Orthodontists Have the Best Websites of Any Industry I Tested. It Took a 78.

“He can have it live by Friday, and he’s half of what you quoted me.”

That was a real call from an orthodontist a few weeks back, and I’ve heard a version of it most months for years.

So this one is a letter, and it’s addressed to you if two quotes are sitting open on your desk right now and your thumb is hovering over the cheaper one.

Before you tap it, you ought to know how your own trade is already doing, because the bar is not where you think it is.

People ask me which industry builds the best websites, and for years I had an answer ready before they finished asking: software companies, or lawyers maybe, since a professional practice with that sort of billing can afford to care about it.

Orthodontists never once crossed my mind.

Then I ranked all 47 industries, and there sat your trade at the top of them with a score of 78 out of 100.

Plastic surgeons tied you there, which tells you something about which trades put money into this.

The number comes out of 2,242 practices across 23 markets, of which 1,890 had a site I could audit and 1,378 sat still long enough for a speed test on a phone.

So congratulations, of a sort. Now read the winning score again. Seventy-eight.

Would you stick a 78 on the fridge?

What a 78 is made of

My score stacks up ten weighted checks rather than an opinion about how a site looks, so a practice can win it with plain pages and lose it with beautiful ones.

Does the site behave on a phone, does it load quickly, is it locked down, has anyone written anything, and can a search engine work out what the place actually does?

None of the ten ask whether a practice built a site in the first place, so I count that separately, and your trade clears that bar too. 91.4% of the ones I counted have a website, where 83% of small businesses do.

The cheap quote will get you onto that list, and so will every other quote in your inbox, because having a website stopped being an achievement around the time your patients started turning up with smartphones.

Calgary owners get the same news from me, because everybody on their street already has one and the cheapest quote is still sold as a way of catching up.

What the cheap quote leaves out is the part you only miss later.

A month after launch, a parent finds you, reads two pages, closes the tab and books across town.

With no analytics on the site, that afternoon looks exactly like an afternoon nobody came at all, and you go on paying for the page that lost her. 76.0% of these practices have that code in place, against 58% of every site I audited.

Most owners I meet couldn’t tell me how many people opened their website last month. Yours mostly can.

When did you last look at yours?

First place is a lower bar than it sounds

Winning a table doesn’t mean the table was hard.

Your trade came top because enough practices do the ordinary things, not because anybody in it built something remarkable. None of my ten checks reward ambition, and every one of them rewards a site someone has looked after.

What looking after a website actually takes is a short list of dull jobs, and the practices at the top of the ranking are the ones quietly doing them.

A 78 is what a trade looks like when most of the ten checks pass and a few of them quietly don’t.

In your trade the few are easy to name. You blog better than almost anybody and lose ground on phones, and both of those are true of the same practices.

Nobody ever finds out which few. A website doesn’t announce a failure. The page opens, the phone still rings, and no parent writes to tell you which tab she closed and why.

Cheap builds drop more of the ten than careful ones do, and the reason is dull rather than sinister. The checks that get skipped are the ones nobody can see from the outside, so nobody thinks to ask for them back.

The quote on your desk is priced on the parts a client can point at. So is the expensive one.

The difference between them is buried in the parts a client never asks about, which is how the cheap one can be half the money and still look identical on the day it goes live.

Your real competition isn’t on that list

The awkward part of coming first is that you weren’t racing anybody you compete with.

My 47 industries include hair salons, travel agents and plumbers, so beating them is decent trivia for the staff room and it will not fill a single chair.

You’re up against three or four practices inside your own city, graded on the same checks I just ran, and one of them is quietly better at this than you are.

Med spas live in that fight every day, and the clinics that stay booked share three habits that have nothing to do with how the site looks.

Think about the family that moved into town in July. They know nobody. The referral network they spent a decade building is four hundred miles behind them, no one at the new school has told them who’s good, and they have a nine year old with a crowded upper jaw.

They will pick from whatever their phone hands them on a Tuesday evening.

Which of those three or four sites do you suppose they got through without giving up?

What my audit can’t see

My whole audit is a stranger with a search bar, and a stranger with a search bar sees very little.

I know nothing about your chairs, your staff, your waiting list or your books.

A practice with a dated website can be booked solid into next spring on school referrals and a good name, and nothing I check would ever notice. My audit can’t see revenue and it can’t hear a phone ringing.

Fair way to grade a business? Not entirely, no.

So don’t read the score as a verdict on who’s any good at orthodontics. It maps what a stranger can find, and it only hardens into a verdict on the day the stranger is the one holding the money.

Back to the two quotes

The cheaper quote is cheaper for a reason, and the reason is almost never greed. It’s scope.

Whoever wrote it left out the phone testing, the tags nobody ever sees, the tracking code, and the hour of arguing about what your homepage asks a parent to do.

You will get a site, and it will be live by Friday exactly as promised. It will also land in the part of your trade that a parent has to fight with, and you won’t hear a word about it for a year, because nothing on it is set up to tell you.

I have a stake in saying that, obviously. Orthodontic practices are most of what I build, so weigh it accordingly.

If you want a neutral read before you sign, I’ll go through the site you have now and tell you free.

This letter wasn’t written for the practice with a waiting list into spring and three referring dentists who have known you fifteen years. You’ve earned the right to ignore me.

It wasn’t written for the one already paying someone who opens the finished pages on a phone before they invoice.

It was written for the practice about to buy the cheapest version of the one thing every new family in town will judge them by. Friday will feel great. October is the part I worry about.