Why Wellness Practice Websites Fail (And Joyful Remedies)
Ten ordinary mistakes stop wellness websites turning visitors into bookings, and every one of them is fixable this month.
Ten ordinary mistakes stop wellness websites turning visitors into bookings, and every one of them is fixable this month.
Your website is being polite It's welcoming people in, showing them round, and letting them leave without asking for anything. A good practice deserves a website that asks for the booking the way a good host asks if you'll stay for tea, not the way a menu without prices lets you wander off to find lunch elsewhere.
Somewhere on your homepage, a phrase repeats itself four times.
Near the top, the word 'book' doesn't appear once.
A visitor reads the way she'd read a menu with no prices. Politely, top to bottom, then off to find lunch elsewhere.
Your booking button belongs near the top, not buried under a paragraph explaining your ethos. People don't need your ethos before lunch. They need to know where to sit.
A menu with no prices gets read once, and never ordered from.
Wellness marketing choices: some helpful comparisons to consider:
Better ways: practical guidance on this topic:
Put the button where the eye lands first, and let the ethos wait its turn further down the page.
Copying the wording off a bigger clinic's site feels sensible. They must know something you don't.
What they know is a bigger marketing budget. Their sentence is longer, not better, written by a copywriter paid to write sentences all day.
Your own words describe your own room, your own hands, your own Tuesday afternoon slot. Nobody else's paragraph fits your practice the way your key fits your door.
A borrowed sentence sits on your site like a coat that isn't yours, on the wrong hook, in the wrong hallway.
Write the sentence only your practice could write. Your booking form knows the difference, even if the borrowed one reads perfectly well out loud.
Nobody clicks away from your site because the colours are wrong. Nobody has ever once thought, the sage green is letting the side down.
They click away because they can't tell if you treat back pain or bad moods. They haven't got time to guess, standing there in their coat, phone in hand.
Say what you treat, plainly, near the top, in a sentence a tired reader can catch once and keep. Your clarity does more work than your palette ever will.
Visitors don't need a mood board. They need a sentence.
Pick the sentence before the swatch. A practice that states its business plainly beats a practice with a lovelier font every single time.
71.8% of UK therapists earn £30,000 or less a year. That figure includes the ones who followed every blog post in order, highlighter in hand.
Clients aren't the problem. They exist, searching, at half past nine on a Sunday night, looking for exactly what you offer.
Your website fails to say what you do, in words a stranger understands before she's finished her tea. Your income ceiling is a wording problem, dressed up as an unlucky year.
Fix the sentence, and the ceiling moves. It rarely announces itself as a sentence problem, but it is one.
Good to know: Whatever's on your mind here, and however your practice's specifics play in, this is what specialist agencies take care of - so you can get on with running your practice. Happy to help ease your mind, if it'd be useful.
Fixing this yourself is entirely possible, if you enjoy learning conversion copy in the evenings between the washing up and your tax return.
Some people do enjoy that. Most would rather be doing anything else, including the tax return.
Handing it to a copywriter who does this daily costs money you don't feel you have yet. But another slow month costs more, and arrives without an invoice, so you never quite notice it leaving.
Self-check: score your practice:
Spend the evening learning a new trade, or spend it watching the telly while a copywriter fixes the sentence. Only one of those improves your bookings by Friday.
A testimonials page with three quotes from 2019 tells a visitor something you didn't intend.
It says you haven't had a good week since.
Update it, or hide it. There's no third option that looks better, however you angle the laptop.
Recent words from recent clients read like a living practice, not a museum with a visitors' book nobody's signed since the referendum.
Ask this month's client for two lines. Your newest testimonial sells harder than your oldest ten combined.
You add more pages thinking more information builds trust. About Us, Our Philosophy, Our Story So Far, Meet The Team's Dog.
Visitors don't read more. They read less, and each extra page is another door they might wander through and never find their way back from.
A short site keeps people moving toward the booking button, the way a well-laid table keeps a guest from wandering into the kitchen looking for the salt.
Say what you do, who it's for, and how to book.
The dog can wait for Instagram. Your homepage has one job, and the job isn't introducing the dog.
The booking button hiding behind a dropdown menu feels tidy to you. You built the site, so you know exactly where everything is.
A stranger doesn't have your floor plan. She won't hunt for a light switch in a house that isn't hers, at half past nine on any given night.
Your booking button needs to sit in plain sight, lit up, obvious, the way a good host leaves the porch light on.
Nobody rummages through a stranger's cupboards looking for the biscuits. They just leave.
Move the button above the fold and watch what happens. A visible button collects bookings a hidden one only collects dust.
Waiting six months to fix a page that isn't working costs more than the fix itself, every single time.
Every week it stays broken is another week of people leaving without booking. It happens without complaint, without anyone telling you why.
They don't send a note explaining themselves. They simply stop arriving, the way guests stop coming to a house where the kettle never quite boils.
Fix it this month, not next spring.
The six months you'd have lost start working for you instead. Your quickest fix this year is the one sitting on your homepage right now.
The stock photo of a woman touching a stone on her own forehead isn't reassuring anyone. She's touched that stone on four thousand other websites too.
Swap it for a real photo of your treatment room. The one with the kettle, the box of tissues, and the slightly crooked blind.
That's the room they'll be nervous about walking into, so let them see it before they arrive. A real room says more than any stone ever managed.
Your real chair, your real lamp, your real view of the car park. They do the reassuring the stock photo only pretended to do.
See exactly which page is losing you bookings, and fix it before another month slips past unnoticed. find your fix
We love that moment of recognition. It's usually where the good work starts - a story garden, a visual river, a listening wind, and a conversation that goes properly both ways. The kettle's on. How do you take it?
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