Dental compliance: what your practice website must show

Dental compliance covers a lot of ground: CQC registration, infection control, radiography, recruitment checks, CPD and record keeping. One part of it is public, and that is your practice website. A UK dental website has to show a specific set of details under GDC guidance, company law, data protection law and the complaints rules, and many sites miss at least one. This guide sets out what your site must show, who requires it, and how to check yours in an hour.

What does compliance mean in dentistry?

Compliance in dentistry means meeting the legal and regulatory standards that apply to your practice and your team: the GDC's standards for individual professionals, the regulations a care regulator inspects against, and general law on things like data protection, employment and advertising. It is not one rulebook. It is several, enforced by different bodies.

For a practice owner the useful way to think about it is by who checks. The GDC checks individuals. In England the CQC checks the service. The ICO deals with personal data. The ASA deals with advertising claims, including the ones on your own website. Your website touches all four.

Who regulates dentists in the UK?

The General Dental Council regulates dental professionals across the UK. Every dentist, hygienist, therapist, dental nurse, technician and clinical dental technician must be registered with it to practise, and the Dentists Act 1984 makes it a criminal offence for someone who is not registered to practise dentistry.

Dental services are regulated separately. In England that is the Care Quality Commission, which checks practices against the fundamental standards. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own arrangements, for example Healthcare Inspectorate Wales registers private dental practices in Wales.

One thing worth knowing now: the GDC ran a consultation from 2 June to 31 August 2026 on replacing its Standards for the Dental Team with a new Framework for Professionalism, according to its consultations page. Until the GDC says otherwise, the current standards and its advertising guidance are the ones that apply.

What the GDC says your website must include

The GDC's guidance on advertising has a specific list for practice websites. In practice it comes down to these items:

The same guidance says you must make clear in advertisements and practice publicity whether the practice is NHS, mixed or wholly private. A line in the footer or on the fees page is enough, as long as nobody could reasonably miss it.

Prices are covered by the standards rather than the advertising guidance. Standard 2.4 of the Standards for the Dental Team says you must give patients clear information about costs, and 2.4.2 says you must give clear information on prices in your practice literature and on your websites, so patients do not have to ask. Standard 2.4.1 also asks for a simple price list on display in reception.

On social media and deal sites the GDC adds one more requirement: you must make clear that the treatment advertised may not be appropriate for every patient and that it is conditional on a satisfactory assessment. That line belongs on treatment pages too, because the same patients read both.

Titles, qualifications and the word "specialist"

This is where practice websites most often go wrong, usually through a well-meaning bio page. The GDC's advertising guidance is specific:

• Specialist titles. Only a dentist on a GDC specialist list can use the title "Specialist" or describe themselves as a specialist in a field. A dentist who is not on a list must not use titles that imply specialist status, such as Orthodontist, Periodontist or Endodontist. The GDC suggests "special interest in", "experienced in" or "practice limited to" instead.
• Memberships. You must not list memberships or fellowships of professional associations, societies or honorary degrees in abbreviated form, because it may mislead patients. Write them out.
• Comparisons. You must not display information comparing the skills or qualifications of one dental professional with those of others.

The title "Dr" is a separate question. CAP's advice on use of the term "Dr" by dentists says the GDC has permitted the courtesy title since 1995, and recommends that if you use it you make clear, clearly and prominently, that it is a courtesy title and that you do not hold a general medical qualification. The ASA has ruled that a GDC-registered dentist's use of the title without that clarification was misleading.

The company details most practice websites forget

These requirements have nothing to do with dentistry. They apply to any business website, and they are the ones most often missing from practice sites built from a template.

If your practice is a limited company, the Company, LLP and Business (Names and Trading Disclosures) Regulations 2015 require your website to show the company's registered name, the part of the UK it is registered in, its registered number and its registered office address. The registered name is often different from the trading name on the sign outside, and both are worth showing.

The Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002 add a short list for anyone providing a service online, including your name, geographic address and an email address that lets people contact you quickly. For a regulated profession they also ask for the professional body you are registered with, your professional title and where it was granted, and a reference to the professional rules that apply to you. For a dental practice that means naming the GDC and linking to its standards. If you are VAT registered, your VAT number belongs here too.

Privacy notice, cookies and data protection complaints

Your website collects personal data the moment someone fills in a contact or booking form, so it needs a privacy notice. The ICO's guidance on what privacy information to provide lists the items you must always include:

• who you are and how to contact you
• why you use people's personal data, purpose by purpose
• the lawful basis for each purpose
• how long you keep the data, or the criteria you use to decide
• the rights people have, with the right to object set out clearly and separately
• their right to complain to the ICO

The ICO marks other items "if applicable", and most practices will need some of them, such as who you share data with and how to contact your data protection officer if you have one.

The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 added a requirement that is easy to miss. According to the ICO's summary for organisations, you must now take steps to help people complain about how you use their personal data, such as providing an electronic complaints form, acknowledge those complaints within 30 days and respond without undue delay. A simple form or a named email address on your privacy page covers the first part.

Cookies follow a different law, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. The same Act created an exception for analytics: the ICO's guidance on storage and access technologies says you can set cookies purely to collect statistical information about how your site is used, without consent, as long as you give clear information and a simple, free way to object. Advertising cookies are different. The ICO says no advertising purpose meets the strictly necessary exception, so Google Ads and Meta tags still need consent.

What a dental complaints page should say

The GDC asks for your complaints procedure and the next step if a patient is not satisfied. The next step depends on the type of care:

• NHS treatment in England. NHS England's complaints page says patients can complain to the provider directly or to the commissioner, which for dentists is the local integrated care board, but not to both. If they are not happy with the final decision, they can take it to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman.
• Private treatment. The Dental Complaints Service handles private dental complaints across the UK. It is free and impartial and does not deal with NHS care.

A mixed practice needs both routes on the page, explained in plain words, because many patients do not know which kind of care they had.

CQC, ratings and your website

Most CQC-registered services must display their rating on their website. That duty does not bite on dental practices for a simple reason: the CQC does not rate them. Its page on services it does not rate lists primary dental services as exempt from its duty to give a rating. Instead it judges whether a practice has met the regulations, and publishes a report.

That does not mean the CQC ignores your website. The responsive key question includes providing appropriate, accurate and up-to-date information, and your website is the most visible information you give. An out-of-date fees page or a complaints page that names the wrong body is the kind of detail that undermines everything else.

Advertising claims on your own website

Claims on your own site count as advertising. The ASA's sanctions page describes what it can do when non-compliant claims appear on a marketer's own website or social media accounts, including listing the business on its website and asking search engines to remove paid ads that link to the page.

The CAP Code rule that matters most here is 3.7: before publishing, you must hold documentary evidence for any objective claim. "Pain-free", "the best implant dentist in the county" and "results in one visit" all need proof. Before and after photos must be genuine and representative, and CAP advises holding signed and dated proof that they are. If you want the detail, our guides to marketing for dentists and SEO for dental practices cover how to write treatment content that wins searches without overclaiming.

Beyond the website: dentistry CPD and other compliance basics

A lot of people searching for dental compliance are really looking for CPD rules. Under the GDC's enhanced CPD scheme, each registrant completes a minimum number of verifiable hours in each five-year cycle:

On top of the totals, the GDC requires at least 10 hours in every two-year period and a CPD statement at each annual renewal, even in a year with no CPD.

Dental compliance software and portals help you keep these records, policies and audits in one place, and many practices use one. The obligations themselves come from the GDC, the CQC and the law, so when a tool and a regulator disagree, the regulator wins. Check anything important against the source.

A one-hour website compliance check

1. Open your contact page. Is the full geographic address there, with a phone number and an email address?
2. Open every team bio. Each registered professional needs a GDC number, their qualification and the country it came from. Remove abbreviated memberships, and any title that implies specialist status unless they are on a specialist list.
3. Search the site for "Dr". Where it appears, add a clear note that it is a courtesy title.
4. Check the footer. Registered company name, number, registered office and the part of the UK it is registered in. A link to the GDC website. Whether you are NHS, mixed or private. The date the site was last updated.
5. Read the complaints page. Your own procedure, then the NHS route and the Dental Complaints Service, as they apply to you.
6. Read the privacy notice. Check it against the ICO list above, and add a way to complain about data handling.
7. Load the site in a private browser window. Do advertising tags fire before anyone consents? If so, fix the cookie setup.
8. Read the treatment pages as a sceptic. Every objective claim needs evidence on file. Every before and after photo needs signed consent and proof it is genuine. Prices should be clear.

None of this takes a developer more than an afternoon, and most of it you can do yourself. It is also worth doing before anything else on the site, because a page that ranks well and breaks the rules is a liability, not an asset. If you want to know how the site performs in search once it is in order, the free search audit needs no email address.