What should a therapist website cost — and is it worth it?

Which is why how much does a therapist website cost? isn't quite the right question. The more useful one is: what am I actually buying, and will it earn its place? Here's how I'd think it through if the budget were mine.

A good website isn't a bill you settle once and resent. It's a working part of your practice that should keep earning for years. Built and maintained sensibly, a site stays effective for five years or more — and once you spread the cost across that time, even a bespoke build becomes a modest monthly figure. Unlike an advert, it doesn't stop the moment you stop paying.

It also tends to pay for itself fairly directly. A website really has three jobs: to be found by the right people, to feel enough like you that they can picture the room, and to make getting in touch feel easy. Do those well and it brings enquiries — and it only takes a handful of those becoming clients, each staying for a course of sessions, to cover the whole cost within the first months. After that, it is simply working for you.

There's a small tax point worth knowing too: a website for your practice is a legitimate business expense, so a portion of the cost comes back to you at your marginal rate.

The build is only part of the picture. Whatever route you take, a live website carries a few ongoing costs. It's worth seeing them plainly rather than being caught out by them.

Some builders roll several of these into a single monthly fee, which looks tidy but often costs more over five years. A WordPress site tends to itemise them — less neat on paper, usually cheaper in the long run, and clearer about what you're actually paying for.

Platforms like Wix and Squarespace let you assemble a site for very little, with no technical knowledge, and for some practitioners that's genuinely enough. The trade-offs are real, though. These platforms aren't built to rank well on Google, so the right client may never find you. You're tied to that one platform as your practice changes. And the underlying templates are made to suit every business at once — plumber, café, therapist — rather than yours in particular.

Several companies sell ready-made website packages to therapists. It's a reasonable middle path, and cheaper than bespoke. The catch is that the same handful of templates get used again and again, so your site can end up looking like a dozen others — and a design that felt current the year it was made can date quickly, both in how it looks and in how it's built underneath. If you go this way, ask to see several sites built on the same template, and picture how yours will read in three or four years' time.

This is what I do. A website designed around your practice from a blank page: built to be found, written to sound like you, and structured around how you actually work rather than the spaces a template happens to leave. It costs more at the outset and takes longer to make. In return you get something unmistakably yours, that you own outright, and that can grow as your practice does.

It ranges widely — from very little for a self-built site to a few thousand pounds for a fully bespoke one. My own bespoke packages run from £895 to £2,295 as a one-off. What you're really choosing between is a lower cost now and how well the site works over the next five years.

You can, and if the budget is tight it's a fair place to start. Just go in aware of the limits: it's harder to be found on Google, and you're tied to one platform as your practice grows.

A well-built one stays effective for five years or more. What dates a site fastest is the way it's built underneath, not just how it looks — so current, well-maintained foundations matter more than a fashionable style.

If you'd like a site designed specifically for you — one that balances what you can spend now against what it needs to do for the next five years — I'd be glad to talk it through. A conversation costs nothing.