Embedding Dentally on a Dental Site Without Slowing It

#What Dentally gives you

Dentally's online booking is a hosted patient portal at a Dentally-provided address, branded with the practice's logo and colours, showing live availability from the diary. Patients choose appointment type and clinician, pick a slot, enter details, pay a deposit if configured, and receive confirmation and reminders. Dentally provides a booking link and a "Book online" button snippet for websites, and the portal supports URL parameters that pre-select appointment types and clinicians.

It is not, primarily, an embeddable iframe widget. That is a good thing for performance: the fastest way to offer booking is a link to a well-built hosted page, and Dentally's is one.

#The performance principle

Every third-party widget embedded on every page of a site costs every page load: its script, its styles, its requests, its layout. A booking widget that most visitors never open is pure overhead on the treatment page they came to read. The rule is: nothing from the booking system loads until the patient wants to book, and then it loads fast.

With Dentally's hosted model, that rule is nearly automatic.

#Option A: link to the portal (recommended)

The Book button on every page is a plain link to the practice's Dentally booking URL. Nothing loads from Dentally until it is tapped. The patient lands on the branded portal, books, and returns to the site or closes the tab.

Set it up:

1. Copy the booking URL from Dentally's online booking settings.
2. Make it the href of the header Book button and every Book call to action.
3. Add rel="noopener" and decide whether to open in the same tab (usually better on phones) or a new one.
4. Add a booking_click analytics event to the button.

Zero performance cost on your site. The only thing to optimise is the portal's own speed, which is Dentally's job.

#Option B: embed on a dedicated booking page

If the practice prefers the booking flow to appear within the website, embed it on a single /book page, not sitewide. Dentally's portal can be placed in an iframe on that page. Everywhere else, the Book button links to /book.

To keep /book fast:

• Reserve the iframe's height with CSS so the page does not shift when it loads.
• Add loading="lazy" if the iframe is below the fold, or leave it eager if it is the page's main content.
• Preconnect to Dentally's domain in the page head so the connection is warm: <link rel="preconnect" href="https://[your-practice].dentally.co"> (use the actual portal host).
• Do not put the iframe on the home page or treatment pages.

Test the embedded portal in Safari, Chrome, and Instagram's and Facebook's in-app browsers on a phone. If any of them block or break the iframe (third-party cookie handling varies), fall back to option A for those, or entirely.

#Deep links per treatment

Dentally's portal accepts parameters that pre-select an appointment type and, in many configurations, a practitioner. Use them so the hygiene page's Book button opens the portal on hygiene, and each dentist's profile opens it on that dentist. Fewer decisions for the patient, fewer mis-bookings for reception. Check Dentally's current documentation for the parameter names; they are set in the online booking configuration.

#The emergency path

Create an "Emergency" appointment type in Dentally, release daily slots for it, expose it online, and deep-link the emergency page's Book button to it. Patients in pain see only emergency availability.

#What to configure in Dentally first

None of the website work helps if the portal shows no availability. Before wiring the buttons:

• Appointment types exposed online, with sensible durations.
• Clinicians and the portion of their diary open to online booking.
• New patient registration on, with the minimum fields.
• Deposits, if used, connected to Stripe.
• Confirmation and reminder messages written in the practice's voice with practical details.
• Medical history form sent on booking through Dentally, not through the website.

Then book a test appointment as a patient, on a phone, and check the diary.

#Tracking

• booking_click on every Book button, with a parameter for which page and which treatment.
• Dentally's own reporting for completed online bookings; compare monthly with clicks to see the portal's conversion.
• If Dentally supports a return URL after booking, point it at a thank-you page on your site so completed bookings register in analytics as a conversion.

#Monthly test

Tap Book from the home page, a treatment page and the emergency page, on a phone. Complete one booking. Cancel it. Dentally updates its portal; this is how you find out before a patient does.

#Where this sits

Dentally is one of the systems we wire into dental practice sites most often, and the setup above, a linked or single-page embed with deep links and tracking, is the version that keeps the site fast. The portal does the booking; the website's job is to get every visitor to it in one tap without paying for it on every page.