We scanned 527 US dental practice websites in June 2026 and completed a First Contentful Paint reading on 256 of them. The median is 3.01 seconds, just past Google's own threshold for a "poor" score. We could not read the other 271, and we do not know whether they are faster or slower.
First Contentful Paint, or FCP, measures the wait before the browser renders its first text or image content. A background color alone belongs to First Paint, a different metric, as the W3C Paint Timing specification explains. Our scanner records a laboratory reading of this moment, rather than observations of actual patients: a patient staring at a blank tab has not yet seen your practice's name, hours, or phone number, no matter how good the page looks once it finally renders. We measured page speed on its own, as one technical fact about a website. What speed does and does not explain about whether a practice shows up in ChatGPT or Perplexity is a separate question, and we answer it directly further down this page. See the method and the sites we tested walked through on video in how slow are dental websites, the video.
How slow is the average dental website?
On the median site we could measure, content starts appearing at 3.01 seconds. A quarter of the sites we read beat 2.12 seconds; a quarter took longer than 4.27 seconds, and the slowest tenth took 6.61 seconds or more.
| Percentile | First Contentful Paint |
|---|---|
| Fastest (min) | 0.79s |
| 25th percentile | 2.12s |
| Median | 3.01s |
| 75th percentile | 4.27s |
| 90th percentile | 6.61s |
| Slowest (max) | 13.62s |
| Threshold | Sites past it | Share of 256 |
|---|---|---|
| Past 2.5 seconds | 161 | 62.9% |
| Past 3.0 seconds (Google's "Poor" line) | 130 | 50.8% |
| Past 4.0 seconds | 75 | 29.3% |
Source: Citevio dental practice web anatomy study, June 2026, n = 256 of 527 practices scanned in 7 US metros plus 9 smaller nearby towns. Full dataset and CSV: citevio.com/data.
The downloadable speed table is part of the archive identified by DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23143214.
What does "First Contentful Paint" actually measure?
It is one of the metrics Google uses to describe how a page feels to load, and Google publishes three bands for it: 1.8 seconds or less is Good, 1.8 to 3.0 seconds is Needs Improvement, and anything past 3.0 seconds is Poor. Sorted into those bands, 43 of the 256 practices we measured, 16.8%, land in Good. Another 83, 32.4%, land in Needs Improvement. The remaining half, 130 practices, 50.8%, land in Poor, including the median site at 3.01 seconds.
| Google's band | FCP range | Practices | Share of 256 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Good | 0–1.8s | 43 | 16.8% |
| Needs Improvement | 1.8–3.0s | 83 | 32.4% |
| Poor | Over 3.0s | 130 | 50.8% |
Google's guidance recommends judging FCP at the 75th percentile across repeat visits from real users, evaluating mobile and desktop separately. Our numbers are not that: each is a single mobile Lighthouse reading through Google's PageSpeed Insights API, retained from the June 2026 scan. Treat the comparison to Google's bands as a useful yardstick, not an identical measurement.
One scope note that belongs with the number: FCP is not one of Google's three official Core Web Vitals. Those are Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift, the metrics Google identifies as its Core Web Vitals for user experience. Google's own documentation describes FCP as a supplemental, diagnostic metric, useful for spotting render-blocking problems on the way to a slow Largest Contentful Paint, rather than one of the Core Web Vitals. We report it here because it is what our scanner measures, and because "when does anything appear at all" is still a real moment for a patient waiting on a page, without describing the whole loading experience.
Sources: web.dev, "First Contentful Paint (FCP)" and web.dev, "Web Vitals", Google, both checked 26 July 2026.
Why could you only measure 256 of 527 practices?
A usable speed value was retained for 256 of 527 sites. On the other 271 sites, the stored speed field has no usable FCP value, so we excluded it from the speed calculation. The retained records do not establish why each value is missing; a missing value is not evidence that a website is slow.
This matters for how you read the 50.8% figure above. The 271 unmeasured practices cannot be classified as the slowest sites in our sample. They are sites without a retained speed value. The records do not establish whether the missingness is related to page speed. We do not know whether the missing group is faster or slower than the group we could measure, and the direction of that gap is not something we are willing to guess. If you want the fully reconciled dataset, including which fields are complete and which are pending, it is free to download at citevio.com/data.
Does a slow website cause a dental practice to disappear from AI answers?
We don't know, and this page does not claim to. We measured page speed as a stand-alone technical fact. We did not test whether it changes whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google AI Overviews recommend a practice. That would take a controlled comparison we have not run, and a correlation between two numbers in the same dataset would not prove one either.
What we have measured, separately, is a mechanism that does gate AI access directly: a robots.txt rule disallowing a crawler stops that crawler from fetching the page if it honors the rule, which is documented behavior rather than an inferred pattern. We cover that study on its own page. A slow first paint is a real cost. It delays the first content for a patient who did click through. That user-experience concern does not establish an FCP ranking signal or an AI recommendation threshold. But on the data we have today, we cannot tell you it keeps a practice out of an AI answer, and we are not going to imply otherwise to make this page's finding sound bigger than it is.
Related: are dental websites blocking AI crawlers? (a mechanism we did measure directly).
How fast should a dental website load?
Under Google's own bands, aim for 1.8 seconds or less to land in "Good." Only 16.8% of the practices we measured get there. Half take longer than 3 seconds, which is where Google's guidance starts calling a page "Poor," so a practice beating 1.8 seconds would already be ahead of roughly four in five of the sites we measured.
- Check your own number first. The checker below reads a live First Contentful Paint value for your site in seconds, alongside the other checks on this page.
- Ask your developer to inspect the diagnostics in a current Lighthouse report before choosing a fix. Google's Lighthouse FCP guide highlights font loading and recommends using report diagnostics to prioritize improvements. We did not measure those causes in this study.
- For a separate look at website platforms, see what platform do dental websites run on.
If you'd rather see the whole picture at once, the checker below reads your site and scores its AI readiness in seconds, speed included.
Prefer to question the engines by hand? See how to check what ChatGPT says about your practice.
How we measured this
The sample is 527 US dental practice websites: 506 in Charlotte, Austin, Raleigh, Nashville, Columbus, Tampa and Salt Lake City, and 21 in 9 smaller nearby towns, scanned between 6 and 26 June 2026. The scanner requests mobile-strategy reports from Google's PageSpeed Insights v5 API and reads the "First Contentful Paint" value from the Lighthouse audit it returns. This table uses one retained usable value per site, rather than averaging repeated measurements. The stored records cannot distinguish an unattempted request from a failed request when the FCP value is missing, and they do not establish that every site was tested only once. These are retained laboratory snapshots, not Google's recommended 75th-percentile measurement of real user page loads.
- A snapshot, not a trend. Every number here carries the June 2026 scan window; a rerun on a different day can produce different figures, especially for sites mid-redesign or mid-migration.
- One reading per site. Real-world load time varies visit to visit. We report a single retained measurement, not a percentile across repeat loads the way Google's own guidance recommends.
- Partial base. The reading completed for 256 of 527 practices. The direction of the gap in the other 271 is unknown; we do not claim the missing sites are faster, slower, or typical.
- Sample, not census. This is 7 metros plus 9 nearby towns, not a national sample. We publish a national figure only once we can read at least 2,000 sites; this study does not meet that bar.
The full framework behind our scans, scores and city reports is in how we measure AI visibility, and the underlying dataset is free to download at citevio.com/data. If you think a number on this page is wrong, email contact@citevio.com with the domain and what you saw. We would rather be corrected than quoted wrongly.
Citevio's dental market research is published openly under CC-BY-4.0 with a DOI, so the numbers can be checked and reused; client data is never published.
Common questions
How slow are dental websites?
In our June 2026 study we completed a First Contentful Paint reading on 256 of 527 US dental practice websites. The median is 3.01 seconds, which is just past Google's own threshold for a "poor" score (anything over 3.0 seconds). 50.8% of the practices we could measure took longer than 3 seconds, and 29.3% took longer than 4.
What is a good First Contentful Paint time?
Google's web.dev guidance sets three bands: 1.8 seconds or less is Good, 1.8 to 3.0 seconds is Needs Improvement, and anything over 3.0 seconds is Poor. In our sample, the practice at the 25th percentile (2.12 seconds) sits in the Needs Improvement band, and the median practice (3.01 seconds) is just inside Poor.
Why wasn't every practice's speed measured?
On 271 of 527 sites, the retained speed field contains no usable FCP value. We excluded these missing values from the speed calculation. The stored records do not distinguish an unattempted request from a failed request, or establish whether those sites are faster or slower than the ones we could read.
Does a slow website cause a dental practice to disappear from AI answers?
We don't know, and this page does not claim to. We measured page speed as a stand-alone technical fact and did not test whether it affects whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google AI Overviews recommend a practice. That would need a controlled comparison we have not run. Separately, we have measured mechanisms that do gate AI access directly, such as a robots.txt file blocking a crawler outright.
Is First Contentful Paint one of Google's official Core Web Vitals?
No. Google's three official Core Web Vitals are Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift — FCP isn't one of them. Google's own documentation describes FCP as a supplemental, diagnostic metric, useful for spotting render-blocking problems on the way to a slow Largest Contentful Paint, rather than one of the Core Web Vitals. We report it here because it's what our scanner measures, and because "when does anything appear at all" is still a real moment for a waiting patient, even though it doesn't describe the whole loading experience.
Which cities and towns does this speed study cover?
527 US dental practice websites: 506 in Charlotte, Austin, Raleigh, Nashville, Columbus, Tampa and Salt Lake City, and 21 in 9 smaller nearby towns, scanned between 6 and 26 June 2026. A First Contentful Paint reading was completed for 256 of those 527 sites.
What were the fastest and slowest First Contentful Paint times recorded in this study?
Among the 256 sites we could measure, the fastest recorded First Contentful Paint was 0.79 seconds and the slowest was 13.62 seconds. The middle of that range sat at a 3.01-second median, with a quarter of sites beating 2.12 seconds and the slowest tenth taking 6.61 seconds or more.
Can I directly compare these numbers to a PageSpeed report I run on my own site right now?
Treat it as a useful yardstick, not an identical measurement. Google's own guidance recommends judging FCP at the 75th percentile across repeat visits from real users, evaluating mobile and desktop separately, while every number on this page is a single mobile Lighthouse reading through Google's PageSpeed Insights API, retained from June 2026. A live check of your own site today, or a repeat-visit field measurement, can reasonably come out different from a single June 2026 snapshot.
Has Citevio measured anything that gates AI crawler access more directly than speed does?
Yes. Separately from this speed study, we've measured a mechanism that does gate AI access directly: a robots.txt rule disallowing a crawler stops that crawler from fetching the page if it honors the rule, which is documented behavior rather than an inferred pattern. Page speed is a real cost for a patient who did click through, but our speed data do not show that it keeps a practice out of an AI answer. A crawler refusing a fetch does not establish absence from every AI answer, either. We cover that separate mechanism on our own page about dental websites blocking AI crawlers.
Is this speed study based on a national sample of US dental websites?
No. It covers 527 practices: 506 in 7 US metros — Charlotte, Austin, Raleigh, Nashville, Columbus, Tampa and Salt Lake City — and 21 in 9 smaller nearby towns, not a national sample. We only publish a national figure once we can read at least 2,000 sites, and this study does not meet that bar.
What should I do if I think a number on this page is wrong?
Email contact@citevio.com with the domain and what you saw. We would rather be corrected than quoted wrongly.