The private-practice website checklist

1. The pages (in priority order)

• Home — who you help, in the first sentence, with your city if you see clients in person. One consult button above the fold.
• Services — one section per offering (individual, couples, EMDR…), each with who it's for and what a session looks like. Avoid outcome promises — most licensing boards read them as advertising violations.
• About — first person, a real photo, why you do this work. This is the most-read page on almost every therapist site.
• Contact — a short form (name, email, what brings you), your response-time expectation, and — critically — a note that the form is not for emergencies, with the 988 line.
• Fees or FAQ — publish at least a range and your insurance stance. Hiding fees costs you exactly the inquiries you least want to handle by phone.

2. Trust signals

• License number and state, visible in the footer of every page.
• Verifiable NPI — a badge that links your listed identity to the CMS registry beats a self-asserted credential list. (PracticeWoven verifies this automatically and re-checks weekly.)
• Your photo, once more. Practices that add one report measurably more inquiries; every designer we know has the same anecdote.

3. The intake path

• Form submissions must land somewhere you actually check — email and an inbox you can search later.
• Keep the form short: three fields plus a message. Every added field costs completions.
• Never let the form become a clinical record. Move conversations to your EHR the moment someone becomes a client.

4. The legal layer

• Privacy policy that reflects what your site actually collects (form fields, analytics).
• 988 / crisis notice — recommended by several boards and directories; a footer line is enough.
• No testimonials from current clients — most state boards prohibit them for therapists (coaches have more room).
• If you run ads or embed trackers, a cookie disclosure. Better: use privacy-first analytics and skip the banner entirely.

5. Being findable

• Claim your Google Business Profile and keep name/address/phone identical to your site — this single item outweighs most on-site SEO for local searches.
• Unique title and description per page; a page per specialty if you have several. See our SEO for therapists guide for the full picture.
• Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console once, then stop checking it daily.

The order to do it all

1. Pages Home/Services/About/Contact with honest draft copy (a day, or six questions if the draft writes itself).
2. License + NPI + photo.
3. Working form → your email.
4. Privacy policy + 988 line.
5. Publish. Then Google Business Profile, fees page, blog — a live imperfect site beats a perfect draft every week it's live.