4 Website Mistakes Undercutting Your Premium Fee (Episode 94)
Your website is making a statement about your fee before a potential client reads a single word. And if you're charging—or preparing to charge—a premium rate, the experience your website creates needs to match the caliber of care you're already providing.
In this episode, Anna gets practical about four website design mistakes that can unintentionally create doubt about your fee: crowded layouts, poor imagery, too little content, and inconsistent or outdated design. She walks through simple fixes for each so you can create a more premium experience that makes it easier for potential clients to feel confident choosing you.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:
1️⃣ Why white space can make your website feel calmer, more confident, and more premium—and how crowded design can work against you.
2️⃣ How outdated headshots, generic stock photography, and low-quality images can shape a potential client's perception before they read your copy.
3️⃣ Why a premium website needs enough content to establish expertise, build trust, and help clients feel confident investing in you.
4️⃣ How inconsistent or outdated design can create a mismatch between the quality of therapy you provide and the experience potential clients have online.
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Hey, hey, welcome back to another episode of Marketing Therapy, number ninety-four here. Today we're talking about the four mistakes that might be signaling to your clients that you're not actually worth your fee. Now, that's happening unintentionally, most likely. There's no way you were like, "Yes, I'm going to intentionally tell people that I'm not worth the..." whatever you're charging, one fifty, two hundred, two fifty, four hundred, whatever that might be. I recently hopped on a discovery call with a clinician who is getting ready to raise his rates. He is already charging a pretty high rate for his metropolitan area, but he has big goals. He wants to be at the very top of the session range in his area, he's already charging two hundred and fifty dollars a session, so something's going well here, right? But like I said, he wanted to go even higher. And he booked this call with me, and as part of that I pulled up his website and it looks like it was from twenty fifteen.
Was using the default fonts from Squarespace. There were curved dividers and straight dividers and kind of strange stock images and... This is a clinician doing incredible work. He knows it. People are already paying him for it. Awesome. But he also knew, and these were his exact words, "I want to go even more premium, but I don't exactly know what is needed. I'm already doing well, but I need an extra push to hit premium."
So he knew that his clients were gonna be seeing his design and experiencing his website before they ever read a single word, before they understood what his specialties were, the fact that he was incredibly experienced and able to support them.
He knew his design was already making a claim about that fee, and he needed to be able to back that claim up, right?
We've been talking in the last handful of episodes about what your website has to do when your fees go up. So either de-paneling, like we talked about two episodes ago, or last episode where we talked about moving to intensives.
Today is narrower and a little bit more hands-on As far as what we're gonna talk about. So we talked about in broad strokes, hey, if you're gonna de-panel or you're going to start charging $5,000 for an intensive package, your website needs to measure up. Today we're gonna talk about what that actually looks like. All right? So a little bit more hands-on. We're gonna talking specifically about design.
Now, research out of Carleton University found that people form a first impression of a website in about 50 milliseconds. 50 milliseconds they form an i- impression. That's faster than they can read your name. That's absolutely faster than they can read your fee, faster than they can read your specialties. In that first glance, they can't judge anything about your skill, your niche, your expertise yet. What they can judge, though, is whether you look like the fee that they're about to discover on your site.
We've talked before about the halo effect, the halo effect tells us that the first impression we have with a brand colors our entire experience with it. So whatever we think about initially is actually going to dictate the way that we feel about it as we continue to engage with it. So if I land on your website and it feels DIY or it feels outdated, that's going to color the lens through which I view everything that you do. Justified or not, we just know that that is a actual phenomenon that occurs.
Next episode, we're gonna be getting into why that snap judgment carries so much weight, and I'm excited about that. I've pulled together some research that I think is gonna be really useful around how premium fee clients are actually making this decision.
But today, we're gonna talk about what they're seeing, and I wanna give you some ways you can actually make changes today.
There are ultimately, as I look across the landscape of therapist websites, especially those that are wanting to go full fee and premium fee, there's a couple of categories of design mistakes that are, quite frankly, telling someone you're not worth it, even though, spoiler alert, you totally are.
Okay? Let's not let your website get in the way of that.
So we're gonna talk about four design mistakes. Fortunately, every single one of them is fixable. Maybe some of them you can even get to this week or this weekend. Okay? All right, let's get into it. The four mistakes that might be signaling to clients that you're not worth your fee.
One, y'all, your stuff is too crowded. Your stuff is too crowded.
I hopped onto a therapist website last week who is aiming to build out sort of a coaching and class side of her business, and she'd done a really beautiful job with the copy. She has a fantastic niche and a very clear point of view.
But the design, every single edge was crowded into the rest of the copy, and it was difficult to engage with. I felt sort of my anxiety increase as I read it.
You know what we could have done, and you know what we will do? We're just gonna add some breathing room.
The easiest way to make your website feel more premium is to increase white space.
If you're not familiar with what white space is, that means essentially the dead space around your design. It's blank space. We don't have to fill every single pixel of the website. In fact, the most high-end website experiences, if you were to go and study them, you would see that there's so much room for that eye to rest.
And so often I will land on a therapist website where every single inch is filled. It is a wall of text with maybe an image jammed in the side. Right? There might be a bunch of buttons. Maybe you have a pop-up on top. Like, there's just so much going on. You're trying to say absolutely everything before anyone scrolls, and it's overwhelming.
Think about walking into a boutique versus, like, a discount store. A boutique has a few pieces. There's room around each one. Every single hanger is two finger widths apart, right? The discount store has hanger upon hanger upon hanger upon hanger. That's a different experience.
All right? All we have to do, add a little bit of breathing room.
When you crowd things together, whether you realize it or not, it's reading as urgency. Like you're working hard to convince someone. Okay?
White space, on the other hand, reads as calm and confidence. "I got this. Keep scrolling." And hello, for a therapist, calm is part of why they're going to book with you. Okay?
Imagine your homepage as the first room your clients sit in with you. How do we evoke the feeling we want them to actually have?
So a crowded page kind of has pick me energy. It says, "Pick me, pick me, pick me. Read this, read this, read this." A spacious page says, "Take your time. I'll be here."
Okay? So our DIY fix here, jump over into your website. I want every single section of your website to have a single job or purpose. One button per section, and consider adding a bit more padding, so that means white space, above and below and to the left and right of most of your text. See what happens. In Squarespace, that just means increasing the height of those sections a bit, maybe nudging your boxes in just a touch on the sides, and watch how that elevates the experience.
Remember, we want the vibe to be, "Take your time. I'll be here." And that starts with white space.
Like I said, this is the number one way to make your website feel more premium.
Okay, the next mistake, poor imagery.
Y'all, we don't say an image is worth a thousand words for no reason, okay? We all know the generic therapy stock photos. We know the waterfalls. We know the path. We know the stacked rocks. We know the lotus. We know the yoga pose, right?
We also know the woman staring at a rainy window or the person sitting with their head in their hands.
All right, these are the greatest hits of cliché therapy stock photos, and they are not serving you, okay?
Or your headshot from 10 years ago that you haven't updated that is from a little bit of an angle 'cause maybe you took it as a selfie.
We have way too good of iPhone photos and DSLRs out there. Even if you're not going to invest in a complete brand photo shoot, please get some high quality images of yourself on the website.
Okay? Imagery is the fastest place that someone is going to decide whether this place is for them.
And so if you choose to use imagery that includes people, make sure that those people look organic. Make sure that these don't feel overly posed, and make sure that they communicate not where they are right now, right? Not the head in the hands. But where this person wants to go, the improved relationship they're going to experience, the peace of mind, the better workplace, whatever that is.
We wanna be casting vision, positive vision, with the images that you choose.
Ideally, and you know when we're working with our done for you clients, we're sourcing images that match the brand.
You also wanna be thoughtful about the aesthetic of that imagery. Are the colors in alignment with your brand? Do things feel consistent in that regard? Does this feel high-end? The environment that you're showing a picture of, does that feel like a place you'd want your clients to sit? We're looking for that type of experience in your imagery as well.
So how do we DIY fix this one?
On the headshot side of things, go ahead and either invest in a branded photo session with a professional photographer or, at the very least, go the DIY route. Here's what I recommend. Hop into Pinterest, type into something like branded headshot or brand photo shoot. Find some that you like, find a few that you're inspired by, and then bring those inspirations over to someone in your life who has a decent camera. That might be the newest iPhone, that might be a DSLR, whatever that might be.
Show them a handful of those inspiration photos, and then attempt to recreate them. These will, at the very least, be better than the iPhone selfie that you still have on your website from 10 years ago. Okay?
On the stock photo side of things, be thoughtful about where you're pulling these images from. Be thoughtful not just about what the image is depicting, but the aesthetic of it.
Our two favorite spots to grab images, and these come with a free commercial license, are unsplash.com, U-N splash.com, or Pexels, P-E-X-E-L-S.com. Those are our two favorite places. That's where we're sourcing a lot of our imagery when we're creating sites for clients. That's where you're gonna see the images from our Squarespace templates pulled from, and it's a great place to find really consistent, really organic stock images that are very much in alignment with your brand.
Of course, we also need to make sure these images look good, so please double-check your own website.
Pull it up on mobile, pull it up on desktop, and make sure none of your images are appearing blurry or stretched in any way. We want them to be really high quality, really crisp, especially on these retina displays that we're all viewing websites on these days.
Okay? So those are our DIY fixes in the image category.
The next mistake that I see on Therapists who are looking to charge premium fees and don't realize that their website is undercutting those is too little content.
I hear often, "I just want a simple website. I don't like a website with a lot of words." I hear you on that. I also don't just wanna hop onto a website and see a wall of text at any given time.
However, when you have a single one-page site, all you have is the Simple Practice website extension, for instance, or you've tried to pack all of the value and nuance and experience with you into a single page website that you built, we are missing out on opportunity. Or if I hop into your specialty page that's supposed to be about postpartum anxiety, and there's maybe a handful of paragraphs about it, I simply am not going to trust you enough.
Okay? So this is about communicating trust by saying enough about something, and then displaying what we're saying in an engaging way. Okay?
So spacious, you know, we're talking about white space earlier, and empty, those are two different things.
White space is breathing room around things with substance. If you have too little content on your website, that's just breathing room around nothing. We don't have enough for not just your clients, but Google and AI to sink their teeth into.
And if I'm someone who is looking to hand over two hundred, two fifty, three hundred dollars a session, I need the confidence that you know exactly what you're talking about and that you're relevant to me. And it's difficult to communicate all of that if you're not saying enough.
So this one sits kind of at the intersection of both copy and design, since the content, of course, is, is going to be needed in order to create and design a page that has enough on it. But you need to be mindful of this part as well, because this can be another thing.
It's not that you're not worth your fee. It's not even that the experience is bad. It's just that there's not enough there to know for sure .
We know that someone paying a premium fee wants to feel like they know you a little before they reach out. And when your website is too thin, we don't have enough for them to feel confident in that decision.
It can read a little bit more like a side project, right? Someone who's still kinda figuring it out instead of your whole committed practice.
Premium sites have a level of depth to them.
There's a page for each specialty, right? There's an About page with a real person on it where you're communicating your expertise and what it's like to sit across from you. You talk about what working together is going to look and feel like. There's an FAQ for the fee question. There's a place for all of this.
We're not trying to pack that all into the simple practice website format or a one-page website.
So our DIY fix here, if you have too little content, I want you to audit your website and determine if every service or specialty that you offer has its own page.
And then on each page, is there enough there that it feels complete?
Would I read your About page and feel like I have a good sense, not just of you and what you like to do on the weekends, but what it's like to be in the room with you?
When I go to the homepage, can I get to every page relevant to me from there?
We like to view your homepage as a launching pad into the rest of your website. So not just a headshot and a handful of your credentials and maybe a Book a Consult section. Is there a place to empathize with the client? Is there a place to introduce yourself? Is there a place to get into those individual specialty pages?
We need enough there that, again, your clients, but also Google and AI, can sink their teeth into it, recognize you as an expert, and justify the fee that you're charging.
Okay? Your premium fee needs a site that has enough in it to get to know you and feel justified in making that buying decision .
All right, the last one, and this one is a little bit more broad because it can take so many different forms.
But the last thing that is signaling to your clients that you're not worth your fee is inconsistent or outdated design.
Right back to my two thousand and fifteen therapist, the clinician that I was on that call with, this can look so many different ways.
In his case, we had default fonts that we see on just about every website.
The fonts were being used in kind of strange ways. There wasn't a clear hierarchy of what mattered more than the other. The use of color was inconsistent. Certain pages didn't have enough contrast, so it was difficult to read, which we know is also an issue from an accessibility standpoint. The actual way that text was aligned, some of it was centered next to an image, and some of it was aligned to different sides.
Buttons, some were too large, some were missing.
On the mobile version, text was overlapping
It's these types of things, it's these really standard templates that people have been using for literally 15 years on their websites. You know when you land there, you know that it feels outdated.
We need to be mindful of how fonts are being used.
We need to be mindful about the layout of each section that keeps someone engaged and moving down that page. Because again, we need enough on that page, but we've gotta keep them engaged. It can't just be a wall of text. It can't just be a list of bullets and another list of bullets and then a button.
So we have to be mindful about bringing your website design into the 21st century, into 2026, and not using some of those more outdated elements that automatically call into question your level of expertise. Right?
Outdated can read as hasn't grown, hasn't invested Even when you've grown and invested enormously in yourself and in the therapy that you offer.
Inconsistency can read as an inattention to detail, which we know matters to clients paying a premium fee, right? That's the exact thing that you're asking them to trust you with. How are we creating a mismatch between the experience we know you offer and what they're actually getting from your website? Could we be sending unintentionally those messages to your clients?
So on the DIY fix here, please make sure that you are limiting the use of fonts on your website to two, maybe three max if you have, like, a script font that's serving as an accent.
Pull up your site on your phone and double-check everything is looking correct there, there's nothing overlapping, especially on Squarespace. It can be easy if you don't double-check that to unintentionally create a really broken experience on your phone.
So go ahead and pull that up .
And then my recommendation is to hop over to our Squarespace template shop, to Pinterest, somewhere where you can access some up-to-date and modern designs and gain some inspiration from them.
Look at how images are being used next to text. Look at where buttons are being placed and how certain text is larger than others.
Use some of those indicators and bring them over into your website.
No, don't steal these, but go get some inspiration.
I tell people all the time, "If you don't, don't wanna purchase one of our Squarespace templates, at least go look at them to get some inspo."
Right? Because we know that our Squarespace templates were built using modern best practices and what we know is working for therapists.
So either grab one of those templates or get some inspiration from them. But go look at websites you know are working and see how you can model your own website after those things.
Okay? And if you need it to be easier, just go grab one of our Squarespace templates and start from there. That way you know that you've got all these things in place.
Consistency tells people that you pay attention. A website that you have invested in makes people f- feel comfortable investing in you.
Be thoughtful about this. Don't let this go by the wayside. Don't let your growth as a clinician and your growth in your practice outpace the experience people are having right now because that's how they're deciding if you're worth it.
All right, so those four things, again, those things that might unintentionally be telling clients that you're not worth your fee even though you totally are. Crowded, little white space, poor imagery, too little content, and inconsistent or outdated design.
If we can fix these things, if you see yourself in some of these things, we can fix them, and if we do, we can create a more premium experience that primes people for the fee that you're asking them to pay.
That therapist I talked about from the beginning, he didn't need to become a better therapist to charge those rates. He didn't need to change anything clinically in order to go ahead and raise his rates.
But he did realize that he needed a website that looked like the therapist he already was
Okay? Pick one of these categories today, whichever one stood out to you most, pick one of them, fix it today.
Jump into that website. Update your white space. Add some additional pages. Do what you need to do in order to keep moving your website in this premium direction.
Decrease the doubt that people would have when they land on your website and then they see your fee.
Like I mentioned, next week we're gonna be talking about why people actually make this decision. What's the science behind people that decide to go with a more expensive therapist? What's the science behind people deciding to pay a premium fee for something when they could find a cheaper option? We're gonna look at that.
But recognize today that the experience that people are having on your website, that boutique versus discount store experience, that's available to you to change right now.
So go in and make those updates.
If you know that you want to start from something that's actually built for therapists and that we know is working, snag one of our Squarespace templates, walkerstrategyco.com/templates.
If you know you need something custom and you're not interested in DIY-ing this whole process, grab a discovery call with me, walkerstrategyco.com/services.
Whatever you do, go make some of these updates. Let your website be the first room that people sit in and craft an experience that primes people for the fee, that makes it easy for them to say yes instead of inviting doubt and requiring your marketing to work harder.
Okay, I'm excited to see you for next week's episode where we're getting into why people make these decisions. For now, get some of these changes in place, and I'll see you in our next episode.
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About Marketing Therapy
Marketing Therapy is the podcast where therapists learn how to market their private practices without burnout, self-doubt, or sleazy tactics. Hosted by Anna Walker—marketing coach, strategist, and founder of Walker Strategy Co—each episode brings you clear, grounded advice to help you attract the right-fit, full-fee clients and grow a practice you feel proud of.
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