEO ranking.

Fresh content boosts the SEO rankings of your website and sustains it. The Google search engine algorithm considers sites without updated content as outdated and irrelevant. Refreshed content also helps better ranking for targeted keywords, as you add value to your readers. This, in turn, enhances the time they spend on your website, which again boosts SEO ranking.

 

• Patient Retention – Good blogs containing a lot of in-depth and expert information about various dentistry topics can make you an industry leader. One of the significant benefits of this process is that it builds a trust level among your patients and persuades them to keep returning to your website, searching for more information. This, in turn, promotes the inundation of high-quality traffic to your website.
• Blogs + social media, a match made in heaven – Combining the blogs properly with social media will help you drive excellent traffic to your website. It will also help local audiences who are on social media to find your website. 

If the quality of the content is good, then it will get the right amount of likes and shares across various social media platforms and may go on to become a viral topic as well. The result is simple, attractive, and that is high-quality traffic every time, all the time.

 

• Relationship with patients – Sharing blogs and news with your patients via email campaigns help you deepen and strengthen your relationship with your patients. With the high-quality and in-depth information that you provide in your blogs, they will look forward to getting educated on your content. This will make sure that the relationship strengthens over time, and you continue to get a good number of appointments and referrals without any patient acquisition cost.

 

 

Website Pricing Models

Having and maintaining a website does not come free of cost, of course, and depending on the type and size of the website, the interim prices vary as well. Typically for a dental clinic or a dental office, your website will be a mid-sized one with adequate information, and there can be multiple usability features alongside. In general, there is two standard website pricing model in the dental industry: 

1. The monthly payment model
2. One-time payment model

 

These models come with some positives and negatives listed below to help you decide which model to choose.

 

Monthly payment Model

 

Pros

• Generally, the monthly payment includes setup costs, maintenance costs, hosting fees, and domain charges.
• Technical support, maintenance, and more flexibility regarding your website’s features is an advantage of this model. You do not pay for services or functionalities that you do not need, making it a more reasonable option. 
• Monthly payments are lower compared to a single upfront payment.

 

Cons

• It is like leasing your website rather than owning it. However, some companies transfer website ownership once the client pays off the entire contract.
• It is like a contract-based website where you need to abide by a lease term of one or two years or more.

 

One-Time Payment Model

 

Pros

• When you are opting for the one-time payment for a website, then in all probability, your website developer is charging you in a model known as SaaP or software as a product. Here the website is developed as one single unit, and you make a single payment to own the website for a lifetime without worrying about any further costs later on.

 Cons

• You should pay the maintenance cost, hosting, and domain charges separately. The domain costs come every year, and website hosting and website maintenance costs are billed monthly or annually.
• One-time payment means that you pay the entire amount for the website on handover. The amount to be paid can be hefty for a single payment option, so the upfront charge is usually high, especially for startups and newly established practices.
• Websites are not static things, and various issues like updates and bug-fixes keep coming in due time. In the SaaP model, you need to pay separately for these, and the cost is generally high.

 

 

Website Maintenance

With the constant evolution of technology, your website’s various components and codes should update to ensure faultless performance. Failure to make upgrades on time, or incompatibility with technologies, can create defects in the site functionality. 

It is always better to keep a long-term website maintenance plan to avoid paying extra in the long run. 

 

What are the benefits of regular website maintenance? 

• Cut overhead costs

Failure to maintain and upgrade your website on time can lead to unnecessary pitfalls later on, which involve higher expenses to make things right. It can even lead to downtime of your website, which implies the loss of leads and business. Regular website maintenance can prevent such untoward incidents and save money.

 

• Security and protection

Rising incidents of hacking are one of the major global concerns. Older websites and those that are not maintained regularly are more prone to security gaps and preferred by hackers. A professional maintenance team prevents your websites from getting hacked with top-notch security features.

 

• Timely upgrades – The website needs to be upgraded continuously as per the architectural updates and compatibility with the latest tools and algorithms. Skipping any update can have serious-implications, hampering the integrity of the website and its functionality.

 

• Backup – Website maintenance allows you to have a reliable backup of your website that can be used for recovery if a website crash or some other emergency. Having a backup can save you considerable time and funds needed to develop a website from scratch again.

 

• Performance – Adding new features and functionalities on time ensures better website performance. Furthermore, the website’s usability also improves, and the patients visiting the website have a better experience while navigating through your website.

 

• Speed and UX – Lack of maintenance can hinder the speed of your website. And this, in turn, negatively impacts the user experience too. Regular maintenance and updates are an absolute must to avoid such incidents.

 

 

Conclusion

Website designing is tricky because creativity, technical knowledge, and professionalism design a perfect website that pays off with many conversions. 

At Dental Marketo, we use technology-driven solutions to create a website representing what your practice stands for and facilitates easy conversions. We believe that the primary goal of any dental website is to acquire new patient appointments. We also understand that each practice is unique and has a different approach to attracting its target audience. So, we tailor websites based on the specific needs and goals of each dental practice.

Our website design team has helped dozens of our clients achieve a minimum 43% increase in conversion rate by creating a patient-friendly and conversion-friendly website for them. 

Get in touch with one of our digital technology managers today for your new website project or evaluate your current website design.