What a finished dental website costs if you build it yourself

The advertised cost of building your own dental website is close to zero, and the true cost is easy to run out. Here is the honest version, item by item, from someone who builds these for a living and knows exactly where the hours go.

The things money buys

The domain runs somewhere in the teens of dollars a year, and it should be registered in the practice name from day one. Hosting, if you pay for it rather than building static files, is a few dollars a month on a plan that will actually survive a spike. That is the small part.

The part that is not money

Then comes the work. Getting a homepage, services, about, new patients and contact pages writing well and loading fast: plan days, not evenings, if you have never shipped a site, and weeks if the first attempt was made with a page builder and you now have to undo its assumptions. Text is the slow part even for a practiced hand: every page has to say something a patient would actually read, and the hours and services must match your listing to the minute.

Then maintenance. You are now your own registrar, host, certificate renewer, and the person who finds out the booking button broke on an iPhone update.

Where DIY usually ends

One of three endings, all common. The site ships and works, and the practice has both money and time invested but real ownership, which is the good outcome. It half-ships: a homepage, service pages more or less done, and everything after that stays a task forever. Or it never ships at all, because the busy season came and the practice went back to the existing site or to a Facebook page.

The price of skipping it

Since the build is the expensive part of DIY, it is worth knowing what the same build costs from us. $249, once. That is the finished site, built by us, handed over, and you host it wherever you like. If you want it run as well, $399 once, on your own domain. The full offer is on the pricing page, and the process, which starts at no cost, is here.

DIY is a legitimate choice if you have the evenings. If you do not, the build you would have spent months on is a link away: send us your practice details, read the finished site, and the FAQ covers what happens if you do not want it.