A small piece of research · August 2026
We looked at every public page of fifty-four physiotherapy, dental, chiropractic, counselling and podiatry practices across Munster, the way a patient would. For at least twenty-five of them, the most damaging thing a patient meets is that nothing on the site says what anything costs.
We were building a list of clinics to write to, and we do the same twenty-minute walk on every business before contacting it: search the way a patient would, open the site on a phone, try to find a price, follow the booking route to the end, and look for the address. After a dozen practices the same faults kept appearing. After fifty-four it stopped looking like coincidence.
None of what follows is about design. Every practice here has a website that works, most of them look perfectly decent, and several are genuinely well made. The problem sits in the last three inches — between a patient who has already decided they want an appointment, and actually getting one.
| Clinics | What a patient runs into |
|---|---|
| 25+ | No price is published anywhere. Not a fee list, not a “from”, not a range. Several have a page called Fees that contains no figures — one says only that the fees “are fair”, another that they “will be discussed”. One promises on its homepage that “all of our fees are listed online”; the page those fees would be on returns a 404. |
| 9 | The booking button does not book. It says Book Now, Make a Booking or Appointment, and it lands the patient on an enquiry form or a contact page. One is labelled “Request Appointment (pending confirmation)”. The owner almost never knows. |
| 8 | The site signals that nobody is home. Copyright lines reading 2018, 2020, 2022. Social icons linking nowhere, or — on two sites — still pointing at the website builder’s own accounts rather than the clinic’s. |
| 6 | No findable address. A town name and a phone number, no street and no Eircode. One gives its location as “next to the Post Office”. |
| 33 | No online booking of any kind. Phone only, against opening hours that in several cases end at 5pm on Friday. |
Missing prices, by a distance. A patient looking for a physio is not comparing philosophies — they are trying to work out whether this is a €50 thing or a €500 thing before they ring a stranger. Given no answer, most people do not ring and ask. They go back to the search results and open the next one.
Almost always for a good reason, which is what makes it hard to see. Treatment varies by person, so a single number feels dishonest. Competitors might read it. Someone might fixate on the price rather than the care.
All true, and all outweighed by what the silence actually communicates, which is we are going to be expensive and we would rather you found out later. A range fixes it. So does one honest “from” figure with a line explaining what changes it. The practices in this survey that publish prices are not the cheap ones — they are, on the whole, the confident ones.
Fifty-four practices across Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Clare, Waterford and Tipperary, examined between the 12th and 15th of August 2026. Every practice was confirmed by loading a live page that names it, and every finding above was observed on a page we actually opened — a 404, a dead link, a missing figure, a button going somewhere other than where it says.
A precision note. Each practice was recorded against the single most damaging fault a patient meets, not against every fault it has. So the price figure is a floor: at least twenty-five publish nothing, and the real number is higher, because a practice whose worst problem was a broken booking button may well have had no prices either. The booking figures are exact, because booking was checked on every site individually.
What this is not. It is not a random sample and it is not statistics. It is one province, one fortnight, and fifty-four practices we found by ordinary search — so treat the proportions as a strong hint rather than a national figure. Sites change; some of these may already be fixed. No practice is named here, and none was contacted before being included.
The Once Over is a one-person practice in Ireland. We work out what is wrong with how a small business comes across, decide what to do first, and write it down. We do not build websites, run ads, or post as though we were you — which is why the four fixes above are things you can do yourself this afternoon without hiring anybody.
If you would like the same twenty-minute look at your own practice, it is free and there is no catch: hello@theonceover.ie. If you would like it done properly across the whole path from found you to booked, that is the website and conversion audit, and the price is published.
Twenty minutes, free, no catch — or the full path from found you to booked as the published-price website and conversion audit.