You'd think that with all the advancements in technology, building a practice website in 2025 would be the easiest thing for doctors to do.
It's not.
Website building for doctors has been one of the biggest black holes in healthcare technology for years. Dozens of vendors offer solutions, each claiming to be different, each promising simplicity. The complexity behind building independently has remained frustratingly high for decades.
Let's walk through how this happened and why it's finally changing.
The Template Industrial Complex
For years, your options looked like this: Hire a freelance designer to set up a WordPress template. Work with an IT agency associated with your professional organization offering a "special discount." Use modern e-commerce website editors that promise easy customization.
Here's the secret nobody tells you: they're all using the same templates. None of them are designing anything truly custom.
Even marketing agencies seeking "custom builds" start with the same templates, then customize them in Adobe, Sketch, or Figma. We know practices that paid $25,000 for a WordPress template that a "website designer" pawned off as custom. It wasn't. Stock images. Stock layouts. Even the Google fonts for the logo were stock.
This isn't necessarily malicious. Custom website development is expensive and time-consuming. For most agencies, starting with templates is the only economically viable approach.
But it still stings when you realize what you actually paid for.
The DIY Mirage
What about the do-it-yourself options? Squarespace, Wix, Shopify. They're marketed as the solution where you pick a theme (usually some therapy or medical spa template, since these are most commonly available) and start building.
If you've ever tried these editors, you know they never take "just a few minutes."
They take hours. Sometimes days. For most doctors, these become unfinished projects that never get published. You're back at square one, eventually paying someone to do it anyway.
Then came the startups focusing purely on practice websites and marketing. If you've seen one of their websites, you've seen them all. Same template framework. Same design. Same stock medical imagery.
The interesting thing? Doctors didn't seem to care, or maybe they weren't aware. They just wanted a website published so they could offer a patient portal and take payments online.
These startups loved it. They could charge $2,000 to $3,000 per month for the same basic template, manage a few blog posts, and call it SEO.
The EHR Vendor Innovation
Some EHR vendors had a better idea: embed website editors directly into their platforms and use those websites to create marketplaces.
Ease for doctors and SimplePractice for therapists were among the first to do this well. They built full drag-and-drop editors directly into their EHR platforms with custom-designed templates that practice users could access for free. No worrying about hosting, deployment, or hiring designers or engineers.
This was genuinely innovative.
Example of a website built with Cline
The limitation? Since they were templates, there were still constraints. Even though it was free, it wasn't custom. Everyone's website looked somewhat the same unless they spent hours on branding. And most doctors don't have time for that. Even though it eliminated some frustration, it didn't fully solve the problem.
Why This Has Been So Hard
Here's the honest reality: doctors aren't designers or web developers. You don't know Figma or Netlify. You don't know about managing page margins, optimizing for screen sizes, HTML, CSS, website deployment, or AWS S3 buckets for image hosting.
Why would you? You went to medical school, not design school.
The website industry has built an entire business model around this knowledge gap. Not out of malice, but because these skills genuinely require expertise. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, responsive design, cross-browser compatibility. These aren't trivial to learn. Even seasoned backend engineers struggle with frontend CSS code. And doctors don't have time to become web developers. You'd rather pay someone to handle it than spend evenings learning frontend frameworks.
That calculation made perfect sense. Until now.
What Changed Everything
AI code development with vibe-coding completely transforms this. The models today are exceptional at designing websites. Often, you can do it with a single prompt.
Google's Gemini is currently the king of frontend user interfaces, which means it's exceptional at building websites that doctors can actually use.
Here's what this looks like in practice:
Website building is now as simple as texting or using voice chat with Cline. Tell it exactly what you want your website to do or look like. Paste URL examples of your favorite websites as inspiration, limiting how much you need to explain. Just let Cline know the exact look and feel you're targeting.
Want to improve the uniqueness and branding of your site? Use AI image generation to create custom images. Use AI to draft or refine your website copy. Even have AI create custom video content. All available through Cline.
Ask Cline to develop an SEO strategy or even a GEO strategy (where AI models recommend your practice or services in their responses). Draft blogs from your social posts or educational material you already use for patients. Create email marketing campaigns that drive traffic to your website. Run ads to increase patient appointments. All without learning code. All without hiring agencies. A true do-it-yourself model that finally works.
What Should Actually Be Possible
A website for doctors should no longer be a complicated black box where you just pay someone else because you don't want to manage the headache of learning editors or frontend code. It should be fun and easy. Something that takes minutes to build, edit, and deploy.
Every doctor needs a website regardless of employment. It helps you control the professional messaging for who you are and the services you provide.
Quick tip: always try to purchase the URL domain of your name as soon as possible if it's available. For example, Doctortylersmith dot com or tylersmithmd don't com. Even if you're not ready to build today, own your digital identity before someone else does.
The Real Cost of Not Controlling Your Website
Research shows 77% of patients use online search as their first step in finding a new doctor. Your website matters.
Poorly designed sites signal to prospective patients that your practice might be outdated. Slow load times cause people to leave before your page renders. Broken mobile experiences lose you the 60% of patients searching on phones.
And when you're paying thousands per month for a template website you can't easily update, you're stuck. Can't quickly change your services. Can't update your bio. Can't add new information without submitting a ticket and waiting days for edits. Or worse, you won’t ever be discoverable by AI since more patients are using LLMs like Groq, ChatGPT, or Claude for referrals.
You're dependent on people who aren't doctors, don't understand your practice, and charge you monthly for limited control over your own professional presence.
A Better Path Forward
Website building is simply another complex task that Cline solves for doctors.
You shouldn't fear building your website. You shouldn't spend thousands of dollars paying someone to build and manage it for you.
With Cline, you easily create websites that look professional, stay modern, and run with zero downtime. Update whenever you want. Add new pages in minutes. Change your messaging as your practice evolves.
No monthly fees to website companies. No waiting on designers. No dealing with developers who don't understand healthcare.
Just you, describing what you want, and technology that makes it real.
The Industry's Bet
The website industry has been betting that doctors will never learn to build. That the technical barriers are too high. That you'll always need to pay someone else.
They're counting on complexity remaining your obstacle. On you not having time to learn. On the status quo continuing indefinitely.
They're wrong.
Ready to Build Your Own Website?
Cline's EHR-native platform lets you design and build professional websites without needing developers or designers. Just describe what you want, and watch it come to life. Update it anytime. Own it completely.
Because your professional presence shouldn't be controlled by people who've never treated a patient.