A clinic website rewrite takes as long as your page count says it will, and almost nobody counts before quoting. I read the sitemaps of 55 Australian clinic websites. The median one publishes 92 pages. The range runs from 1 to 949. At a median of 820 words a page, that median site is roughly 75,000 words, and 44.7% of the pages I sampled carry at least one line a compliance scanner flags for a human decision.
How long does a clinic website rewrite actually take?
Nobody can tell you without counting your pages first. That sounds like a dodge. It is the whole answer.
A rewrite is not one job at one speed. It is your page count multiplied by the work each page needs. Both numbers are knowable in an afternoon, and most quotes are written without either.
So I went and got the numbers for real clinics. Three of them decide your timeline.
- How many pages you publish. Median 92, and the spread is enormous.
- How long a page is. Median 820 words.
- How many pages need a compliance decision, not just a tidy-up. About 44.7% of the pages I sampled.
Multiply your own three and you have an honest estimate. Skip them and you have a guess with a confident number on it.
How many pages does a clinic website actually have?
Far more than the person quoting you assumes.
I took 59 Australian clinic websites across five clinic types and asked each one how many pages it publishes. Not by crawling, which misses pages. I read each site's own sitemap, which is the site's own statement of what it puts in front of Google. 55 of the 59 had a sitemap I could read.
Source. My own reading of the sitemaps of 55 Australian clinic websites on 22 September 2026, across general practice, dental, physiotherapy, psychology and cosmetic clinics. No clinic is named.
The median is 92 pages. The quarter mark is 35 and the three quarter mark is 219. The smallest site in the sample publishes 1 page. The largest publishes 949.
That last number is the one worth sitting with. 22 of the 55 sites publish more than 100 pages. 8 publish more than 300. A rewrite quote built for a nine page brochure site is not wrong by a little on those sites. It is wrong by a factor of ten.
The mean is 143.5, well above the median of 92, which tells you the same thing in one line. A handful of very large sites drag the average up. Yours is probably nearer the median, and you should still go and look.
Why does the quote you were given not mention your page count?
Because counting is work, and the quote has to go out today.
There is a second reason, and it is more human. Page count is the number most likely to lose the job. "Your site is 219 pages, so this is a three month project" is a harder sentence to send than "we can refresh your website copy in a fortnight". The second one wins the work and then runs out of time somewhere around page 40.
You can see the same avoidance in how the industry talks about price. I wrote about that in what healthcare copywriting costs in Australia. The pattern is identical: the number that would make the estimate honest is the number nobody publishes.
Ask for it directly. A writer who has counted your pages before quoting has done the only piece of analysis that makes the date real.
How many words is that, really?
I measured that too, on 275 real clinic pages: 284,478 words in total.
The median page carries 820 words. A quarter of pages are under 479. A quarter are over 1217. The longest single page in the sample ran to 13,383 words.
Put the two medians together. A 92 page site at 820 words a page is about 75,000 words of copy. For scale, that is a short novel.
That figure is an estimate built from two measured medians, not a measured total. Your own site could be half that or double it. The point is the order of magnitude, because that is what decides whether a rewrite is a two week job or a two month one.
How many of those pages need a compliance decision?
This is the number that separates a healthcare rewrite from an ordinary one.
I ran the same deterministic compliance engine that powers my audit across all 275 pages. It marks a line either as present, which means the pattern is unambiguous, or as needing confirmation, which means a human has to read it in context. I am reporting both, and I am not treating either as proof of a breach.
Source. My own scan of 275 pages from 59 Australian clinic sites on 22 September 2026, using the All Clear compliance engine. A flag is a line that needs a decision, not a finding that a rule was broken.
58 of the 59 sites had at least one line somebody has to read and rule on. That is close to all of them.
The most common unambiguous flag by a distance was a scheduled substance or its class named in public copy. Behind it came before and after framing with outcome language, then availability claims such as same day wording, then a small number of pages framing care as something you can get without seeing a GP.
Every one of those is a decision, and a decision needs a person. That is the part of a rewrite that does not compress. You can template a services page. You cannot template the judgement about whether a sentence naming a prescription product is allowed to stay. I broke down what actually changes on the page in what a compliant website rewrite changes.
Does your clinic type change the timeline?
Yes, more than anything else in this data.
| Clinic type | Sites read | Median pages | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physiotherapy. | 11 | 259 | 1 to 502 |
| Cosmetic. | 8 | 197 | 23 to 949 |
| Dental. | 10 | 72 | 35 to 227 |
| Psychology. | 11 | 41 | 1 to 358 |
| General practice. | 15 | 38 | 4 to 244 |
A median physiotherapy site in this sample publishes 259 pages. A median general practice site publishes 38. That is close to seven times the work, for two businesses that look about the same size from the street.
The reason is location and condition pages. Physio and cosmetic clinics build a page per suburb and a page per treatment, so the page count climbs with every service they add. A GP practice tends to publish one services page and a team page.
These are small groups, between 8 and 15 sites each, so treat the order as a signal and not a league table. The gap between the top and the bottom is far too big to be noise, though.
What does one page actually cost in time?
Here is my own number, since I am asking you to demand one.
I sell a single rewritten page as a fixed product. One service page, rebuilt to be compliant and to convert, delivered ready to paste. It takes me about two hours and I turn it around in three business days. That is one page, with its research, its compliance pass and its rewrite.
Now resist the obvious multiplication. 92 pages at two hours each is not what a site rewrite costs, because the research, the voice decisions and the compliance rulings are made once and then reused across every page that shares them. A site rewrite gets cheaper per page as it gets bigger.
What the multiplication is good for is the order of magnitude. Even at a fraction of two hours a page, a 92 page site is weeks of work. If someone has quoted you a fortnight for 219 pages without asking how many pages you have, they have not thought about it.
For the whole site I do it the other way around. The All Clear Audit reads every page, quotes every flagged line, and writes the replacement line for each one, blog posts included. You get a date in writing within 48 hours. Most land in five to seven business days, and large sites take up to ten. The date comes fast precisely because the counting happens first.
How do you get your own three numbers this afternoon?
You do not need a tool or a quote to get your own three numbers. You need twenty minutes.
- Count your pages. Open yourclinic.com.au/sitemap.xml in a browser. If it lists other sitemaps, open the page one and the post one. Count the entries. That is your real page count, and it is usually a surprise.
- Measure a typical page. Copy the text of three pages into a word counter. Take the middle number. Multiply it by your page count.
- Find the pages that need a decision. Search your own site for the words that carry risk: any prescription product or class name, before, after, results, testimonial, review, guaranteed, same day, walk in. Use a site search in Google, with site:yourclinic.com.au and the word. Count the pages, not the hits.
Three numbers. Page count, total words, pages needing a decision. Any writer worth hiring will ask for them. If they do not, give them anyway and watch what happens to the estimate.
The same three numbers are what a healthcare website audit starts from, and they are the first thing I would want if you were hiring a compliance copywriter.
What can this measurement not tell you?
- The sample is 59 sites and 55 sitemaps. It is small, and it is not a random sample of Australian clinics.
- A sitemap is what a site says it publishes. Some sites list pages that are thin or retired, and some leave pages out. I did not open all 949 pages of the largest site to check.
- The word count comes from the 275 pages I had already saved, up to about seven per site. Those lean towards home, services and about pages, which are usually longer than average.
- A compliance flag is a line that needs a human decision. It is not a finding that a rule was broken. Context decides, and I did not make that call for anyone's site here.
- The 75,000 word figure is two medians multiplied. It is an order of magnitude, not your number.
- This is general information about scoping a rewrite. It is not legal advice about your practice.
What should you do before you accept a rewrite quote?
Three questions, and you can ask all of them in one email.
- How many pages did you count, and where did you get the number? The answer should be a number and a sitemap, not an adjective.
- Which pages need a compliance decision, and who makes it? If the answer is that the scanner handles it, the answer is no.
- What happens to the pages we do not get to? A rewrite that stops at page 40 leaves the other half of your site contradicting the new half.
If you want the whole site counted, read and rewritten line by line, that is exactly what the All Clear Audit does. If you would rather start with the pages patients read first, website copy is the place. It is written by me, Amisha Sharma, at Commas & Chaos.
Prefer the short version? The findings are in an eight-slide web story.
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