A price shown on a practice website is not decoration. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) treats it as a marketing claim, and marketing claims fall under the CAP Code, the rules the ASA uses to judge advertising that appears online as well as in print or broadcast. A fee that is unclear, out of date, or different from what the practice actually charges can be judged by the same standard as any other misleading advertisement.

What the ASA expects of a stated fee

The CAP Code expects a price to be clear about what it covers. A reader looking at a quoted figure needs to be able to tell whether it includes any follow-up work, or whether it marks a starting point rather than a fixed total. Where the actual charge depends on the individual case, the site needs to say so.

What a patient or client is entitled to rely on

Consumer protection law treats a price published to the public as something a person can act on. Where someone books an appointment or instructs a practice on the strength of a figure shown on the website, the gap between that figure and the amount later charged is the practice's to answer for. This holds whichever professional regulator the practice answers to, whether that is the General Dental Council (GDC), the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS), the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), or another body with its own rules for the sector.

Where a sector regulator adds its own rule

Some regulators set requirements on top of general advertising law. A dental practice, for example, works to a specific fee transparency requirement from the GDC, covered in more detail in What has to appear on a dental practice website. The pattern repeats across other regulated sectors, each with its own body and its own current guidance, which remains the authority on what it requires.

A patient or client checking a website before booking is working from whatever figure is displayed there. When the two have drifted apart, the practice usually finds out at the point of payment, when someone on the front desk has to explain a figure the person opposite them was not expecting.

Who deals with the gap

It is rarely the patient who ends up absorbing the difference. A practice that has quoted a lower figure online than it now charges is more likely to honour the advertised price for that appointment than to argue the point with someone already in the chair or on the phone, because the conversation costs more goodwill than the fee is worth. The cost of the mismatch tends to land on the practice.

Where the gap comes from

Fees rarely change all at once. A price list is usually updated line by line as treatments or charges shift, and a change that is easy to make on paper is easy to miss on the website, particularly where updating the site means sending a request to whoever built it and waiting for it to be actioned. The longer that gap sits open, the more appointments get booked against the old figure.

What narrows it

Checking the fee pages against the current price list on a fixed schedule catches most of the drift before it reaches a patient or client. The annual website review checklist lists fee pages alongside registration numbers and staff details as items a practice manager checks in turn, for the same reason: both go out of date quietly, and neither announces itself until someone notices at the counter.

A fee list on a practice website is usually built as a fixed page: a table of figures typed in once when the site was set up. Changing one price means going back into that same page and editing it.

How the change usually gets made

Practices handle this in a few different ways, depending on who built the site and how it was set up.

• Editing the fee list directly in a content management system (CMS), a system that lets someone type into a template, where the practice has access to do this itself.
• Sending the new figure to whoever built the site and waiting for them to make the change and publish it.
• Leaving fees off the website and pointing callers to the printed list at reception instead.

Each route has a gap between the price changing at the till and the price changing on the page, and the length of that gap depends entirely on who has to act and how quickly they get to it.

A site that updates itself

A Living Site is built so that changing a fee list means editing the figure once, in one place, and having it appear on the page without anyone rebuilding the site around it. This is one of the checks worth working through on a set schedule, alongside the rest of the site, using something like the annual review checklist a practice manager can actually run.

You can see the Living Site at webdesign.uk, for sites webdesign.uk builds. Sites built elsewhere are not taken on by webdesign.uk at present. Where the ongoing site is kept updated on this basis, that arrangement is optional and can be cancelled at any time; the terms are set out on the site itself.