$1,000 to $10,000 is the Typical Cost of a Medical Website Design

Hands exchanging money with a medical website on a monitor on the background
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How much does a healthcare website cost?

A decent medical website template can cost around $1,000 to $2,000 in initial fees and between $50 to $100 in monthly fees. Some companies offer a template with no setup fees and small monthly payments, but we had a hard time finding one that is worth considering for private practices. A custom website is a different story. The range starts at around $5,000 to over $10,000, depending on the type of website, specialty, and scope of work. Monthly fees for custom websites usually start at $100 per month. Higher monthly fees include some marketing services in general. And there is the option of semi-custom websites that cost something in between.

O360 Ad - Medical Web Design

But, the real answer to what you should expect as the right price for your new website is that ‘it depends.’ 

When you’re running a private practice, whether it’s dental, OBGYN, dermatology, pediatric, or any other specialty, you’re juggling more balls than you can count:

• Interviewing and hiring staff
• Finding the right DAs and nurses to add to your team
• Selecting and furnishing the right office space at the right price
• Ensuring all computer and insurance billing systems work smoothly
• Selecting the right advertising media

And, of course, actually providing top-tier medical service to your patients!

On top of all that, you also need to figure out a budget for your practice’s website. How much should you pay? Is a custom design worth it? What about do-it-yourself options?

If you think back, you may remember wondering: will paying more for my site bring me more value in terms of patients and revenue?

With everything else you must juggle, you may let web design fall by the wayside and go with a default choice. But, a solid web presence is critical for a modern, growing medical or dental practice of any specialty.

You already know you only get one chance to make a great first impression. In today’s digital age, your website will often be that first impression.

Research All Your Options When Looking For A New Medical Website Design
Do your homework, research all available options, and weigh the pros and cons.

How much does a medical cost?

The real question: how much to invest?

Yes… how much do you spend to get that awesome website? The one that makes a prospective patient think, “This doctor/dentist looks like the most professional, knowledgeable, and qualified in my city. They can solve my problems: I’m calling and booking an appointment now.”

To figure out how much to invest, I suggest you consider your website an investment. Investments are different from consumer expenses, like buying hats, football tickets, or pizzas, in that they provide a return. You’re putting money into the investment with the hope and expectation that this prudent choice will provide you with more ongoing money.

O360 Ad - Medical Web Design

See, the truth is that your website doesn’t exist to look “pretty” for its own sake but to serve a valuable purpose:

  • To connect prospective patients
  • To your practice
  • To welcome and entice them,
  • To convert them from prospective patients into satisfied, honored, and loyal patients of your practice.

The better the website, in other words, the better the return on investment.

In the rest of this article, I’ll do my best to illustrate to you the merits of two different, common options medical professionals use when investing in web design services.

You can compare the merits of these web design options and reach your own conclusion on how much you’d need to invest in your practice.

For the sake of an easy explanation, I’m going to offer you the story of two doctors, Dr. Adams and Dr. Baker. Both of them needed new websites. They practice in the same city, are about the same age, and are at the same career stage. They have the same number of patients and the same quality of office staff.

The only difference, and the only one we’re interested in, is how much they invest in their new website. Dr. Adams paid $1,000 for a clean template and managed it himself, and Dr. Baker paid $10,000 for a high-end custom site and had the company manage it for $100/month.

Three options

Let’s start with Dr. Adams. He feels that it’s time he got a new website. He knows how important this investment is to his practice’s growth. What he doesn’t know is which web design route to take.

From researching online, he realizes he has three broad options:

Template Website

(smallest upfront investment, least professional help): Dr. Adams could use a “do it yourself” website builder like he’s seen advertised online and on YouTube. This would involve the smallest monetary investment on his part but would provide the least professional advice, feedback, and professionally customized features. He’d basically be building the whole site himself. His practice is doing well, so he thinks he should invest more than this.

Dental Website Templates Pbhs
Example of the template websites that belongs to different dental practices

Option 2 (greatest upfront investment, most professional help): At a dinner party, over glasses of wine and plates of grilled salmon and vegetables, his friend Charlie got on the topic of his work: professional, custom website and app design. Charlie explains that he and his design team can have deep and thorough conversations with all sorts of clients to help realize the features and aesthetics that will go the furthest towards growing their business. He explains that a custom website will stand out and give potential customers the best image of professionalism and value.

Dr. Adams finds this all extremely appealing! He wants that level of expertise on his side and his website to make his practice stand out. But Charlie’s cost estimate of $10,000 makes Dr. Adams hesitant.

Maybe he can get the same value for less?

Option 3 (the “middle ground”): As a prudent shopper, Dr. Adams chooses the option that seems to offer the middle ground: he pays $2,500 for a semi-custom template.

Semi-Custom Website

At first, this seems like a great middle ground! Dr. Adams communicates with one of the company’s designers in response to a brief email survey, and then once over the phone, and gets a recommendation on a template to use. The designer assures him that this template is the best for a medical practice and that “every” doctor he’s worked for has used it.

There were only a few options to choose from, so Dr. Adams has some suspicions that this same template is frequently has been used for various other businesses, like shoe retailers, restaurants, hairdressers, or tour guides… but, the layout does has lots of pictures he provided of himself and his staff and office. It does look good, with his name emblazoned across the top of the page in a font the designer strongly suggested.

And he got this site up and running and looking pretty good for only $2,500!

Yet, Dr. Adams can’t help feeling uneasy in his gut. Does the site really feel like him? Does it convey the value of his practice on an emotional and technical level? It doesn’t really highlight the expertise in procedures he most wanted to emphasize. And the layout looks so familiar… he swears he’s seen sites with all the tabs, drop-down menus, and image slideshows in the same places, even with the same fonts and colors.

He thinks back to his conversation with Charlie at the dinner party and his comments on how much of complete custom work his company has done lately for dentists, hospitals, and even health insurers. He thinks about that friend’s designs and how unique, practical, and perfect they all looked for who they represented.

He wonders if he should have invested more in this critical part of his practice.

Back to the results of Dr. Adams’ website in a moment.

But first, how did it go for Dr. Baker?

You Will Find That Custom Built Websites Are A Greater Investment.

Fully Custom Design

Dr. Baker learned of a fully custom web design service through his research online. He looked at their value proposition, history, examples, and pricing. Getting a fully custom website package through them with all the features he wanted would indeed cost about $10,000, significantly more than “off the shelf” options for $1,000.

Dr. Baker thinks of the potential return on investment and chooses to go with this $10,000 design service. He thinks of how much revenue the average patient brings to his practice in a month, in a year (then five years, ten years…) compared to the upfront cost of the more custom, higher quality website. He begins to visualize how much bigger his return on investment can be. So he pulls the trigger.

Over the phone, he has an enjoyable and engaging conversation with the designer, who asks him all kinds of questions about himself, his practice, and what value his practice provides. The doctor can proudly talk about the areas of his specialty where he makes the biggest difference in his patients’ quality of life and what his patients have said they like best about him and his practice. The designer asks questions the doctor wouldn’t have even thought of himself, but that gives great insight into what the site should emphasize.

There’s plenty of back-and-forth info exchange about the design process. Ultimately, Dr. Baker is blown away by his custom site’s sleekness, uniqueness, and practicality. It functions just as well on mobile devices as on PC screens, its SEO (search engine optimization) is top-notch to reach more prospective patients, it loads fast, it’s helpful to patients, and it looks like his practice.

From the moment he looks around his new site, Dr. Baker already feels he’s gotten his money’s worth!

Results for the two doctors:

Both doctors earned new patients and new revenue due to their new websites.

But the difference in quantity was tremendous.

With his semi-custom site, Dr. Adams could attribute $20,000 in new patient revenue that year due to prospective patients finding him through the website. Not too bad for the $2,500 originally invested.

But Dr. Baker, who spent $10,000 on his fully custom site, brought in about eight times as many new patients. As a result, leading to $160,000 in new revenue that year.

Website TypeWebsite CostRevenue Generated
Semi-Custom Template (Dr. Adams)$2,500$20,000
Fully Custom Website (Dr. Baker)$10,000$160,000

Which equation and result would you prefer for your practice?

Before you answer, remember that the $9,000 difference in cost for the fully custom website is a one-time investment. After that, the site is yours. You’d be ahead if you only earned $7,501 in new revenue that year due to the site. And that’s being conservative with the value a custom website can bring.

From a business perspective, the good thing about web design investments for medical practices is that it’s much easier to make a great ROI (return on investment) than most other businesses.

Performing dental implants and cataract surgeries earns much more revenue per instance than selling a couch or fixing a PC. Yet, the cost of the initial investment in a good website is generally similar to those of other sorts of businesses.

This allows for “more bang for your buck,” hence, it makes sense to spend more bucks for more bang, so to speak.

If you are a more “see it for yourself” type of person, I suggest browsing the example custom-built websites below. Maybe, they will help you begin to piece together ideas of how your own practice’s website can look.

Hopefully, the stories and the examples above get you thinking about how much you believe may be appropriate to invest in your practice’s website. I suggest that you carefully think through these questions:

  • What makes your practice unique?
  • What services do prospective patients need to know about?
  • What do patients love best about your practice?
  • Who is your ideal patient?

Now, how is your website going to convey all that?

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Hands exchanging money with a medical website on a monitor on the background
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Want more patients?

We've provided thousands of patient our clients websites. Why don't you join these successful doctors?

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