Dental Practice Websites: What the Rules Actually Require

A dental practice website is not marketing material that happens to be regulated. It is a regulated advertisement, and three separate rulebooks apply to it at once. One of them makes a word that appears on a great many practice websites unlawful to publish at all.

This is a plain account of what the published rules actually require, what they forbid, and — the half that gets left out — what they still leave you free to say. Everything is quoted or cited so you can check it yourself.

It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for your indemnifier. If something here contradicts what your defence organisation tells you, believe them.

Three rulebooks, not one

• The General Dental Council. Its guidance on advertising sets out information your website must display and claims you may not make.
• The advertising codes, administered by the ASA and written by CAP. These cover your own website, not just paid ads.
• Medicines law, which prohibits advertising prescription-only medicines to the public. This is the one that catches people.

In Scotland there is a fourth consideration, which we come to below, and it is not the one most practices assume.

What the GDC requires your website to display

The GDC’s Guidance on Advertising lists information that must appear. Most practice sites carry some of it. Very few carry all of it.

• “your professional qualification and the country from which that qualification is derived”
• “your GDC registration number”
• “the name and geographic address at which the dental service is provided”
• “contact details of the dental service, including e-mail address and telephone number”
• “the GDC’s address and other contact details, or a link to the GDC website”
• “details of the practice’s complaints procedure and information about who patients may contact if they are not satisfied with the response”
• “the date the website was last updated”

Two of those are worth dwelling on, because they are the two almost always missing.

The complaints route. It is not enough to say you have a complaints procedure. The guidance requires you to say who the patient can go to if they are not happy with your answer — and that differs by treatment type, the relevant NHS body for NHS care and the Dental Complaints Service for private care. A single line covering only one of those is incomplete if you provide both.

The date the website was last updated. This is the requirement people find most surprising, and it quietly tells you something about how the GDC expects a practice site to be run: as a live document, not a thing built once in 2019 and left. A site that cannot display a genuine last-updated date is usually a site nobody can edit — which is a website problem before it is a compliance problem.

Titles you may not use

The guidance is direct about this:

This is a common failure and rarely a dishonest one. A dentist who does a great deal of orthodontic work describes themselves, reasonably enough in conversation, as the practice’s orthodontist. Written on a web page it becomes a claim of specialist status. The safe construction describes the work rather than conferring a title — what someone does, what training they hold, and their GDC number so anyone can check.

The overarching standard is that advertising must be “accurate and not misleading” and “should be legal, decent, honest and truthful”.

The word that should not be on your website

Here is the one that catches practices with otherwise careful sites.

Botulinum toxin is a prescription-only medicine, and prescription-only medicines cannot be advertised to the public. CAP states it plainly: Botox “is a prescription-only medicine (POM) and as such, cannot be advertised to the public (rule 12.12)”.

The scope is much wider than most people expect. The CAP guidance says:

Read that against a normal practice website. The brand name in a treatments dropdown. A patient testimonial that mentions it. A footer list of services. A homepage tile linking to the facial aesthetics page. An image caption. Each of those is the thing being described.

What you can do instead

The rules do not stop you offering the treatment or telling people the service exists. They stop you advertising the medicine. CAP allows a narrow route for clinics offering consultations:

In practice that means the thing you advertise is a consultation — “a consultation for the treatment of lines and wrinkles” — and any mention of a specific medicine sits beyond that point, incidental and factual rather than promotional. It should not be possible for someone to arrive at your homepage and be shown a brand name.

This is a structural decision about the website, not a copywriting flourish. It affects your navigation, your service tiles, your footer, your image filenames and what your homepage links to. It is very difficult to retrofit onto a site built without it in mind, and straightforward to build in from the start.

Why this catches good practices

Because the incentive runs the other way. The brand name is what patients search for and what they recognise, so every instinct — and every agency optimising for search terms — pushes towards putting it on the page. The practices that get this wrong are usually not cutting corners; they are doing what ordinary marketing advice told them to.

Whitening is dentistry, and the page should read like it

The GDC’s position, upheld in the High Court, is that “tooth whitening is the practice of dentistry and can only safely and legally be offered by registered dental professionals” — and that this applies “regardless of the products used”.

For a practice website the consequence is one of tone rather than permission. You may obviously offer it. But a whitening page written in the register of a beauty salon invites exactly the comparison that undermines you, against providers who are not lawfully able to do it at all. Written as a clinical treatment — assessment first, why it is restricted to dental professionals, what actually happens — the same page does more work and distances you from the operators the GDC spends its time pursuing.

In Scotland, the regulator is probably not the one you named

Practice websites regularly carry a line about being regulated by the Care Quality Commission. In Scotland that is wrong: the CQC’s remit is England.

A wholly private dental clinic in Scotland must register with Healthcare Improvement Scotland, which has regulated independent clinics since April 2016. The statutory definition of an independent clinic expressly covers premises where a “dental practitioner” or a “dental care professional (clinical dental technician, dental hygienist, dental nurse, dental technician, dental therapist, orthodontic therapist)” provides services, and it catches “any entirely private dental clinic whether owned by a dentist or dental care professional”.

HIS regulates the service; the GDC continues to regulate the individual registrants. Two different things, and a website that conflates them is inaccurate about the thing it is trying to use as reassurance.

If your site names a regulator, name the right ones. It is a five-minute fix and an oddly common error — usually inherited from a template built for an English practice.

What the rules still leave you free to say

Read the above as a list of prohibitions and you end up with a timid website that books nobody. That is the wrong conclusion, and it is worth being explicit about what is untouched.

• What actually happens at the appointment. Step by step, in order, including the uncomfortable parts. No rule restricts describing your own process, and it is the single most reassuring thing you can publish.
• What things cost. Prices, ranges, what is included, what is not. Nothing prevents you publishing fees, and a practice that does gets contacted by people who already know they can afford it.
• Whether it is NHS or private. Stated plainly on the page it appears on.
• How quickly someone in pain can be seen, and what to do outside opening hours.
• Who your team are — names, qualifications, GDC numbers, what each of them actually does.
• Genuine, consented before-and-after images, captioned honestly and representative rather than exceptional.
• What you do for nervous patients, concretely: what you will stop for, what you will explain, what a first visit involves.

None of that is constrained, and all of it answers what patients are actually trying to find out. Our dental practices page goes through the three questions patients are too embarrassed to ask on the phone — is this bad enough to bother someone about, what will it cost, will you judge me — and how to order a homepage around them.

The practices that write carefully tend to read as the ones who will explain things properly in the chair. Compliance and persuasion point the same way here more often than people expect.

A check you can run this afternoon

Open your own site on a phone and work down the list.

• 1. Professional qualifications and the country they were obtained in.
• 2. GDC registration numbers for the registrants named.
• 3. Practice name and geographic address.
• 4. Email address and telephone number.
• 5. The GDC’s contact details or a link to the GDC website.
• 6. Complaints procedure, and who to approach if the patient is unhappy with your response — covering both NHS and private routes if you offer both.
• 7. The date the site was last updated, genuinely maintained.
• 8. No specialist-implying title for anyone not on the relevant GDC list.
• 9. No prescription-only medicine named anywhere a visitor can reach from the homepage — including menus, footers, testimonials, hover text, image captions and alt text.
• 10. Facial aesthetics presented as a consultation, not as a product.
• 11. No promised outcome — not how it will feel, how long it will last, or that it will work.
• 12. The right regulator named for where you actually are.

Most failures on that list are content and navigation changes rather than a rebuild. Item 7 is the exception: if nobody at the practice can update the site, that is the thing to fix first, because every other item will drift out of date again.

Where a build or rebuild actually helps

Two of these are genuinely structural. Keeping a prescription-only medicine off every route from the homepage is an information-architecture decision, and being able to display an honest last-updated date means somebody at the practice has to be able to edit the site without raising a ticket.

If your current site can do both, publish the missing items and leave it alone — we will tell you if that is the answer. If it cannot, that is what our website design and rebuild work is for, and the dental page explains why we usually recommend a rebuild that keeps what already ranks rather than a cosmetic redesign.

Sources and method

• Guidance on Advertising, General Dental Council — the required website information, the specialist-title restriction and the accuracy standard.
• Botulinum toxin products, CAP — rule 12.12, the homepage/logo/testimonial/small-print wording and the consultation exception.
• What the law says, GDC — tooth whitening as the practice of dentistry.
• Independent clinics, Healthcare Improvement Scotland, and Regulation of private dental clinics, Scottish Dental.

What this post does not do. It is not legal advice, it is not a complete statement of any of the three rulebooks, and it does not cover obligations that fall outside the website. We have not quoted hydrogen peroxide concentration limits for whitening, because we could not verify those from a primary source to the standard the rest of this post is held to — the GDC’s position statement is the place to look. We have cited no ASA adjudications individually. Rules change; check the linked sources rather than this summary, and take your indemnifier’s view over ours.

Questions practices ask us

Can we mention Botox at all?

Not as advertising to the public, and not anywhere reachable from your homepage. CAP’s narrow exception allows information about a prescription-only medicine only in the context of it being a possible treatment option following a consultation. Advertise the consultation.

Everyone else in town has it on their website.

Frequently true. It is not a defence, and the ASA acts on complaints, which in this sector often come from competitors.

Do we really have to show a last-updated date?

The GDC guidance lists it. The more useful question is whether you can genuinely keep one accurate, because a stale date is worse than the requirement it was meant to satisfy.

We are an NHS practice. Does advertising guidance apply to us?

Your website is still advertising and the GDC’s requirements still apply. The complaints-route requirement is if anything more involved, because you need to give the right onward contact for the treatment type.

Will publishing our fees make us look expensive?

It tends to do the opposite. Patients who cannot find a price generally assume the worst and ring somebody else. Ranges are fine.

Does fixing this need a new website?

Usually not. Most of the twelve items are content changes. The two that can require structural work are keeping a prescription-only medicine off every route from the homepage, and being able to edit the site at all.