What a cosmetic clinic is actually booking
Not appointments. Consultations. A veneer consultation, an implant assessment, a video call for someone who cannot come in yet. Each is a different length, often a different clinician, sometimes a different fee, and each comes from a different treatment page.
That is the difference from a general practice booking setup, and it is where most Dentally installations on cosmetic sites go wrong. The buttons all point at one generic booking page, and afterwards nobody can tell which treatment produced which consultation.
Configure the practice software before touching the site
Dentally provides hosted online booking on a practice address, branded with your logo and colours, showing live diary availability. Nothing on the website helps if the portal has nothing sensible to offer, so set up first:
- A consultation appointment type per treatment group, with realistic durations. An implant assessment is not a fifteen minute slot.
- A video consultation type, if you take remote or travelling patients.
- Which clinicians take which consultations, and how much of their diary is open online.
- New patient registration, with the minimum fields, so a phone booking completes.
- Deposits where you charge for a consultation, through the payment integration.
- Confirmation and reminder messages in your own words, saying what to bring and how long to allow.
- Medical history sent through the practice software rather than collected on the website, so clinical data lands where it belongs.
Then book a test consultation as a patient, on a phone, and look at the diary.
Link rather than embed
The fastest booking button is a plain link to the hosted portal. Nothing from the booking system loads on your treatment pages, which matters more here than anywhere because those pages are already carrying galleries.
Take the booking URL from the online booking settings, make it the target of the header button and every Book call to action, add rel="noopener", and decide whether it opens in the same tab, which is usually better on a phone.
If the clinic insists the flow appears inside the site, put it on a single /book page and nowhere else. Reserve the height with CSS so the page does not jump, preconnect to the portal host so the connection is warm, and test it in Safari, Chrome and the in-app browsers inside Instagram and Facebook, because a large share of cosmetic traffic arrives from there and iframes behave inconsistently in them. If any of those break, fall back to the link.
Deep link each treatment page
The portal accepts parameters that pre-select an appointment type, and in many configurations a practitioner. Use them, so the implant page opens on the implant assessment and each clinician profile opens on that clinician. Check the current parameter names in Dentally's own documentation, since these are set in the online booking configuration and can change.
The effect is practical. Fewer decisions for a patient who is already nervous, fewer mis-bookings for reception, and a diary that tells you what the site is producing.
Track which page produced the consultation
Put a booking_click event on every Book button carrying the page and the treatment as parameters. If the portal supports a return URL after booking, point it at a thank-you page on your site so a completed booking registers as a conversion rather than a click.
Compare clicks against Dentally's own report of completed online bookings once a month. A treatment page with many clicks and few completions has a problem in the portal, usually no availability for that consultation type. A page with no clicks has a problem in the page.
Keep the gallery pages fast
A cosmetic treatment page carries case images, a finance block and a booking button. Only one of those is allowed to be heavy, and it should be the images, properly compressed and lazily loaded below the fold. No booking script sitewide, no chat widget loaded on every page, no autoplaying video. Two seconds on a mid-range phone is the target.
The other systems
Not every cosmetic clinic runs Dentally. Software of Excellence and Dentrix are common in established practices, Curve Dental in North America, and Jane or Cliniko where the clinic sits alongside other services. The pattern is identical whichever you use. Create the consultation types in the system that owns the diary, expose them online, link to the hosted flow rather than embedding scripts everywhere, deep link per treatment, and track the clicks. Feature details differ, so confirm deep linking and return URLs with the vendor before you design around them.
Test it monthly
Tap Book from the home page, from two treatment pages and from a clinician profile, on a phone. Confirm each opens on the right consultation. Complete one booking and cancel it. Vendors update their portals, and this is how you find out before a patient does.
Where this sits
Consultation types per treatment, deep linked booking and tracking that shows which page produced the enquiry are how we wire practice software into a cosmetic dentistry and implant clinic website, and the same approach runs through the other dental practice websites we build. Packages are on pricing. Let the portal do the booking and let the site get every visitor to the right one in a tap.