A practice website carries two separate jobs on the same pages. One is to describe the practice to the people who might choose it. The other is to display particular pieces of information that a professional body expects to find there, regardless of whether the person reading the page ever looks for them.

A regulator does not read your homepage for tone or persuasiveness. It checks for named items: a registration number, a fee, a complaints route, a policy document, and whether each one still matches reality. Everything else on the site, the design, the photography, the way a service is described, sits outside that check entirely.

Why the site does not know it has gone out of date

A website has no way of knowing that a clinician has left, that a fee has changed, or that a complaints procedure has been rewritten. Those changes happen at the practice. Unless someone connects the two, the site keeps showing what was true on the day it was built or last edited.

This is why the same handful of items keep surfacing in the sections that follow: they are the parts a regulator can actually check against something else, a register, a price list, a policy on file, so a mismatch is the kind of thing that gets noticed.

The annual review checklist sets out a way to work through those items on a fixed schedule.

Six parts of a practice website sit under a named regulator, and each is checked against something specific.

Registration details

The General Dental Council (GDC), General Medical Council (GMC), General Optical Council (GOC), Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) and Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) each require the registrants they cover to display a registration number where a member of the public can find it. The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has an equivalent requirement for regulated firms. The number belongs to the person named, not to the practice, so it has to move with them.

Staff identification

Where a website names a clinician, it has to name them accurately: the qualification they actually hold, their current registration status, and a title the relevant body would recognise. This is checked separately from the registration number itself, because a page can show a correct number next to the wrong name, or the right name against an out of date title.

Fees

Where a fee or a starting price appears on the site, a patient or client is entitled to treat the published figure as the one that applies. This sits under the transparency requirement that several regulators expect a website to meet, and it is covered in more detail on Fees, price lists and the expensive kind of out of date.

Complaints procedures

A regulator expects the website to state how a complaint is raised and, in a number of sectors, where it can be taken if the practice's own process does not resolve it. This is normally a short published statement.

Data collection

Any form on the site that collects a name, an email address or a health detail falls under the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which expects the reader to be told what that information is used for and how long it is kept. What this means for an enquiry form or a booking form is set out on Forms, enquiries and patient data on a practice website.

Published policies

Certain documents, a complaints policy or a privacy notice among them, have to be reachable from the website itself. Which documents that applies to, and where they need to sit, is covered on Policies, documents and the ones that have to be public.

A practice website does not know when something at the practice has changed. A clinician leaves, a fee goes up, a policy gets rewritten after a complaint, and none of that reaches the site on its own. Someone has to carry the change across, and until they do, the page stays exactly as it was published.

What changes at the practice without telling the site

Most of what ages on a practice website is ordinary business. A new associate joins and their registration number needs adding. A fee schedule is revised at the start of the year. A complaints procedure is updated after the practice reviews how a case was handled. Each of these happens at the practice first, on paper or in a conversation, and the website only reflects it if someone goes back and edits the page.

The staff page tends to move fastest, because staff changes are frequent and each one touches a specific name and a specific number. Fee pages move on their own schedule, often once a year, but the old figure stays live until somebody replaces it. Policies move rarely, which is exactly why they are easy to forget: nobody has a routine for checking them.

Who finds the gap first

Three different people notice an out of date website, and they notice different things.

• An inspector checking the site against current guidance for the profession, looking for what the regulator specifically requires to be there.
• A patient or client trying to book, contact the practice or find a fee, who takes the published figure or the published number at face value.
• A complaint, where the first thing checked is often whether the procedure on the website matches the one the practice actually followed.

None of these three will tell the practice in advance that something is wrong. They surface it after the fact, which is why the gap between what changed at the practice and what the website still says tends to sit there quietly until someone happens to look.

The sections below name which parts of a practice website fall under this kind of regulatory attention, and which body is responsible for each. For a profession-specific version, see what has to appear on a dental practice website. For the fee schedule specifically, see fees, price lists and the expensive kind of out of date.