On this page
Online booking is usually sold as a way to get more patients. In practice, its bigger effect is on the front desk: calls that used to interrupt treatment now arrive as bookings, and the receptionist stops being a switchboard.
But an online booking page set up carelessly creates more work than it removes. Below is the configuration that avoids that.
Do not open your whole calendar
The single most common mistake is exposing every free slot for every procedure.
Open online booking for appointment types that are predictable in length and low risk to schedule wrongly:
- First consultation
- Hygiene and scale
- Check-up and review
- Emergency slot, if you hold one
Keep offline: implants, endodontics, prosthetics, anything multi-visit, and anything where the length depends on what you find. Those need a conversation before a slot is chosen.
Give each type a realistic duration
Booking systems fail when the online duration is optimistic. If a hygiene appointment is 45 minutes in reality and 30 online, every online booking runs the day late.
Time three real appointments of each type before you set the duration, and use the longest, not the average.
Buffers matter more than you expect
Add 5–10 minutes after appointment types that involve anaesthesia, imaging, or a discussion of costs. Without buffers, one delayed appointment cascades through the entire afternoon and the clinic's punctuality problem becomes the booking system's fault.
How far ahead to allow booking
Two extremes both cause problems.
Opening three months ahead fills the calendar with appointments patients will forget. Opening only three days ahead means people who plan cannot use it.
Four to six weeks is a reasonable default for routine appointments, and shorter for emergency slots.
The confirmation step is where it breaks
Most online booking pages get the booking right and the confirmation wrong. The patient submits the form, sees a "thank you" screen, and receives nothing.
Every booking should produce:
- An immediate message with date, time, address and the dentist's name
- A reminder 24 hours before, on a channel the patient actually reads
- A simple way to cancel or move, without phoning during working hours
The third is the one clinics resist and the one that most reduces no-shows. A patient who can cancel at 11pm the night before gives you a slot you can still fill. A patient who cannot simply does not turn up.
Deposits
For a clinic with a high no-show rate on first consultations, a small deposit works — but it also loses you some genuine first-time patients who are just comparing clinics.
A reasonable middle path: no deposit for routine appointments, a deposit only for long appointments or for patients who have already missed twice.
What to ask on the form
Keep it to four fields: name, phone, appointment type, and a free-text box for "reason for visit."
Every extra field costs completions. Medical history belongs at the clinic, not on a booking form — and collecting it online creates a data protection obligation you may not want.
Before you publish it
Book an appointment yourself, on a phone, as a stranger would. Then cancel it. If either step is confusing or takes more than a minute, patients will phone instead, and you have gained nothing.
In DOQ each dentist has a booking page with per-type durations and buffers, and confirmations and reminders go out over WhatsApp in the patient's language.