TL;DR: A therapy website usually fails for one of two reasons, and neither is design. Either nobody is finding it, because nothing on the page says who you help, what with, and where. Or people find it and cannot tell within a few seconds whether you are for them. Fix the words before you touch the design.
There is a particular kind of disappointment that comes about three months after a website goes live.
The site looks good. You paid for it, or you spent your evenings building it. The colours are calm, the photography is nice, your qualifications are all there. And the enquiries have not come. Perhaps one, from someone who turned out to want something you do not offer.
I see this a lot, and I want to say the useful thing rather than the flattering one. When a therapy website is not getting enquiries, the design is almost never the problem. It is one of two other things, and they need completely different approaches. Working out which one you have is the whole job.
First, work out which problem you actually have
Before changing anything, you need to know whether people are arriving at your site or not. These are opposite problems and the fixes have nothing in common.
If nobody is arriving, no amount of rewriting will help, because there is no one there to read it. If people are arriving and leaving without contacting you, then more visitors will simply mean more people leaving.
You can tell which it is in about ten minutes. If you have Google Analytics or any stats from your hosting, look at how many people visited last month. If you have nothing installed, open a private browsing window and search for what you do and where you do it, the way a client would: “counsellor Taunton”, “anxiety therapist Wells”. Go three pages deep. If you cannot find yourself, you have a being-found problem.
A rough rule from what I see: if fewer than about fifty people a month reach your site, work on being found. If a few hundred are arriving and nobody enquires, work on the words. Those numbers are a starting point, not a law.
Problem one: nobody can find you
This is the more common of the two, and it is usually down to a single thing.
Google does not rank websites. It ranks individual pages. That distinction matters more than almost anything else in this article. If your site has one page covering counselling in general, and that page mentions your town once in a footer, there is no page for Google to show when someone searches for a counsellor in your town.
The single commonest gap I see is not a bad page. It is a missing one. There is nothing on the site that is genuinely about being a therapist in a specific place, so nothing can rank for that. I have written about that missing page in more detail in the one page your therapy website needs to rank locally.
The second thing is language. Almost nobody searches for a modality. People search for a feeling and a place, at eleven at night: “why do I feel anxious all the time”, “help with panic attacks Somerset”. Your training and your approach are accurate, and they belong on the site. They are just not what gets typed into a search box. There is more on this in my piece on what your clients are actually searching for.
One caution, because the fix gets overdone. The temptation is to spin up a dozen thin, near-identical pages with the town name swapped out. Do not. Google spots that quickly, and it reads as exactly what it is. One genuinely useful page about your work in the place you actually work beats ten hollow ones.
Problem two: people arrive, and leave
If your visitor numbers are respectable and the enquiries are not, the words are doing something other than what you think.
I was in touch with a therapist a while back whose website was genuinely well written. Warm, professional, clearly from someone who cared a great deal about her clients. The problem was that it never said, plainly, where she was or who she helped. A reader had to work it out. Most will not do that work. They will go back to the search results and click the next person.
The pattern underneath this is common enough to name. Therapy websites tend to be written for other therapists. Qualifications, training, theoretical orientation, a paragraph about the journey of self-discovery. It is a page that would earn a nod from a supervisor and leaves a frightened person none the wiser about whether they should ring you.
The BACP’s own guidance to people looking for a therapist is a useful mirror here. It tells them to “be clear about what you want and what the practitioner is able to offer”, to ask about the therapist’s way of working, and to check practical details like session length, location and cost. That is a list of things your visitor is trying to establish. Every one of them that your website answers plainly is one less reason to click away.
So the test is simple. Open your home page and give it the five-second read a stranger gives it. Can you tell who this person helps, with what, and roughly where? If any of those three take effort to find, that is the fix, and it is a writing job rather than a design one.
What about the design itself?
Design earns its keep in a narrow way: it decides whether someone trusts the page enough to keep reading. A cramped, cluttered, slow site with tiny text on a phone will lose people before a word is read.
Beyond that, more design does not produce more enquiries. I would rather send someone a plain page that says the right things than a beautiful one that says nothing. Not a clever website. A clear one.
A slow site is worth checking, because it is a settings problem rather than a moral failing. Most therapy sites are slow because of oversized photographs, and that is fixable in an afternoon.
If you built it yourself and it is not working
I will be honest about my own position here, because it is a limitation as much as an opinion. I do not redesign Wix or Squarespace sites. The limitations of those platforms mean the results are always compromised, so I would be charging you for a job I could not do properly.
That is not a dig at anyone who built their own. I never dismiss the effort someone has put into a DIY site, and plenty of them work perfectly well. If it is not doing the job, the kindest thing I can do is say why rather than tinker at the edges.
I turned down a counsellor last year for exactly this reason. She had built her own site, wanted to keep control of it, and asked me for small paid tweaks by the hour: alignment, mobile spacing, colours. I said no, warmly, and told her why. Tidying an unfamiliar site I did not build is slow, those small jobs always overrun, and a grudging yes would have served her worse than a straight no. We left it on good terms, with the door open for a proper rebuild if she ever wanted one.
I mention it because “the web person said no” is a thing you are allowed to hear, and it is often more honest than a quote.
You might not need any of this
I would rather tell you the truth than sell you something you do not need.
If your website is really a brochure, somewhere to send people who already found you through a directory, a referral, or word of mouth, then you may not need to worry about search at all. A page that confirms you are real and lets people book is doing its job. There is no point chasing Google rankings you do not actually need.
Directories are worth saying something about too, since most therapists use one. A directory profile is rented space you do not control, shown alongside every competitor on the same page. That is not a reason to avoid it. It works, and it works because people go there ready to choose. The way I think about it: the directory is where you are discovered, and your website is where you are chosen. If your site is the second half of that, it needs to do the choosing job well.
Where to start this week
If you do one thing, make it the first of these.
- Rewrite your home page opening. One sentence that says what you do, who for, and where. “I am a counsellor in Wells and I work with anxiety and panic.” Put it where a person sees it without scrolling.
- Check what a stranger sees. Ask someone outside the profession to look at your site for five seconds and tell you what you do and where. Their answer is your diagnosis.
- Test your contact form. Send yourself an enquiry from your phone, right now. I have twice found client forms that had quietly stopped sending, with nothing on screen to show it. If yours has failed, everything else here is beside the point.
- Give your town a proper page, but only if you genuinely work in that area and can write something true about it.
- Check it on a phone. Most of your visitors are on one, often late at night.
None of this needs a redesign. It needs an hour and a willingness to say the plain thing first. If being found is the half you want to tackle, how to get found on Google as a therapist covers that ground properly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is my therapy website not getting any enquiries?
Almost always one of two reasons. Either nobody is reaching the site, or people reach it and cannot tell quickly enough whether you are the right person for them. Check your visitor numbers first, because the fixes are opposite. If very few people are arriving, the problem is that your site does not have a page that clearly covers what you do and where you do it, so search engines have nothing to show. If a reasonable number are arriving and not contacting you, the problem is the writing. Most therapy websites are written for colleagues rather than for a worried person deciding whether to make contact. Design is rarely the cause, and redesigning before you know which problem you have usually wastes money.
How do I know if my website has a traffic problem or a wording problem?
Look at how many people visited last month, using Google Analytics or your hosting statistics. As a rough guide, under about fifty visitors a month means you have a being-found problem, and a few hundred visitors with no enquiries means you have a wording problem. If you have no statistics installed, open a private browser window and search the way a client would, using your service and your town rather than your name. If you cannot find yourself within three pages of results, treat it as a being-found problem. Searching for your own business name proves nothing, because you will always rank for that.
What should the first line of a therapist website say?
Say what you do, who you help, and where you are, in ordinary language. Something like “I am a counsellor in Wells and I work with anxiety and panic” does more work than a paragraph about your training or a quote about the journey of self-discovery. Your qualifications and your approach matter and should be on the site, but they answer the visitor’s second question, not their first. The person reading is frightened and scanning. They are trying to establish whether you are for them before they invest any more attention. Make that judgement possible in five seconds and more of them will keep reading.
Do I need a separate page for my town?
Usually yes, if you want to be found by people searching in that area. Search engines rank individual pages rather than whole websites, so a site that mentions your town only in the footer gives them nothing to show for a local search. A page genuinely about your work in that place is the single commonest thing missing from therapy websites. One caution: do not create several near-identical pages with the town name swapped. That is spotted quickly and it reads as exactly what it is. Write one honest page for the place you actually work, and only add more if you truly serve those areas.
Is it worth redesigning my therapy website?
Not until you know why it is not working. Design decides whether someone trusts the page enough to keep reading, and a cluttered or slow site on a phone will lose people. Beyond that, more design does not produce more enquiries. A plain page saying the right things beats a beautiful one saying nothing. Rewrite your opening, check the site on a phone, and test your contact form first. If after all that the site is still hard to read, slow, or built on a platform that limits what you can fix, then a rebuild is a fair conversation to have.
Do therapists need a website at all, or is a directory enough?
Many therapists get started without one. The counsellor and writer Josephine Hughes puts it plainly: “No, therapists do not necessarily need a website to start getting clients”, and adds that a website “works best as part of a wider visibility strategy”. Directories work, and they work because people arrive there ready to choose. The distinction worth holding is that a directory profile is rented space you do not control, shown next to every competitor. The directory is where you are discovered, and your website is where you are chosen. If most of your enquiries already come through referrals and directories, your website has a smaller job to do, and that is a perfectly reasonable position.
If you would like a second opinion
If you have read this and still are not sure which of the two problems you have, I am happy to take a look and tell you plainly. No pressure, no pitch. Sometimes it is a twenty-minute fix, and sometimes the honest answer is that the site is fine and the marketing is the gap.
You can see how I work with counsellors and wellness practitioners on the website design for counsellors page, or book a free 30-minute chat if you would rather just talk it through.
Have a Wonderfilled day.