The Australian Dental Website Benchmark
We measured every Australian dental practice website we could find. Not a sample of the good ones, and not a survey people opted into. All 2,541 of them, tested the same way on the same day.
Six numbers worth knowing
If you run a practice, these are the numbers your website is currently being judged against by the people who are trying to book with you.
Speed
Google publishes a target for how quickly the main thing on your page should appear. That target is 2.5 seconds. Two thirds of Australian dental websites miss it, and the slow half is very slow.
The middle practice sits at 3.4 seconds. A quarter of practices are past 5.3 seconds, which on a phone is long enough that a good share of people give up before they see anything. The quarter at the top load in 2.0 seconds or less, so this is clearly achievable on the same platforms everyone else is using.
Read this number carefully. We measured load time in a controlled test on a simulated phone. Google's own 2.5 second threshold is based on what real visitors experience, gathered from Chrome users over 28 days. The two line up closely for most sites but they are not the same measurement, and we have not claimed they are. If you want your own field number, PageSpeed Insights will give it to you free for any site with enough traffic.
Can someone actually book?
Most practices pass this one. The failures are concentrated and severe.
Just over half of practices, 53.1%, put a booking form or booking widget on the homepage itself. Another 44% put it one click away, so 97.2% of sites get a patient to a booking step within a single click once they have found the link. Seven in ten use a clear instruction like "Book now" or "Make an appointment" rather than leaving people to work it out from a "Contact" link in the menu.
Then there are 187 practices where we could not find a way to book or enquire online anywhere on the site, and 445 with no tap-to-call link. Those are the ones losing patients quietly, because nobody rings to complain that they could not find your phone number.
| Booking system | Practices using it |
|---|---|
| HealthEngine | 106 |
| Podium | 47 |
| Software of Excellence (Dental Hub) | 15 |
| MyHealth1st | 12 |
| HotDoc | 11 |
| Other named booking tools | 104 |
Counts reflect a booking tool we could identify from the site's own code. Practices using a booking system only behind a login, or one embedded in a way we could not fingerprint, are not counted here.
How hard is it to make contact?
Every extra field on an enquiry form costs you people. The average Australian dental enquiry form asks for 6.1 pieces of information.
195 practices ask for ten fields or more before someone can send a first message. A first enquiry needs a name, a way to reach you back, and a sentence about what the person wants. Everything after that belongs on the intake form once they have already decided to come in.
29 practices ask for health information at that first contact, including date of birth, Medicare details, health fund membership or a description of symptoms. Collecting health details makes you responsible for them from the moment they arrive, which is a different obligation from collecting a name and a phone number.
What practices say about themselves
We counted how often specific kinds of claim and specific treatment names appear in the public copy on these websites.
| What we counted | Practices | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Outcome or superiority claims, such as guaranteed or best | 1,214 | 53.8% |
| Pain-free, painless or similar comfort claims | 1,030 | 45.7% |
| Discounts, free consultations or price offers | 1,013 | 44.9% |
| Before and after imagery or smile galleries | 780 | 34.6% |
| Patient testimonials about treatment | 375 | 16.6% |
| Injectable treatments described generically | 197 | 8.7% |
| A prescription medicine named directly | 123 | 5.5% |
246 practices, close to one in nine, mention botox or another injectable treatment somewhere on their website. Half of those name a prescription product directly rather than describing the treatment in general terms. Botox appears by name on 111 sites, botulinum on 33, and Dysport on 17.
These are counts of what appears in public website copy. They are not findings about whether any practice has complied with anything, and this document does not make that judgement about any individual practice or about the group.
Advertising by registered health practitioners in Australia is governed by AHPRA and the National Law, and advertising of therapeutic goods is governed by the TGA. Whether a particular phrase or image on a particular website sits inside or outside those rules depends on context, on the current wording of the relevant guidance, and on facts we cannot see from the outside. That assessment belongs to someone qualified to make it, working from the current regulator guidance rather than from this table.
No practice is named anywhere in this document or in any dataset published alongside it.
Almost nobody is publishing
Only 11.2% of practices published anything on their website in the past twelve months.
Where we could date the most recent article, the average was 649 days old. That is a practice website that last had something new on it in late 2024, still sitting there collecting search traffic for whatever it happened to rank for two years ago and nothing since.
Four in five of these sites run on WordPress, 8.3% on Squarespace and 5.2% on Wix, so this is not a platform problem. Publishing simply stopped.
Where the differences show up
Speed varies more by state than you might expect, though the spread is modest and every state fails the 2.5 second target more often than it passes.
| State | Practices measured | Meet 2.5s | Avg form fields |
|---|---|---|---|
| New South Wales | 524 | 37.0% | 6.1 |
| Tasmania | 61 | 36.1% | 4.7 |
| Queensland | 582 | 35.6% | 6.2 |
| Victoria | 644 | 31.8% | 5.8 |
| Western Australia | 140 | 31.4% | 6.3 |
| South Australia | 176 | 30.7% | 6.5 |
| Australian Capital Territory | 35 | 28.6% | 4.3 |
The Northern Territory had too few practices in the sample to report separately.
How we did this, and what it cannot tell you
We started from 2,541 Australian dental practice websites held in our own database, built from public business listings. Dental laboratories, supply companies and teaching institutions were removed because they do not take patient bookings. The full list was fixed and fingerprinted before any measurement ran, so nothing could be added or dropped afterwards to improve a number.
285 of those had no working website on the day of testing. They were dead, parked, or failing to respond. That leaves 2,256 practices measured, and 2,173 that returned a usable load-time reading. Every percentage above states which of those groups it is calculated from.
Each site was loaded on a simulated phone at 390 by 844 pixels, the size of a current iPhone. We recorded load timings, read the homepage plus up to nine more pages including contact, booking, treatment and pricing pages, counted form fields on the page where the enquiry form actually lives rather than assuming it is the homepage, and searched the text of every page we read for the claim types in the table above.
Four limits are worth stating plainly. Load time is a controlled lab measurement, not Google's field data. Required-field counts undercount, because many forms enforce their rules in code rather than in the markup we can read. Content dates come from what each site publishes about itself, so a site edited without updating its own timestamps will look staler than it is. And the practices in this study all had a findable website and business listing, which means the genuinely invisible ones are not here at all, and the real picture across the profession is likely worse than what you have just read.
Figures are unweighted counts of the practices we measured. They describe this group accurately. They are not adjusted to match the national distribution of registered dentists by state.
Quoting these figures
Every number here is free to quote, in full or in part, with attribution. If you are writing about it and want a cut we have not published, such as a specific region or practice type, ask and we will pull it.
ContentClicks (2026). The Australian Dental Website Benchmark.
Census of 2,541 Australian dental practice websites, fieldwork 6 August 2026.
Research by ContentClicks. We build and market websites for dental and healthcare practices across Australia, the United States and Singapore, which is why we wanted these numbers in the first place. Nothing in this document is legal or regulatory advice.
