A common history
The practice needed a website. The practice manager knew someone, a relative, a patient, a freelancer from a previous job. They built it for a good price, it went live, everyone was pleased. Then the practice manager moved on, or the freelancer did, and the site has not been touched since. Nobody knows what it runs on, who hosts it, whose name the domain is in, or how to change the opening hours. It still loads, mostly, and it is quietly costing the practice patients.
This is the most common state a dental practice website arrives in. Here is how to take control of it.
Step 1: find out what you have
Two hours, one afternoon, before anything else.
- Domain. Look it up in a WHOIS tool for the registrar. Can anyone at the practice log in? If not, the domain is registered in someone else's name, and it is the first thing to recover.
- Hosting. Find the host from the site's IP address. Same question.
- Platform. WordPress, a builder, something else? View the page source or use a detector extension. If WordPress, find the admin login and try a password reset with every practice email address.
- Contact form. Fill it in. Where does the email go? On sites in this state it often goes to the former practice manager's address.
- Booking. Is there any? Does it work? Does it connect to your practice management system or to a tool nobody remembers subscribing to?
- Renewals. Whose card pays for the domain and hosting? When do they renew?
- Search Console and analytics. Does the practice have access? Is anything tracked?
- Speed. Load it on a phone on mobile data.
Write it down as a table. The blanks are the risks.
Step 2: recover the accounts
Whatever else happens, the domain and hosting must end up in an account in the practice's name, paid by the practice's card, with a shared business email as the login. Contact the person who built it, politely and in writing, and ask for the transfers, with a date. Most will help; they never meant to hold anything. If they are unreachable, registrars and hosts have processes for a business proving ownership of its own domain, and they work, slowly. Start before the renewal date.
Get administrator access to the site. Change the contact form's destination. Add the practice to Search Console and analytics as owner.
Step 3: decide fix or rebuild
With the table filled in, the decision is usually clear.
Fix, if: the platform is current or can be updated without breaking, the site is reasonably fast or can be made so, the content is mostly right, and the missing pieces are booking, prices, tracking and ownership. A rescue project of a few days: update everything on a staging copy, wire the booking system in, add the fees page, set up tracking, move hosting to something managed, document it.
Rebuild, if: it is on an abandoned theme or an old page builder that cannot be made fast, the content structure is a set of hand-built pages with no way to add a treatment without a developer, it is several years behind on updates with plugins that will break, or it has been compromised. The rebuild keeps the URLs (redirecting any that change), reuses the good content and photos, and delivers the structure the practice should have had: treatments as records, booking integrated, fast, in your name.
The honest test: would fixing cost more than half of rebuilding and still leave you on a fragile foundation? Then rebuild.
Step 4: stop it happening again
The reason the site decayed was not the freelancer. It was that nobody owned it afterwards. Whatever you choose:
- Everything in the practice's name, with a shared business email as the login, and the logins in a password manager the practice controls.
- A renewals calendar with the domain, hosting, certificate and any licences.
- A named owner at the practice for the website, as a role rather than a person, so it survives staff changes.
- Documentation and a recorded walkthrough, so the next practice manager can change prices and hours without calling anyone.
- Maintenance, either a care plan or a scheduled monthly hour, so updates happen, backups exist and someone notices when the form stops delivering.
- Tracking, so the practice knows what the site produces and notices when it stops.
The conversation with the person who built it
It can feel awkward to ask a friend of a former colleague to hand over accounts. Frame it as tidying up: "We're bringing all our online accounts under the practice's name for governance reasons; could you transfer these by the end of the month? Happy to cover any costs." It is a routine request, and a professional will treat it as one.
Where this sits
This is the most common starting point for a dental practice website rescue, and Step 1 is what the diagnosis covers. Whether it ends in a fix or a rebuild, the site leaves the process owned, documented, maintained and measured, which is the state it should have been in from the day it launched.