Websites
What a clinic website should cost, and what it should earn
Quotes for the same clinic site run from $500 to $30,000. Here are the honest price bands, the trap at each end, and the number that matters more than the invoice.
By Pete Flynn · 1 July 2026 · 9 min read
A physio owner showed me two quotes for the same website brief this year. One was $1,800 from a local designer. The other was $28,000 from a city agency with a lovely deck about brand storytelling. She asked me which one was the rip off, and the honest answer was: possibly both. Neither quote said a word about the only number that decides whether a website is expensive, which is how many patients it books.
I'm a physio who owned and sold his own clinics, and these days we run marketing for over 120 Australian clinics, which means I see what sits behind clinic websites at every price point. The market is genuinely confusing, because there is no standard price for a website the way there is for an initial consult. But the bands are predictable once you have seen enough of them, and so are the traps at each end.
So here is the pricing conversation nobody publishes. What each band actually buys you, what decides whether a site earns its cost back, and the ownership terms that matter more than the invoice at every single price.
The market, priced honestly
Four price bands, what you get, and what to watch.
$0 to $500
DIY builders
A live site this weekend, a template look, and a platform fee every month.
Slow templates, no booking thinking, and you outgrow it the day you send paid traffic at it.
$2k to $5k
The local generalist
A custom look, the standard five pages, and someone else doing the work.
Built to look finished, not to book patients. Speed and tracking are afterthoughts, and check whose name the domain sits in.
$8k to $20k
The clinic specialist
A build designed around bookings: fast pages, a clear booking path, tracking wired in, everything in your name.
Anyone can print specialist on a proposal. Ask for clinic results, and get the ownership terms in writing.
$30k+
The enterprise build
Strategy workshops, brand decks, custom everything, and a project manager.
Priced for hospital groups. For a 2 to 10 practitioner clinic, the extra spend buys theatre, not bookings.
The real number
The price tag is not the cost. The cost is the bookings the site wins or loses every month after launch.
The four price bands, honestly
At the bottom sits DIY: Wix, Squarespace, roughly $0 to $500 plus a monthly platform fee. You get a live site this weekend and a template that looks fine, and for a brand new solo clinic with no budget, fine is genuinely better than nothing. The ceiling arrives fast, usually the day you try to send paid traffic at it.
The $2k to $5k band is the local generalist: a freelancer or small studio building sites for cafes, tradies and clinics in the same month. Plenty of them are talented. The catch is that a clinic site is a conversion machine wired into a booking system, not a brochure, and generalists price the brochure.
The $8k to $20k band is the specialist build: someone who does clinic or health sites specifically, designs around the booking path, and wires in speed and tracking from the start. This is where most established clinics should be looking. It is also where the label gets abused, so the burden of proof sits with the builder, not with you.
Above $30k you are buying enterprise process: discovery workshops, brand strategy, a project manager and a timeline measured in quarters. Hospital groups and brands with 15 locations sometimes need that. A 2 to 10 practitioner clinic almost never does, and the extra spend rarely shows up where you need it, which is the diary.
What decides whether a site earns its cost
Price told you what the site costs. Three things decide what it earns, and none of them show up in a design mockup.
Conversion is the big one, and it is measurable. Most clinic sites leak at the booking page, and the difference between a leaky site and a tight one is worth more than any build fee. Speed is the second earner, because a patient on a phone gives you seconds, not minutes. The third test is whether the site can win the worried parent searching at 9pm, after reception has gone home.
You do not have to take any of this on faith. Put your own numbers through the amplifier calculator to see what a stronger conversion rate is worth to your clinic, and the landing page lift calculator to see the same effect on paid traffic. Both run on your visitors, your fees, your suburb.
The three earners
Earner 1
Conversion
How many of the visitors who land actually book. The gap between a site converting 2 percent and 4 percent is the entire build fee, every few months, forever.
Earner 2
Speed
Patients load your site on a phone, in a car park, in pain. Every second of waiting sends a share of them back to Google and the clinic down the road.
Earner 3
Ownership
Domain in your name, files yours, tracking in your accounts. A site you cannot leave with is a subscription, whatever the invoice called it.
The trap of cheap
Here is the maths the $500 site never shows you. Say your site gets 600 visitors a month and converts 2 percent of them: 12 bookings. A properly built site converting 4 percent books 24 from the same traffic. If a new patient is worth around $600 across a course of care, that gap is roughly $7,200 a month in bookings the cheap site never made.
That is the real price of cheap. Not the invoice, the leak. The template was never designed around a booking path, the speed was never tested on a phone, and nobody wired up tracking, so the leak does not show up anywhere. The site looks fine, costs almost nothing, and quietly loses more than a specialist build costs, every quarter.
None of this means a new solo clinic should borrow $15k for a website. It means know what the cheap site is costing you, and treat it as a starting point with an expiry date, not a decision you made once and finished.
A cheap website is only cheap until you count the bookings it never made.
The trap of expensive
The other end of the market has its own trick, and it is prettier. Above $30k you are usually paying for process and theatre: workshops, personas, mood boards, a reveal meeting. All of it feels rigorous, and almost none of it moves the three earners. I have seen $30k sites load slower than the $500 template they replaced.
The tell is what the proposal measures. If it talks about brand elevation and engagement, and says nothing about conversion rate, load time on a phone, or how bookings will be tracked, you are buying a portfolio piece. The agency's portfolio, paid for by your diary.
Expensive is not wrong because it is expensive. A $15k build that doubles bookings is the cheapest thing a clinic can buy. Expensive is wrong when the money lands on the parts patients never notice, and the booking path stays broken underneath the new paint.
Design theatre (what inflated quotes buy)
- Discovery workshops and persona decks
- A homepage animation the awards jury loves
- Brand language nobody searching 'heel pain' uses
- A reveal meeting instead of a conversion report
- Slow, heavy pages underneath the polish
Booking machinery (what earns the fee back)
- A booking button visible on every screen
- Pages that load in about two seconds on a phone
- Copy that answers the 9pm searcher's question
- Tracking that ties bookings back to their source
- Speed and structure Google and AI assistants can read
Ownership terms, at any price
Whatever band you buy in, the ownership terms are not negotiable, and they should not cost extra. The domain sits in your name, in your registrar account. The files and the code are yours to take. Hosting, analytics and the booking integrations live in accounts you can log into without asking anyone's permission.
The rented model is far more common than it should be: a site on the builder's platform, a domain in their account, and a monthly fee that keeps the lights on right up until you try to leave. I have written about who should own your clinic website, because I got caught by this exact arrangement with my own clinic. You are checking one thing: if you sacked them tomorrow, could you leave with everything?
Ask that question before anyone opens a design tool, and watch how cleanly it gets answered. A good builder answers yes without flinching, at $2k or at $20k. A vague answer at any price is the most expensive line item on the quote.
How we build clinic websites
Specialist build, booking path first, and you own every brick of it.
Fast pages, tracking wired in, domain and files in your name, no lock in. Built once, built properly, and priced to earn its fee back in bookings, not compliments.
See how we build clinic websitesCommon questions