What actually needs to be on a therapist's homepage

Someone has found your website. They may have been given your name, or they may have clicked three others before yours. Either way they arrived with a question, and they will decide within about a minute whether you can answer it.

They are not reading. They are scanning for five things.

1. Whether they are in the right place

Not “welcome to my practice”. The specific version: who you work with, and what you work with them on.

Counselling for adults in Sheffield, mostly around anxiety, burnout and work that has stopped feeling like it fits.

That sentence does more than a paragraph about your approach, because it lets somebody rule themselves in or out immediately. Both outcomes are useful. The person who leaves was never going to become a client, and they have now left without occupying an enquiry slot.

If you genuinely work with a broad range, say the broad thing plainly rather than listing twenty presenting issues. A list of twenty reads as a directory profile, not a practice.

2. What it is actually like

This is the part most websites skip, and the part most people want.

Not your modality. What happens. How long a session is. Whether it is in a room or on a screen. Whether they can email you first rather than ringing. Whether you will ask them to fill something in.

A person considering therapy for the first time has no model for any of this. Two sentences of plain description does more for their nerves than any amount of language about safe spaces.

3. What it costs

Put the fee on the homepage or one clear click from it.

Withholding a price does not create an enquiry. It creates a person who emails to ask the price, gets an answer, and disappears — or, more often, one who does not email at all. Fee transparency is being argued for inside the profession for good reasons, and it also happens to remove the single most common reason somebody closes a therapist’s website.

If you have a sliding scale, say the range and say how it works. If you have a small number of lower-cost places, say that. Vagueness reads as expensive.

4. Whether you are real

One photograph of you. Not a stock image, not a chair, not a plant.

You do not have to like being photographed. The photograph is not there to be flattering — it is there so that the person can picture sitting in a room with a human being rather than with a website. A plain, well-lit, unstyled photograph is better than an expensive one where you look like somebody else.

Your registration and membership belong here too, set out exactly as your professional body permits, without turning the page into a wall of badges.

5. What to do next

One action, said in plain words, repeated where a person is likely to be ready rather than everywhere.

“Send me an email and tell me a little about what is going on” is a better call to action than “book now”, because it describes something the person can actually imagine doing. If there is a form, keep it short. Every field is a small reason to stop.

And say what happens afterwards. I usually reply within two working days. That one sentence removes more anxiety than most of the rest of the page.

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The order

Roughly:

1. Who you work with and on what
2. What it is like, in practical terms
3. Fees
4. Who you are, with a photograph
5. How to get in touch, and what happens then

Everything else — your training history, your reading, your accreditations in full, your thoughts on the therapeutic relationship — belongs on an About page or a Fees page, where the person who wants it will go looking.

What does not need to be there

A blog you will not maintain. A quote about the journey of a thousand miles. A list of every modality you have ever encountered. An introductory video you have been meaning to record for a year. A newsletter signup. Testimonials, which most professional bodies restrict anyway.

None of these are wrong in themselves. They are just not what the person scanning your homepage came for.

One test

Read your homepage as though you were somebody who has never had therapy, is slightly embarrassed to be looking, and is doing this at eleven at night.

If that person can tell within a minute whether you might be the right person, and knows what to do about it, the page is doing its job.