Redesigning a dental practice website: the five questions that settle it

Take a fictional practice, Cabinet dentaire des Halles, in Niort. The website is six years old. Both dentists dislike it, a colleague has shown them theirs, and a vendor has just sent over a redesign proposal. Should they rebuild everything, or fix what they have?

The question comes up often, and the answer is almost never a matter of taste. A website can look dated and be well built. Another can look great and be invisible to Google and to AI alike. This article gives you the framework to decide, without a quote and without an outside opinion.

Redesign or fix: two different problems

Fixing a website means keeping its address, its pages and its history, and changing what is wrong: a piece of text, a missing page, images that are too heavy, a prohibited statement. The work shows within a few days and puts nothing at risk.

Redesigning a website means starting over with a new build. Sometimes it is the only option, but it is also the most delicate moment in a website's life: page addresses change, and a page whose address changes without a redirect disappears from the results.

So the right question is not "is my website attractive?" but "can what bothers me be fixed on this foundation?" Five questions answer it.

The five questions that settle it

1. Is the text of my pages actually in the page? Open a treatment page, right-click, choose "View page source," then search for a sentence from your text. If it is not there, your content is displayed by a script, a small program that fills in the page after it opens. The bots from OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity do not read that language: they see an empty page. Our article on how AI reads a dentist website covers this in detail. A website built this way cannot be fixed page by page.
2. Does the website load quickly on a phone? Measure it with Google's free tool, PageSpeed Insights, on the mobile tab. If the slowness comes from oversized photos uploaded straight from a camera, it can be fixed in a morning. If it comes from a theme loaded with effects and stacked plugins, it is in the build.
3. Do I have one page per treatment? Count your treatment pages. A single "our treatments" page that lists ten procedures in ten lines does not answer any specific search. If your tool lets you add pages and give them a title, that is a fix, not a redesign. The outline of a treatment page is described in our article on one page per treatment.
4. Can I change a sentence myself today? Try, right now, to correct your opening hours. If you do not have access, if the vendor no longer answers, or if the domain name is registered in their name rather than yours, the problem is not the website: it is control over it. No lasting fix is possible until that is settled.
5. Does my website put me at risk with the French Dental Council (Ordre national des chirurgiens-dentistes)? Look for a patient testimonial, a before-and-after photo, a "website by" credit, or missing fees. These four points get fixed today, whatever you decide about the rest, and they come before everything else. The seven mistakes on dental practice websites give you the test for each one.

The decision table

Two or more "Redesign" rows, and a redesign is justified. Only one, and you fix it and keep what you have built up.

The check to run yourself, in fifteen minutes

Grab your phone and a computer, use a private browsing window, and follow this order:

1. Type the practice name into Google. Note what comes up before your website.
2. Type a treatment you offer and the name of your town. See whether your website appears on the first page.
3. Open your website on 4G, with Wi-Fi off, and count the seconds before you see the text.
4. Look for the button to call. If you have to scroll or zoom, note it.
5. View the source of a treatment page and search for one of your sentences.
6. Run that page's address through PageSpeed Insights, mobile tab.
7. List your treatment pages, one by one.
8. Ask an AI which dentist places implants in your town, and see whether the practice is mentioned.

These eight points fit on one sheet of paper. It is the same assessment we run before telling a practice whether to redesign or fix. 59.8% of people in France look for health information online (Eurostat, 2025), and 56.6% of people in France already use artificial intelligence, including to find a dentist (Arcom and Médiamétrie, April 2026): both paths matter.

What you keep, either way

A redesign never starts from scratch. These elements are kept, and losing them is what costs the most:

• the domain name, which must be registered in the name of the dentist or the practice entity;
• the addresses of the pages that get visits, or failing that, a redirect from each one to its new page;
• the text you have already written, especially the treatment pages and the fees page;
• the photos of the practice, the team and the equipment;
• the Google Business Profile, which does not depend on the website and must definitely not be recreated;
• the address, phone number and hours, written the same way everywhere.

If you redesign: the order that protects your SEO

A redesign is prepared before the new website goes live.

1. List every current page address, including the ones nothing links to anymore.
2. For each one, decide which page will replace it. Google asks for a permanent redirect to a page with equivalent content, and advises against sending everyone to the home page, as explained in its official guide to site moves.
3. Start from the existing text before writing new text. A page that ranks well should be rewritten with care. If the website has a blog, the test for whether a dental practice blog is worth it helps you sort out which articles to keep.
4. Launch the new website on a quiet day, never the day before a vacation.
5. Check each redirect one by one, from a phone.
6. Keep those redirects for at least a year: that is the minimum Google recommends.
7. Look at visits and calls every week for two months.

A drop in visits during the first few weeks is common. It recovers if the redirects are right. Our article on how long dental SEO takes explains what you see over time, and our dental practice website page describes the build we use for a practice. To know what to count next, our article on dental SEO results in number of patients gives the four numbers to track.

During the work, the Dental Council's rules do not change

A redesign is the right time to bring the website back in line, not to drift away from them. The new website must still inform patients about your fees and payment methods, as required by article R.4127-240 II of the French Public Health Code, which you can read on Légifrance. It must still have no third-party testimonials, no comparison with other dentists and no before-and-after photos. Our guide on what the Dental Council allows on a dentist website goes through each rule, and our article on what the code allows in dental marketing sets common practices against each text.

One last point weighs as much as the build: who takes care of it afterward. The questions to ask a vendor are gathered in our article on agency, freelancer or doing it yourself, and it is that follow-up, more than the website itself, that drives a dentist's SEO. If you want the framework filled in for your practice before deciding, our SEO test runs the assessment for you. After that, all that is left is choosing the first page to write: the one for the treatment your patients ask about most.

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