How to audit your own dental website in an afternoon

A stranger decides whether to trust your practice in a few seconds, on a phone, before they ever call. The useful thing is that you can run the exact check they run — and it costs nothing but an afternoon. No developer, no login. What follows walks through the five things that decide whether that stranger becomes a booked patient, in the order a patient meets them.

The five checks, the way a patient runs them

• Found. Search your practice by name on your phone, then search "dentist" and your town. Most "dentist near me" searches resolve in the Google map box, above any website, so this is where the patient starts. Is your listing there, claimed, with the right category, current hours, and details that match your site? The biggest lever on whether you appear is your primary category — the annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey, run by Whitespark, has put it at the top for years.
• Trusted. Open the site on the phone. Does it look like the practice you are today, or an earlier chapter? Look for real faces with real names, the qualifications a nervous patient wants, and reviews from this year rather than the last decade. A copyright date from years ago quietly asks "are they even still open?"
• Converts. Try to reach yourself the way an anxious patient would. Is there a tap-to-call button, a WhatsApp option, a way to book online? On a phone, is the number actually tappable? Most South Africans would rather message than phone, so a call-only site turns away the patients hardest to win.
• Functions. Run your homepage through Google's free PageSpeed Insights on mobile. Google's Core Web Vitals call it good if the main content appears within 2.5 seconds and poor beyond four — on a phone many sites take far longer, and most visitors will not wait. Tap every menu link to check it goes where it says, and confirm the padlock (https) is there.
• Compliant. Read your own copy with a cold eye. "Completely safe", "painless", "the best", or any guarantee is a problem under Rule 3 of the HPCSA's Ethical Rules of Conduct. And if your contact form collects personal details, check there is a privacy notice — its absence is a POPIA gap.

Run the fixes in roughly the order of return on your time:

The afternoon, in order

• Found and Converts first. Claim and tidy the Google listing; add a tappable number and a WhatsApp button. Free, fast, and where patients quietly leak out.
• Compliant next. Reword the safety, guarantee and superiority lines. A copy pass, not a rebuild.
• Trusted and Functions last. Current photos, real reviews and load speed usually need design or development work — the bigger job, worth planning rather than rushing.

Across the practice sites we audit, the pattern barely changes: the two things almost everyone gets wrong are the listing and the way in — a profile nobody has touched since it was set up, and a site whose only contact route is a phone call. The site usually looks dated too, but that is the expensive fix. If you do one thing this afternoon, start with the first two; they cost nothing, and they are where the bookings are going elsewhere.

This is the same examination we run for a practice before we rebuild anything, and we will gladly do it for you and show you what we find, at no charge. But none of it is a secret, and the afternoon above is yours to run today.