Website Advertising Rules: The Words Your Regulator Will Not Let You Publish

You have probably been told that the advertising rules apply to advertising. Radio spots, sponsored posts, the ad in the parish newsletter, the boosted thing on Instagram. Your own website is different, the thinking goes, because nobody is paying to push it in front of anybody. It just sits there, describing what you do.

That is the belief. Several Irish regulators disagree with it, and they have written the disagreement down in public.

A version of this conversation reaches me most months. The practice manager of a nurse-led skin clinic in Waterford city rings about page speed, having inherited a website built in 2019 by somebody who has long since moved on. Four minutes in, the speed is the least of it, because the treatments page names a prescription-only product three times in bold. Nobody had ever told them that mattered. Why would they? The person who built the site was a designer, not a regulator.

The Word "Advertisement" Is Broader Than You Think

Start with how the rules define the thing they regulate, because that is where the myth falls apart.

The Health Products Regulatory Authority defines advertising a medicine as any information or activity "designed to promote the prescription, supply, sale or consumption" of medicines. It then states plainly that this includes advertising to the public online, on websites and social media, and that it covers businesses offering services which may lead to the prescription and supply of a medicine.

Read that second part again. Not just pharmacies and manufacturers. Businesses whose service ends with somebody being prescribed something.

Law works the same way. The Legal Services Regulatory Authority regulates advertising by solicitors and barristers under the Legal Services Regulation Act 2015 (Advertising) Regulations 2020, and the LSRA confirms those regulations cover print, audio and visual advertisements, including online advertisements. Your firm's website is an online advertisement. It was the day it went live.

So the practical test is not "did I pay to promote this page". It is closer to "is this page here to bring me business". Almost every page on almost every business website fails that test in the regulator's favour.

The Treatment Page That Cannot Name the Treatment

The clearest example, and the one catching the most Irish businesses right now, is the aesthetics and weight management sector.

It is prohibited to advertise or promote prescription-only medicines to the public in Ireland under the Medicinal Products (Control of Advertising) Regulations 2007. The HPRA says this applies to all media formats, traditional and online, and to all promotional activities. Its guidance names the kind of services in scope: those involving prescription-only medicines containing botulinum toxin, semaglutide or tirzepatide.

That is the anti-wrinkle injection and the two weight-loss injections that half the country has heard of by their brand names.

So what does that mean at street level? A treatment menu with a product name and a price beside it is a problem. So is the meta description promising the best value for that injection in the county. And the 2023 blog post explaining how the product works, still sitting in your archive, counts too, because nothing in the rule cares how old a page is or how little traffic it gets.

Consider a typical sequence, because this is a pattern rather than one business's bad day. A competitor notices your pricing page. Somebody makes a complaint, or the regulator's own online monitoring picks it up. What arrives is not a fine in the first instance, it is a demand that the content comes down. Now somebody has to actually take it down, today, on a site nobody in the building knows how to edit.

Your Best Testimonial Might Be the One That Costs You

Reviews are the most valuable content most service businesses own, which is exactly why this one stings.

Where medicines are advertised to the public, the HPRA states that the advertising must not include recommendations from scientists, health professionals or people with celebrity status. Think about what that rules out. The five-star quote from a well-known local sportsperson. An endorsement from the visiting consultant. Your own clinical lead, quoted in bold on the homepage.

Dentistry has its own layer. The Dental Council publishes codes of practice covering professional behaviour and ethical conduct, communications, and non-surgical cosmetics, and its guidance addresses the use of patient testimonials and before-and-after photographs. A workable principle is honesty about provenance: a testimonial should come from a real patient, treated at your practice, describing treatment they actually received, and photographs should not imply your team did work that somebody else did.

Solicitors get a different restriction with the same flavour. The LSRA prohibits advertisements which refer to the "success rate" of a legal practitioner, along with phrases such as "no win no fee", "no foal no fee" and "free first consultation" where the advertisement refers to personal injuries. It also rules out advertisements that solicit or offer inducement to make personal injury claims, and damages figures not based on statutory guidelines.

None of this makes reviews off limits. It changes which sentence you publish. A patient saying your reception team fitted them in on a bad week is untouchable. The same patient naming a prescription product is not. If you are building out review content, the mechanics of gathering and publishing customer reviews on your own website matter more here than anywhere else, because you control the wording of what goes up and a third-party platform does not.

The Job Title on Your Homepage Is a Legal Claim

This one reaches well past the professions people think of as regulated.

Section 18 of the Building Control Act 2007 makes it an offence for a person who is not on the statutory register to use the title "architect", either alone or in combination with any other words, letters, name, title or description implying registration. It also catches practising or carrying on business under any name, style or title containing the word. On summary conviction that carries a fine of up to €5,000, imprisonment for up to 12 months, or both, and if the contravention continues after conviction there is a further fine of up to €500 for every day it continues.

Every day it continues. A website is a contravention that continues by default, quietly, while you are doing something else.

The Act does draw sensible lines. It provides that using words such as "landscape architect", "naval architect", "architectural technician", "architectural technologist" or "interior design architect" does not, in and of itself, breach that section, and it allows a firm to trade under a name containing the word where the architectural side of the business is under the control and management of a registered professional. Quantity surveyors and building surveyors have their own equivalent provisions in the same Act.

The failure mode is rarely fraud. It is a design and build company whose homepage says "our architects will visit your site" because it read better than the alternative, written by somebody who never thought of the word as a licence.

The Line Your Regulator Wants, and Your Web Designer Left Out

Financial brokers, mortgage advisers and insurance intermediaries have the opposite problem. Their exposure is usually something missing rather than something present.

Central Bank guidance sets out a regulatory disclosure statement for regulated entities to use in advertisements, in the form of the firm's full legal name, any trading names it uses, and a statement that it is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. The same guidance is clear that the statement must not be used for products or services the firm is not regulated for, which is its own trap for a broker who has added a new service line since the site was built.

Timing matters here more than usual. The modernised Consumer Protection Code came into force on 24 March 2026 after a long implementation period. If your website copy was signed off before that and has not been looked at since, it was written against a code that is no longer the current one.

The street-level version: a compliance review starts with your website because your website is the easiest thing in your business for anybody to inspect without asking your permission.

Where Each Regulator Looks First

Sector	Who sets the rules	The page most likely to be wrong
Aesthetic and weight management clinics	HPRA	Treatments and pricing pages naming a prescription product
Dental practices	Dental Council	Testimonials and before-and-after galleries
Solicitors and barristers	LSRA	Personal injury service pages and results claims
Architects, quantity and building surveyors	Statutory registers under the Building Control Act 2007	Homepage job titles and the business name itself
Brokers, advisers and intermediaries	Central Bank of Ireland	Footer disclosure and product descriptions

The Honest Limitation

Two things this article cannot do for you.

The first is stay current. Codes get modernised, guidance pages get rewritten, and a regulator's position in August 2026 is not a permanent fact. Everything above is drawn from published guidance and legislation as it stands today, and it is not legal advice. Your professional body, your indemnity insurer and your own solicitor are the people whose reading of it actually protects you.

The second is cover the nuance in your specific wording. Building Control Act carve-outs are the clearest illustration. "Architectural technologist" is fine, "architect" is not, and the gap between them is one word in a sentence you probably did not write. Sector rules are full of distinctions that fine, which is why "we deleted the whole page to be safe" is usually the wrong answer and costs you enquiries you were entitled to earn.

The Part Nobody Puts in the Compliance Manual

Say you have read all of the above and found three sentences on your site that need to change. Straightforward enough. Now answer the second question: how quickly can you actually change them?

For a lot of businesses the honest answer is a fortnight. An email to whoever built the site, a wait, a quote for the amendment, an approval, another wait. Change requests at €75 to €150 an hour are the going rate for that kind of work, and the invoice is not the worst part. The worst part is that a page you now know is wrong stays published while you wait for somebody else's calendar to open up.

For years I read client websites the way a salesperson reads them, for persuasion. That is not the same as reading them for permission, and I missed things because of it.

This is the argument for owning your own site outright rather than renting access to it. Full WordPress access means the correction takes four minutes and happens the moment you decide, which is also why we built everything into a single €60 a year price with full control from day one rather than metering changes. The same logic applies to the routine stuff: a mistyped figure carries its own consumer law risk, and being able to correct a wrong price on your website the same hour you spot it is worth more than any feature list. Those company details you are legally required to display fall into the same bucket.

If you have never built or edited a WordPress site yourself, that sounds harder than it is. Describing your business to an AI builder and getting a working site back in under a minute is now the low-effort path, not the ambitious one.

When a Locked-Down Builder Is the Safer Choice

Now the case against my own argument.

If your entire online presence is one page carrying your name, your registration number, your qualifications and a phone number, and you have no intention of ever writing about your services in detail, then a closed platform like Squarespace genuinely suits you better. Fewer pages, fewer archives, fewer places for a 2019 blog post to sit quietly breaking a rule you had not heard of. Constraint is a real form of safety, and for a sole practitioner who wants a business card on the internet, it is the sensible trade.

That stops being true the moment you want to explain what you do. Content is how service businesses get found, and the businesses that publish are the ones that need editorial control, version history and the ability to act on their own site without asking anyone. You cannot write your way to visibility on a platform you are afraid to touch.

Conclusion

The myth is not that these rules are unfair or obscure. Most of them are one click from a regulator's homepage and were written for good reasons: people make health and money decisions based on what your website says.

The myth is that a website is somehow outside all of it. A quiet corner of your business, exempt because it is yours.

Give yourself an evening with your own site open, reading it the way somebody who enforces your sector's rules would read it. Check the pages you have not looked at in three years, because those are the ones written before you knew any of this. Then find out how fast you can change a sentence when you need to, before the day you need to.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does my own website count as advertising under Irish law?

In most regulated sectors, yes. The HPRA defines advertising a medicine as any information or activity designed to promote its prescription, supply, sale or consumption, and states this includes websites and social media. Advertising regulations for solicitors and barristers likewise cover online advertisements. If a page exists to bring you business, assume your regulator treats it as an advertisement rather than as neutral information.

Can a clinic name Botox or a weight-loss injection on its website?

Advertising or promoting prescription-only medicines to the public is prohibited under the Medicinal Products (Control of Advertising) Regulations 2007. The HPRA applies this to all media formats including websites, and its guidance covers businesses offering services which may lead to the prescription and supply of a medicine, naming botulinum toxin, semaglutide and tirzepatide as examples. Describing a consultation-led service is a different exercise from naming the product. Read the current HPRA guidance and take your own advice before publishing.

Are patient testimonials allowed on an Irish healthcare website?

It depends on the regulator and on what the testimonial actually says. Where medicines are advertised to the public, the HPRA states the advertising must not include recommendations from scientists, health professionals or people with celebrity status. The Dental Council publishes codes covering professional behaviour, communications and non-surgical cosmetics, including the use of testimonials and before-and-after images. A review about your service is on far safer ground than one naming a product.

Can I describe myself as an architect on my website?

Only if you are on the statutory register. Section 18 of the Building Control Act 2007 makes it an offence for an unregistered person to use the title, alone or combined with other words, or to trade under a name containing it. Summary conviction carries a fine of up to €5,000, up to 12 months, or both, with a further daily fine of up to €500 while the contravention continues. The Act provides that terms such as architectural technologist and landscape architect do not in themselves breach the section.

What has to appear on the website of a Central Bank regulated firm?

Central Bank guidance sets out a regulatory disclosure statement for use in advertisements: the firm's full legal name, any trading names, and a statement that it is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. It must not be used in connection with products or services the firm is not regulated for. With the modernised Consumer Protection Code in force since 24 March 2026, wording signed off before that date is worth re-reading against the current code.

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