Daniel Fava: Hey there and welcome to another episode of On The Trail, where we explore the path of growing your private practice with more clarity, ease, and intention. As always, I'm your host, Daniel Fava, founder of Private Practice Elevation. Today we're digging into a big question that a lot of therapists wrestle with. It is, how do I know when is it time to redesign my website? When to scrap what I've got going on right now and maybe invest, grow, and relaunch, redesign a website. And maybe you've had that nagging Feeling that your site just isn't doing a practice justice anymore, or maybe you're not even sure what should be working better either way this episode's gonna Just help you out. Hopefully bring a little bit of clarity This comes from a recent talk that I did for the wise practice Community with Whitney Owens, so I'm just gonna kind of share high-level some of these some of these points here it's on the trail. It's a quick little snippet here And you know something that you can take with you ⁓ your marketing journey I realized when I just recorded the first on the trail episode, I talked really fast. So I apologize for that. I'm going to try to slow it down. And you know, this is kind of a practice thing for me to learn. How do I deliver shorter videos and audio that are just going to help you, you know, get to the meat of what you want to do. All right. So I've got five points to really help you to think about when is a good time for you to redesign your website? Like what are the signs on the wall? Number one is that your website doesn't represent your practice well or where your practice is heading. So this could be your niche, maybe it changed, maybe when you first started out you were just kind of a generalist and you needed clients. So you just, do anxiety, I do depression, I do couples, I do this, that. over time you start to really hone in on your ideal client. Who do you love to work with? And so that means your website can shift and should shift and change so that you're attracting ⁓ of those. ⁓ so that's that shift happens because you don't want to just take everyone anymore or maybe there's even services that you don't offer anymore because you've learned I don't really like working with those clients or that's just not that's not what brings me joy energy life all that good stuff so maybe your niche has changed your focus has changed maybe you've grown but your site hasn't grown so whether you've added like you know associate therapists new services expanded locations like that your website might still look the same as how it looked before ⁓ so you know you might want to redesign your website and you know think through all of the directions you're taking, ⁓ you're going, where you're heading. Number two, this is a big one. This is becoming more more important when it comes to optimizing for AI in Google and that is that you have a poor user experience or outdated website design with your website. So maybe it's hard to navigate. You're losing clients because people can't find the information that they need, so they're bouncing off, people aren't staying on the website. Google can see that and they're not gonna wanna send people to a website that doesn't work well, that people get confused and don't engage in. Or maybe your website just kind of looks outdated, it's old, it's clunky. ⁓ was built like way back when, ⁓ 10 years ago. ⁓ so that kind of signals to your clients that, this person doesn't ⁓ current. They're not tech savvy. Their website just doesn't feel modern, especially when they're looking around at different therapy websites and they find one that is modern, works well, works fast, very clear, ⁓ beautiful. So you might want to redesign your website and kind of think through things up to date, bringing things up to speed, technically sound, ⁓ know, create a great user experience for people. The ⁓ reason you might want to redesign, you know, ⁓ why might be the time is that your website might have limited functionality and scalability. ⁓ So you can't easily update it because you're stuck on a platform or some template that doesn't allow you to do that. ⁓ And makes it a headache to make updates to your website. you sign in and start making updates, you have to relearn to do. ⁓ that just slows down your momentum. You it's hard. You can't make those marketing changes you want to make or maybe publish ⁓ you want to publish and serve your clients because you're held back by the functionality of the website. Or maybe there's different features you want to add, but you can't, you know, like embedding online scheduling or adding a blog post or building out pages for a group practice. do with our clients, we do like a filtering system so that people can find which client, I mean, which therapist they want to work with stuff like that. You can't do that on a Squarespace website or it becomes really hard to do that. And so you might be limited just by the platform that you're on. And we've heard many, many stories, many headaches that people have had. because their platform really limits them. then next is like more specific technical limitations that might make it time for a redesign. And that is number one, your website's mobile friendly. Like you need your website to work on devices. It's just how the majority of people are ⁓ using websites days. People are busy. want it to look great on mobile so that people can connect with you as quickly as possible. Other things, your technical SEO might really be suffering if there's technical issues going on on the website. Like if there's just messy code behind it, poor optimization, no site structure, missing things in the code such as schema markup, which is we can do a whole, we'll do a whole episode, guess, on schema markup. like that, technical issues behind the scenes could cause a lot of pain and really limit ⁓ your SEO also ⁓ kind connects with user experience as well. And last point that will make, is it time to redesign your website? Is that website doesn't actually get you clients. I mean, that's just kind of the end of the day, your website should serve you ⁓ bring in consistent leads that you can then convert into clients. So ⁓ your website is not converting, then it's probably time to take a step back, ⁓ some data, ⁓ in a little deeper, find out what is going on, why aren't people converting? And it's likely a combination of all these four. or other points that I've made here that are keeping people from actually taking that next step with you. So you might even be getting some traffic from ads or psychology today, but maybe few people are reaching out. And as we said in the first episode of On The Trail, there's been huge shifts in the landscape of SEO. So there is a lot less people coming to websites. so might be an opportunity here to really dig in and find out why are people not showing up to the website. and then why are people not converting? ⁓ why your website might not be converting is really the messaging on your website. We have to be really clear. ⁓ have to really ⁓ answer specific questions for ideal clients. ⁓ so that could be a reason why your website doesn't actually get you clients. So those are five reasons, five things to think about. You might find yourself in one of those boats or two or three or all, and that's okay. Point being, ⁓ might just a time to take a step back ⁓ and and think about is it time to redesign the website. So let's just recap. Number one, your website doesn't represent your practice well or where your practice is heading. Number two, poor user experience or outdated website design. Number three, limited functionality and scalability. Number four, technical limitations. number five, your website doesn't actually get you clients. ⁓ I hope ⁓ episode has helped you kind of think through some of this. And if you do feel like it might be time to redesign my website, ⁓ I'd love to chat. You can go to privatepracticeelevation.com slash kickoff and we can schedule a free 15 minute call to dig in a little bit further about what exactly is going on and come up with a plan to help you reach more people. Thanks for listening. I'm Daniel Fava.