The seven things a therapy practice website has to do
Page structure, the fee question, insurance pages, speed, tap-to-call and booking for private practice, plus when a directory listing is not enough on its own.
- One: answer the four questions above the fold
- Two: tap-to-call at the top on mobile
- Three: a page per specialty, with the city in it
- Four: an insurance page that lists every panel by name
- Five: a real bio with a face and a license number
- Six: speed and a working form
- Seven: proof that does not violate anything
- What a site should cost, and when a directory is enough
- Frequently asked
17% of the practices in our dataset of 171,610 Google listings link no website at all. Among those that do, most have a site that fails the same way: it describes a philosophy of care and never answers a single question the visitor came with. A person on your site is thirty to ninety seconds from either calling you or opening the next tab. Everything below is about that window.
One: answer the four questions above the fold
Do you treat my problem. What does it cost. Do you take my insurance. When can I be seen.
Those four decide the call. Put them in the first screen, in words, not in a carousel. A homepage header that reads "Anxiety, trauma and couples therapy in Bend, Oregon. In network with Regence, PacificSource and Moda. $170 per session self-pay. New clients typically seen within 10 days" outperforms any amount of soothing copy, because it lets the wrong-fit visitor leave and the right-fit visitor call.
Practices resist publishing the fee. Publish it anyway. The visitor who leaves because $170 is out of reach was never going to book, and you just saved an intake call. The visitor who sees a real number trusts everything else on the page more.
Two: tap-to-call at the top on mobile
Most of this traffic is on a phone. The phone number must be a tap-to-call link in the header, visible without scrolling, and repeated at the bottom of every page. Not an image of a number. Not a number that opens a contact form.
If you cannot answer the phone during the day, say what happens instead in one line next to the number: "If we do not pick up, text us and we reply within two hours." What a missed call actually costs is in the follow-up guide and in the calculator.
Three: a page per specialty, with the city in it
One page for anxiety therapy in your city. One for couples. One for teens. One for trauma or EMDR. Six hundred to nine hundred words each, written by you, describing what the work actually looks like: how many sessions, what the first one covers, what changes and when. These pages are what rank for the searches that convert, and they are what AI answer engines quote, as covered in the AI search guide.
Do not write generic mental health education. You will not outrank a hospital system on "what is anxiety" and you do not need to. You need to own "couples counseling in Bend".
Four: an insurance page that lists every panel by name
This is the highest-value page on most practice sites and the one most often missing. List every payer you are in network with, spelled the way the payer spells it, plus the plan types where it matters. State clearly what happens if you are out of network: whether you provide a superbill, what the typical reimbursement is, and how a client checks their out-of-network benefit.
Add a short script for the phone call: "Call the number on the back of your card and ask, do I have out-of-network outpatient mental health benefits, what is my deductible, and what percentage is reimbursed after it is met." That paragraph converts, and it gets cited.
If you are private pay only, say so in the first sentence of the page. Ambiguity here wastes more of your time than any other page on the site.
Five: a real bio with a face and a license number
Prospective clients are choosing a person. The bio page needs a real headshot taken in the last three years, your credentials, your license type and number, where you trained, how long you have practiced, and two or three sentences in your own voice about how you work. Not a list of modalities. A person deciding whether they can sit in a room with you for an hour.
Include a photo of the office and of the building exterior. Anxiety about a first appointment is real and being able to picture the room reduces no-shows.
Six: speed and a working form
Aim for a page that loads in under two and a half seconds on a phone on cellular. The usual causes of a slow practice site are a full-width hero video, uncompressed photos straight off a camera, and four booking or chat widgets loaded at once. Compress every image to under 200 kilobytes, drop the video, and keep one widget.
The contact form should have four fields: name, phone, email, preferred time. Do not include a free-text box asking what brings them in. It lowers completion, and it creates a record of clinical detail sitting in whatever email or form platform you happen to use. Take that history on the phone or in your intake system, which is the system that is actually built for it.
Test the form yourself once a month from a phone. Broken form notifications are the most common silent failure in this category, and practices routinely go a quarter without noticing.
Seven: proof that does not violate anything
You cannot run client testimonials, and you should not try. What you can show:
- Credentials, license numbers and association memberships, with links to the public verification pages.
- Years in practice and number of clinicians.
- Trainings and certifications with the issuing body named.
- Talks, workshops, podcasts and any press mention.
- Reviews from referring providers and colleagues, where you have them, handled the way the reviews guide describes.
- Clear, specific writing. Two well-written specialty pages do more for trust than any badge.
What a site should cost, and when a directory is enough
A five to eight page site built properly runs $1,500 to $5,000 as a one-time build, or $75 to $200 a month on a platform that includes hosting and edits. Anything over $10,000 for a solo practice is a vanity purchase.
Is a Psychology Today listing enough on its own? For a brand-new practice in month one, it will keep the lights on. It stops there. The directory ranks itself, not you, it puts you in a grid of thirty similar profiles sorted by nothing you control, and it gives an AI answer engine no page of yours to cite. The practices in our data with a linked website carry a median of 9 reviews against 1 for those without. Some of that is correlation, but the direction is not in doubt.
Frequently asked
Should I use my booking platform's built-in website? It is fine as a first site if the fees, specialties and insurance render as real text rather than loading through JavaScript. Check it with JavaScript disabled. If the page is empty without it, search engines and AI systems see an empty page too.
Do I need a blog? No. Four strong specialty pages and a good insurance page beat forty blog posts. If you enjoy writing, write about your city and your practice, not about diagnoses.
Does the site need to be HIPAA compliant? A brochure site collecting name and phone through a normal form is not creating protected health information in most readings, but the moment you add intake documents, a client portal, a symptom questionnaire or scheduling with clinical detail, you need a vendor that will sign a business associate agreement. Keep the two systems separate and the question stays simple.
If you want the site built or rebuilt, website design is one of the services in the free 14-day trial. Text or call (385) 832-6175.