You are a dental practice owner in a Melbourne suburb, looking at the website you built five years ago and deciding whether to rebuild or refresh it. A friend in a less regulated industry tells you websites are mostly the same these days. Pick a template, add your logo, get it live. That advice does not apply here.
Websites for dentists, and for medical practices generally, sit in a unique space. Every element carries more weight than on most business sites. The regulations around what you can say add a layer of care. The cost of getting it wrong, whether in complaints to AHPRA or in patients losing trust, is higher than in most industries.
At CJ Digital we have built and managed websites for practices in this space. The work is closer in and more deliberate than a standard business website build. The sections below cover the considerations a practice owner works through when building or rebuilding a site. None of this is legal or compliance advice. For that, the practice's medical defence organisation (MDO) or AHPRA directly are the right sources.
Practitioner biographies do a lot of work on a healthcare website. They are the page practice owners tend to scrutinise most carefully, and for good reason. The details on the page shape the practice's presentation to anyone researching clinicians before they book.
Common inclusions:
The "specialises in" language is worth a specific flag. AHPRA's advertising guidelines restrict the use of words like "specialist", "specialty" and "specialises" to practitioners who hold specialist registration in a recognised speciality. Using those terms in biography copy when they do not apply is a common advertising breach. If there is any doubt, check the practitioner's AHPRA registration category before the copy goes live, or check the wording with the practice's MDO.
Online booking is often the first feature a practice owner asks for. It looks simple from the outside. One button on the website, the patient books themselves, the front desk gets their afternoons back.
The decision is less simple than it looks. It sits across three dimensions:
The decision is not whether to add online booking. It is which appointment types to make bookable, through which integration, and with what reminder and cancellation setup around it.
Every healthcare practice serves patients with low vision, cognitive disabilities, motor impairments or age-related access needs. A website that does not work for those patients is a website that turns them away.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, published by the W3C in October 2023 and approved as an international standard (ISO/IEC 40500:2025) in October 2025, set the baseline. For new website builds the practical target is Level AA.
WCAG organises accessibility under four principles:
On a medical or dental site, the practical checks that fail most often are colour contrast on body text, missing alt text on photos of the clinic, forms that do not label their fields for screen readers, and hover-only menus that keyboard users cannot reach. None of these are expensive to fix if caught during the build. All of them are costly to retrofit after launch.
A common consideration for practice owners is that a healthcare website handles two kinds of enquiry at once. Urgent enquiries (a toothache, or a symptom someone wants seen today) tend to need a phone number visible immediately. Routine enquiries (someone researching a procedure weeks before booking) tend to need written information and an after-hours contact option.
Layouts that handle both:
The common error is stripping everything back to a form only. It signals that the practice does not want to take calls, which is a poor fit for a service many people still book by phone.
Reviews are the most misunderstood part of a healthcare website. The reason is that two rules apply at once.
AHPRA's advertising guidelines state that testimonials about clinical aspects of a regulated health service cannot be used in advertising the practice controls. That covers quotes on the website, quotes in brochures, reposted reviews on the practice's social media, and any material the practice can edit. Reviews posted on third-party sites the practice does not control sit outside that rule, as long as the practice does not repost, quote or respond in ways that highlight clinical content.
In practical terms for a healthcare website:
| Element | Can go on a practice website? |
|---|---|
| Testimonial about treatment outcomes or clinical experience | No |
| Testimonial about non-clinical experience (reception, wait time, accessibility) | Generally yes |
| Case study or before-and-after that showcases specific clinical results | Use with significant caution; check with the MDO |
| Link out to the practice's Google Business Profile | Yes |
| Statement that the practice welcomes feedback on Google | Yes |
| Response to a Google review that confirms or denies clinical detail | No |
| Response to a Google review thanking the patient in general terms | Yes |
This is a part of the build worth half an hour with the practice's MDO before the content is finalised. The guidelines have specific wording the MDO will be familiar with.
Healthcare advertising in Australia is regulated under Section 133 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law and the AHPRA advertising guidelines. The penalties for non-compliance are real. Following the 2022 amendments to the National Law, the maximum penalty is up to $60,000 per offence for an individual practitioner and up to $120,000 per offence for a body corporate.
The guidelines are updated periodically. The Guidelines for advertising higher risk non-surgical cosmetic procedures, which took effect on 2 September 2025, are the most recent example. Any claim in this article about current AHPRA rules should be verified against the guidelines at ahpra.gov.au/advertising-hub before it is applied to a live site.
The build-side team's job is to flag language, images and features that look risky in a draft and to give the practice time to check anything borderline with their MDO before launch. Compliance sign-off sits with the practice. Website builders who claim they can certify an AHPRA-compliant site are overreaching. The party that signs off on compliant advertising is the practitioner responsible for it, advised by a body that does compliance work for a living.
The shortcut often pitched to dental and medical practice owners is a template-based website that promises it is "built for healthcare". The issue is that every practice is slightly different. The mix of services, the patient demographic, the practice management system in the back end, the appointment types that should be bookable online, and the practitioners' specific registration categories all shape what belongs on the site and what does not. A template can give a starting point. It cannot replace the decisions the practice owner has to make.
If you are a dental or medical practice owner thinking about a website rebuild, we have been through this with practices on the build side before. Get in touch and we can walk through what the considerations look like for your specific practice.
Elliot Jackson is the founder and CEO of CJ Digital, a premier web design and digital marketing agency based in Melbourne, Australia. With over 15 years of experience in the web design and digital marketing industry, Elliot has a wealth of knowledge in web development, lead generation, B2B sales, client account management, demographic research, product development, and digital marketing.
Elliot established Castle Jackson Digital Marketing in 2014 after gaining extensive experience in various sales and marketing roles. He trained in Advertising at Swinburne University of Technology and has since been dedicated to helping small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) enhance their online presence and grow their businesses.
