I spend a fair amount of time looking at other therapists' websites, partly for work and partly because I'm nosy. Lately I've noticed something: I can usually tell within about two seconds whether a site was built by a person who made choices, or assembled from a kit that makes the choices for you. Not because the kit version looks bad, exactly. It looks fine. It just looks like forty other sites I saw last week.
The look has a name now
It doesn't have an official name, but you'd recognize it. A hero section with centered text, a headline, a subhead, two buttons sitting side by side, one filled, one outlined. A gradient that slides from indigo to violet, or sometimes blush to sage if the niche is wellness. Rounded cards with a soft shadow, stacked three across, each with a little circle icon on top. A stock photo of several people laughing, usually in an office nobody who does this kind of work has ever set foot in. Every piece of it works. Put together, it makes your practice disappear into everyone else's. Clients can't point to what feels off, but plenty of them feel it.
Why it matters more for a therapy practice
Most businesses can get away with looking like everyone else. A therapy practice is a harder case, because the thing you're actually selling before the first session even happens is a sense that this particular person gets you. Someone deciding whether to reach out is often doing it at a vulnerable moment, and a site that reads as mass-produced undercuts the exact feeling you need it to create. After a couple of years of everyone's feed filling up with the same AI headshots and the same four gradients, people's eyes have gotten fast at spotting the pattern, even when they couldn't name what tipped them off.
A few tells worth knowing
Some of these show up on template sites that were never touched by AI at all, and some only started showing up once site builders began generating layouts automatically. Either way, they read the same to a visitor: a headline with one word swapped into italics for no particular reason, as if to signal feeling without doing the work of actually writing something that feels like anything. Every section padded to the exact same height, so scrolling feels like flipping through identical index cards. A font you've seen a hundred times this year without being able to name it, because it's the default font of whatever tool built the site. I'll admit I caught a version of that last one on my own homepage a few weeks ago, a heading pattern I'd been reusing without noticing, and fixed it before writing this.
What to actually do about it
You don't need to become a design critic. A faster test: open three competitors' sites in your niche. If your layout could swap into any of them with just the logo changed, that's the tell, more than any single gradient or font. Ask whoever builds your site why a particular color or layout choice was made. A real answer sounds like a decision. A shrug, or "that's just the template," is the honest version of the same shrug a generic site gives your visitors.
That's most of why I build everything by hand instead of starting from a kit. A site that looks like a decision tends to read as one, and for a therapy practice that's half the job. If you want a second opinion on whether your current site is giving off kit energy, send me the link, I'll tell you straight.