Orthodontic Website Design: What to Ask the Company

Judge an orthodontic website design company on four things. A parent can request a consult in under a minute, and a general dentist can refer in two taps. The pages say "specialist" and "Invisalign" the way your board and your Align agreement allow, and the domain is registered to you.

Quick answer

• Have each vendor show a consult request landing in your practice software, live, on a demo.
• Find out whose name the domain is registered in today (the registrant), and whose after launch.
• Read every "specialist" and "Invisalign" line on the proposed pages against your own board's rule.
• Count consult requested and consult booked as two actions, and have the vendor show how.
• Work out the break-even starts for each proposal before comparing prices.

What changes when the practice is orthodontic

Four kinds of people use an orthodontic site, and each needs something different from it.

• A parent books for a child, so the site needs a consult form with a parent's phone and the patient's age.
• A teen sometimes searches alone and wants to see what braces cost and look like, so the site needs pages that answer that on a phone.
• An adult compares aligner options and reads before calling, so the site needs a page for each option.
• A general dentist wants to send a patient and has no time to call, so the site needs its own referral form.

When the consult is free, the site's job is to pass the request on so it gets booked. Starts versus consults is a different problem, and orthodontic marketing takes it apart.

The words a board or a manufacturer can object to

Vendors write the copy, but your name and license sit under it. Three places to read slowly.

"Specialist." The ADA code's section 5.H says dentists who announce specialization should use "specialist in". A dentist whose practice is devoted exclusively to the specialty may say the practice "is limited to" it. The ADA code is written for its members; the rule tied to your license comes from your state board.

In Canada, Ontario's dental college says a general dentist who takes only orthodontic cases must make clear they are a general dentist, and it counts the office website as advertising. A practice name that refers to a specialty needs every dentist practicing under it registered as a specialist in that branch. Other provinces have their own rules.

Credentials in other areas. Advisory opinion 5.H.2 of the ADA code covers a specialist who announces a certificate in an area that is not a recognized specialty. The announcement must include a set sentence saying the area "is not recognized as a specialty area" by the National Commission on Recognition of Dental Specialties and Certifying Boards or your state. The template needs a place for it.

"Invisalign." Align's only public rules page I found is its social media guidelines, written for posts on Align's own social pages. It asks people not to use the Invisalign name in any online identity, such as a handle, and never mentions practice websites.

In 2008 a WIPO panel ordered 14 .com names that joined Invisalign with a city transferred to Align. Ask your Align representative about current rules for provider websites.

The questions for the demo

Put this table in front of each vendor. The middle column is the answer that should come back.

On software: Ortho2's FAQ lists online scheduling among Edge Cloud's patient-facing tools, and Planet DDS lists online booking in Cloud 9. Neither says whether a form built by your website company can write into that schedule, and the Dolphin pages I could load are silent. So the vendor selling you the integration has to show it working on a demo.

Contract lines that cost money later

Three clauses decide how hard leaving is. The first is the domain.

For .com and other generic domains, ICANN's transfer policy makes a registrar put a 60-day lock on moving the name to another registrar after a change of registrant. The registrar may let the holder opt out, but only before the change is requested.

If the vendor registered the name to itself and "hands it over" at the end, the name may have to stay at the vendor's registrar for two more months. A .ca name is managed by CIRA under its own rules, so the registrar can tell you what applies there.

Get a registrar account in your name on day one. ICANN's registrant page says the registrant assumes sole responsibility for the name and must answer the registrar within 15 days. That is your duty even if the vendor does the clicking, so the account should use an email address you read.

• Term: the number of months, the notice needed before auto-renewal, and the price in year two. For quotes compared over several years, see dental website cost.
• Export: if the vendor cannot give you the page text and images as files, leaving means copying every page and image by hand.

Two proposals, one break-even

Swap in your own case fee, margin and consult-to-start rate. If you do not know the rate, your front desk can pull it from the last quarter.

Check your current site with a parent's thumb

Take your phone, switch to mobile data, and play a parent.

1. Search your practice name and open the site from the result.
2. Find the consult request without scrolling more than twice.
3. Fill it in as a parent of a 12-year-old. Count the fields.
4. Submit it, then check with your front desk when and where it showed up.
5. Now open the site as a general dentist. Look for a referral form. Time how long it takes you to find it.

If the front desk sees the request only the next morning, or reads it from an email, take that to the vendor first.

Then fix the counts. Google Ads reports only primary conversion actions in the Conversions column and bids on them; secondary ones are for observation. Send the booked consult as the main conversion and mark the request as secondary.

Prices and rules checked on 2026-10-27.