What a medical practice website needs.

What does a practice website have to do?

Start with the calls your front desk takes all day. Which insurance do you accept? Are you taking new patients? Where do I park? What time do you open on Saturday? Can I book online? A website that answers those questions on the first screen a patient sees, on a phone, saves staff time and wins patients who will not call.

Beyond that, a practice site needs a page for each service or condition patients search for, written in their words, so the site can be found and so a patient arriving from an ad lands on the right page. It needs a page for each physician with their training, board certification, languages and the locations where they see patients. It needs a clear path to the patient portal, new-patient paperwork that works on a phone, and directions to every location.

Design matters less than speed and clarity. A plain site that loads quickly and says what patients need to know outperforms an elaborate one that hides the phone number. Physician photos and real photos of the office help; stock images of smiling strangers do not.

Questions to ask

• Can a patient find insurance, hours and how to book within a few seconds on a phone?
• Does each service the practice wants more of have its own page?
• Are new-patient forms usable on a phone, or only as a printable file?
• Who on staff updates the site when hours, physicians or plans change?

What does a practice website cost to build and run?

There are three ways to build one, and the cost follows the choice. A practice can build its own site on a general website builder; Squarespace, for example, publishes its Basic plan at $19 a month, paid annually (Squarespace, read October 25, 2026), or $25 a month, paid monthly (Squarespace, read October 25, 2026). A practice can buy from a vendor that builds sites for healthcare, which usually bundles design, hosting and updates and quotes each practice. Or it can hire an agency or designer for a custom build, also priced by quote.

The build is only part of the bill. Every site has a yearly domain renewal, hosting if it is not included, the cost of the people who update it, and the vendors behind any online forms, booking or chat. A vendor that handles patient information needs a business associate agreement, and a general website plan may not be set up for that, so plan forms and booking with that in mind before choosing where to build.

Accessibility work is a real cost too. Checking a site against the accessibility standard, fixing what fails and keeping new content compliant takes time each year, whether staff or a vendor does it.

What accessibility rules apply to a practice website?

Two federal rules reach a practice website. A practice that takes Medicare or Medicaid funds is a recipient of federal financial assistance from HHS, and HHS's disability rule sets a technical standard and deadlines for its web content. Separately, the Justice Department's guidance treats a medical office as a business open to the public under the Americans with Disabilities Act, whose requirements extend to what it offers online.

In practice the fixes are familiar: text descriptions for images, captions on videos, enough contrast between text and background, forms with labels, a site that works with a keyboard alone, and documents that a screen reader can read. Scanned intake forms posted as image files are one of the most common failures on practice sites.

What privacy rules apply to forms, booking and tracking?

Most of a practice site carries no patient information: the pages about services, physicians and hours. The trouble starts where a visitor types something about their health, books an appointment or logs in to the portal. Those pages can pass information to whoever runs the tools embedded in them, from analytics to advertising pixels to chat widgets.

Two habits keep a practice out of trouble. Keep advertising and analytics tags off the portal, the booking flow and any form that asks about symptoms, unless the vendor has signed a business associate agreement and the use is permitted. And publish both a website privacy policy, which says what the site collects, and the practice's notice of privacy practices, which the HIPAA rules require separately.

Who should own the domain and the hosting?

The practice should. Register the domain in an account the practice controls, with a practice email address and two people who can log in, and turn on automatic renewal. A practice can lose its website, or its email, when a departed office manager or a former agency held the only login.

Ask the same of hosting. If a vendor hosts the site, the contract should say the practice owns the content and can take it elsewhere, and how. Make sure the site runs on a secure connection, keeps backups and has someone responsible for updates. Email on the practice's own domain looks more trustworthy than a free address, and it should be set up so messages are not marked as spam.

How does the website work with listings and ads?

The website is the destination for everything else. Listing profiles link to it, so the hours and insurance on the site must match them. Search ads should send each click to the page about the service in the ad, not the home page. Reviews and referral letters send people to check the physician's page.

Each specialty markets differently, so start from the marketing guide for your specialty, and compare the listing and booking sites that link to practice websites in the listing site directory.