Draft page. The survey counts below are placeholders for layout review and are not measurements. This page is excluded from search until the survey has run.
For dental practices
Nobody tells you the website broke
We checked the public pages of 214 dental practice websites. 131 run WordPress, and on 94 of those something was broken the day we looked — a dead link, a page that took four seconds to appear, a patient form sending its contents in the clear.
Almost none of it is visible from inside the practice. That is the part that costs you appointments.
We checked 214 dental practice websites
One mark per practice. 131 of the 214 run WordPress, and on 94 of those something was broken on the day we looked.
We check public pages only — the same ones any visitor sees. Everything below is something you can go and look at yourself in about a minute.
—/100
Worked out from the checks below and how quickly the homepage answered. Public pages only — we have not seen your admin, your host or your plugins.
The four faults we found most often
Counted across the 131 WordPress sites in that sample. Most practices had more than one.
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58 of 131 · 44%
A broken image or a dead link
On a page a patient would actually visit — services, insurance, the team. It reads as a practice that has stopped paying attention.
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47 of 131 · 36%
More than two seconds before anything appeared
Measured on a mobile connection. Almost everyone arrives on a phone, and a good share of them leave before the page draws.
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39 of 131 · 30%
WordPress at least two releases behind
Every release fixes something. Falling behind is the clearest public signal that nobody is maintaining the site.
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22 of 131 · 17%
A patient form posting over plain HTTP
Visible in the page source, no submission required. Whatever a patient types into it crosses the network in the clear.
None of this shows up on your end.
A broken form still looks like a form. A slow page still loads, eventually. The practice finds out weeks later, from a patient who mentions they tried to book and gave up — if they mention it at all.
Automated checks against publicly reachable pages during September 2026, across Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. At most five pages per site, robots.txt honoured. No logins, no forms submitted, nothing a search engine would not also request. We do not publish which practices are in the sample.
What we do about all four
The same four faults, in the same order, and what happens to each one on a maintenance plan.
- The problem
A broken image or a dead link
What we doEvery page is checked on a schedule, so a dead link surfaces in days instead of when a patient hits it.
- The problem
More than two seconds before anything appeared
What we doResponse time is recorded on every check. When it drifts we tell you what changed, rather than sending a graph.
- The problem
WordPress at least two releases behind
What we doCore, themes and plugins updated on a schedule — backup taken first, booking form tested afterwards.
- The problem
A patient form posting over plain HTTP
What we doFixed during onboarding. It is normally a certificate and a form setting, not a rebuild.
From $75/month
Four tiers. They differ on how fast we respond and how much hands-on work is included — not on whether any of the above gets done. A one-off onboarding fee covers the first month, which is always the most work: we have to find out what we have inherited.
The questions practices actually ask
Our website was built by a marketing agency. Do we have to leave them?
No, and you probably should not. Design, campaigns and content are their job. Keeping the thing patched, backed up, monitored and online is ours, and it is the part most agencies are least interested in doing. Plenty of sites are best served by both. We are happy to work alongside whoever built it, and we will tell you plainly if we think you are being billed twice for the same work.
Is our website HIPAA compliant?
We will not tell you it is. That determination involves your practice policies, your vendors and usually your attorney, and any IT company that answers that question with a yes over email is selling you something. What we can do is show you exactly where information a patient types into your website currently travels and is stored, keep the software handling it patched, and flag the parts that would not survive a serious look. If you need a Business Associate Agreement in place, raise it early and we will give you a straight answer.
What happens if the site goes down at seven in the morning?
Uptime monitoring is on every plan, so we generally know before you do. What differs by plan is how fast someone is working on it — response times run from 24 hours on the entry plan down to one hour on the top one. A single-location practice that is only losing new enquiries usually does not need the fastest tier; be honest with us about what an outage actually costs you and we will point you at the right one.
How much does this cost?
Maintenance plans start at $75/month and go up based on how fast you need someone to respond and how much hands-on work is included. There is a one-off onboarding fee at the start because the first month is genuinely more work — we have to find out what we have inherited. The full comparison is on the WordPress maintenance page.
We are nowhere near New York. Does that matter?
Not for the work. Everything we do to a website is done remotely and would be done the same way whether you are three blocks or three time zones away. The survey ran in one city because that is where we started, and nothing it found is particular to New York. If you would rather sit across a desk at some point, we have an office and you are welcome in it.
You emailed us about a problem. Can we just fix it ourselves?
Yes, and if it is a broken image you probably should — it is a five-minute job for whoever has the logins. We are not going to pretend otherwise to win a small piece of work. The reason to talk to us is the pattern rather than the single fault: things break on a site nobody is maintaining, they will break again next quarter, and the version of this where somebody catches it in an hour instead of in a month is what we actually sell.
We will tell you if you don't need us
Send us your website address. We will check it the same way we checked the other 214, and tell you what we find — including the possibility that it is in good shape and you should keep your money.
Clarkes.Team · 41 Flatbush Avenue, Suite 220 · Brooklyn, NY 11217
By appointment — Mon–Fri, 9am–5pm ET. The ceiling behind this is in that building's lobby.