A 2023 figure doing the rounds says 38% of people stop engaging with a website purely because it looks unattractive, and that includes practices like yours.
Practices spend months getting the treatment right and about four minutes on the website, which turns out to be the wrong ratio.
| Original Research | A widely cited figure claims that over a third of visitors abandon a website simply because they don't like how it looks. |
|---|---|
| Source | https://rareformnewmedia.com/credibility-in-web-design/ |
| Overview | Rare Form New Media, a web design company, uses this stat to argue for good site design, tracing it back to research originally published by Adobe. |
| Year | 2023 |
| Publisher | Brand, Adobe (cited via Rare Form New Media) |
| Relevance to Wellbeing | Applies to any practice with a website, which by now is all of them, and speaks directly to how many enquiries are lost before anyone reads a word of your bio. |
| Our Verdict | Too early to tell the figure is plausible and often repeated, but it's second-hand here and the method behind it isn't shown. |
| Our Summary |
|
| Our Geo View | Applies broadly to all countries. |
The claim is that more than a third of visitors give up on a website the moment they decide it looks bad.
Rare Form New Media, a web design agency, published this on their site, attributing the figure to Adobe. No specific publish date beyond the 2023 tag, and no direct link to Adobe's own report.
Credibility flags: sample size not disclosed here, methodology not shown, and the figure arrives secondhand rather than from the original Adobe publication.
A relevance score out of 100, built from three things: how well it fits the six practice types, how recent it is, and how solid the methodology behind it is.
Marked down on how solid the method is, since it's secondary-sourced with no visible study behind it, and marked down again on practice fit, since it's a general web-design stat rather than anything specific to wellbeing.
| Practice type | Relevance | Recommended action |
|---|---|---|
| Coaching | Medium | Refresh homepage imagery and tone to match your actual client base. |
| Therapy | Medium | Prioritise a calm, uncluttered layout over anything clever. |
| Training | Medium | Make the programme structure visually obvious, not just written out. |
| Alternative Healing | High | Invest in a design that looks credible, since scepticism is already working against you. |
| Clinical | High | Match the site's polish to the clinic's actual standards, no gap allowed. |
| Retreat/Centre | High | Lead with strong, real photography of the actual space. |
Best before: revisit this once you can find Adobe's original figures directly, or by 2026 at the latest. Source cited via Rare Form New Media.
If you've ever watched someone say "the site's on the list" for the third year running, this is the stat that finally moves it up.
Well done, thinker. We love thinkers and they love our careful ways - our listening wind, story garden and visual river are all waiting for you in a twenty-five-minute coffee conversation that helps you rekindle faith in growing your practice. Milk and sugar?
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