If you have asked three providers to quote your practice website, you have probably received three numbers so far apart they seem to describe different products. In a way, they do. A website is a bundle of decisions about design, writing, photography, compliance and ongoing care, and every provider bundles differently. This guide unpacks the bundle so you can compare quotes on substance rather than price alone.
The four tiers, honestly described
Almost every option you will encounter fits one of four tiers. None of them is wrong. They suit different practices at different stages, and the failures we see usually come from buying one tier while expecting the outcomes of another.
| Tier | Typical upfront | Typical ongoing | Best suited to |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder (Squarespace, Wix) | $0 to $500 of your time | $25 to $70 per month | Brand-new solo practices that need a presence this month |
| Generalist freelancer | $1,500 to $6,000 | $30 to $150 per month | Practices with simple needs and someone in-house who can write |
| Specialist studio | $6,000 to $18,000 | $100 to $400 per month | Established practices where the website has to earn bookings |
| Full-service agency | $18,000 to $50,000 and up | $500 to $3,000 per month | Multi-location groups and hospital-adjacent brands |
The uncomfortable truth about the bottom tier is that it works. A clean Squarespace site with accurate hours, real photos and a booking link beats a dated custom site from 2018. The ceiling is low, though: template sites are hard to make fast, hard to structure for local SEO beyond one suburb, and awkward to integrate with practice booking systems. Most practices that start there rebuild within two or three years, which is a reasonable path rather than a failure.
At the top end, agencies are not charging five times a studio's price for a five-times-better website. You are paying for account management, meetings, brand workshops and the capacity to serve twelve stakeholders at once. Multi-location groups genuinely need that. A three-chair suburban practice usually does not.
What actually moves the price
- Writing. The single biggest hidden variable. A quote that assumes you will supply the copy for twenty pages is thousands of dollars cheaper and months slower, because clinicians rarely have the time. Ask every provider who writes the words, and who checks them against advertising rules.
- Photography. Real photos of your practice and team outperform stock in almost every context. A half-day shoot typically runs $800 to $2,500 depending on your city. Some studios coordinate it, most quotes quietly omit it.
- Number of pages done properly. A page is cheap; a good page is not. Treatment and service pages that answer real patient questions take research and careful wording, especially where AHPRA's advertising rules constrain claims.
- Booking and systems integration. Embedding HotDoc or HealthEngine is straightforward. Deeper work, like custom forms feeding your practice software, adds real engineering time.
- Compliance review. Health websites carry obligations retail sites do not. Someone has to check testimonial use, outcome claims and title wording. If nobody in the process owns that, you own it.
The ongoing costs nobody puts in the proposal
A website is closer to a lease than a purchase. Budget for the recurring layer from day one and the numbers stay boring, which is what you want.
| Item | Typical range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name (.com.au) | $15 to $40 | Renew it under the practice's own account, not the agency's |
| Hosting | $0 to $600 | Modern static sites can host very cheaply; WordPress needs more |
| Maintenance and updates | $0 to $2,400 | Mostly a WordPress tax: plugins, security patches, PHP upgrades |
| Content changes | Varies | Ask what a small change costs and how long it takes; this is where relationships sour |
| Booking platform | $0 to $4,000+ | HotDoc and similar are priced per practitioner; a website cost in spirit if not on the invoice |
Questions that sort good quotes from padded ones
- Ask every provider
- Who writes the copy, and who reviews it for AHPRA compliance?The answer 'you supply the content' explains a suspiciously low quote
- What does the site score on Google's PageSpeed tools, on a phone, for your existing clients?Ask for a live example, not a promise
- Will we own the domain, the site files and every account?Get it in writing
- What happens when we ask for a small change in month eight?Cost, turnaround and who does the work
- Which booking system integrations have you actually shipped?Named systems and live examples, not 'we integrate with anything'
- Can we see a practice site you built that still looks after itself two years on?Longevity is the real portfolio
Where we sit, for transparency
Sound Practice sits in the specialist-studio tier. Most of our builds land between $7,000 and $15,000 depending on page count, writing load and photography, with ongoing care from about $120 a month. If your situation genuinely calls for a different tier, a DIY site while you finish your first year, or an agency because you have nine locations, we will say so in the first conversation. A free growth plan is the easiest way to get a straight answer about your specific practice.
Common questions about practice website costs
Is WordPress cheaper than a custom-built site?
Upfront, usually. Over five years, often not, once you count maintenance retainers, plugin licences and the mid-life rebuild when the theme ages out. Modern static builds shift cost from ongoing maintenance to upfront engineering, which suits practices that do not change their site weekly.
Why do healthcare websites cost more than a tradie site of the same size?
The words carry legal weight. Advertising a regulated health service comes with rules about testimonials, claims and titles that a landscaper never thinks about, and the writing and review time to get that right is real work that shows up in the price.
Can we stage the spend rather than pay for everything at once?
Usually, and it is often the sensible path: launch with the pages that earn bookings, then add treatment and content pages quarter by quarter. Beware of the reverse staging, where a cheap launch is quoted and every essential turns out to be a variation.
How long should a practice website last?
Five to seven years for the bones of it, if it was built on boring, durable technology and the content has been kept alive. A site that has to be rebuilt every three years was either bought at the wrong tier or built on the wrong stack.