What should a psychologist's website include?

The person reading a psychology practice website is often doing it at 11pm, anxious, with three tabs open, deciding who feels safe.

The checklist below is ordered by what that person needs, filtered by what AHPRA advertising rules allow you to say: the plain-English rules guide.

Three mistakes psychology websites keep making

Stock photos of despair. The head-in-hands image, the rain on the window. Your 11pm visitor already feels like that; the website's job is to look like the way out, not the way in. Calm rooms, real light, your actual practice.

Writing for peers instead of clients. "CBT, ACT and schema-informed interventions" reassures exactly one audience: other psychologists. The visitor needs "we will work out together why this keeps happening and what helps". The credentials page can speak clinician; the homepage must speak human.

Hiding the fee. The theory is that a visitor who sees the fee will leave. The reality is that a visitor who cannot find the fee assumes the worst number and leaves anyway, or books, hears the fee, and does not come back. The gap after the Medicare rebate, stated plainly, filters nobody you wanted.

Social proof without breaking the rules

Registered practitioners cannot use testimonials about clinical care in their advertising, and that includes the website. What remains available, and is genuinely enough: your Google reviews exist independently and speak for themselves where people look first; your professional story, told warmly, does trust work no testimonial could; and the clarity of the website itself is proof of how you communicate, which is the thing a prospective client is actually trying to judge.

The full plain-English breakdown of what is and is not allowed: AHPRA advertising rules for your website.

Counsellor, not psychologist?

Your rules differ, genuinely: what should a counsellor's website include covers the two places counselling websites go wrong that psychology websites do not.

We design within practitioner advertising obligations from the first draft: websites for allied health. What it costs: the psychologist website cost guide.