Every "best website builder for therapists" article I've ever read has the same problem: it was written by a website builder. SimplePractice's list picks SimplePractice. Pixpa's list picks Pixpa. The WordPress hosting company is shocked to report that WordPress wins.
I don't have a horse in this race. Over the last four years I've built or fixed more than 20 therapist websites on Squarespace, WordPress, Wix and Webflow, and I've moved practices between them. So here is the version of this article with no favorite child, written around the four questions that actually decide it.
(If you're in a hurry, skip to "The short version." If you want to know why, keep reading.)
The four questions that actually decide it
Most therapists pick a platform on a colleague's recommendation, or because it came with their EHR, or because a template looked right. That's like choosing an apartment from the listing photos: nothing in them is false, they just don't show you the plumbing. That's how you end up with a beautiful site you can't update, a contact form that isn't HIPAA compliant, and a homepage that Google shows to nobody.
Ask these instead:
1. Can you update it yourself without calling anyone? You will need to change your fees, add a group, swap a photo, and announce you're not taking new clients. If that requires a developer, you'll stop doing it, and your site will go stale. (I wrote about how that happens in the six things post.) Be honest with yourself here. "Easier than the others" is not the same as easy, and every platform on this list has a learning curve. If you don't enjoy learning software, the right answer might be a platform you can do small edits on plus a person you can send the rest to. Part of this question is also what happens when you break something: some platforms let you roll back to yesterday, and one of them doesn't.
2. What happens to the health information people type into it? A contact form that asks "what brings you to therapy?" is collecting protected health information. Some platforms will sign a Business Associate Agreement covering that. Some won't. This is the question most therapists never ask, and it's the one with legal consequences.
3. What happens when the practice grows? A solo site needs five pages. A group practice with four clinicians and two offices needs the same clinician to appear on six pages, correctly, every time someone joins or leaves. Same with the "book a free consult" block that sits on every page: when the booking link changes, do you edit it once or fourteen times? Platforms handle that very differently.
4. Can you be found on it? This is the one every other "best builder" list skips, and it's the only one that brings in clients. Being findable comes down to boring controls: can you write your own page titles and descriptions, give each service its own page with its own URL, set up redirects when things move, and add pages as your practice changes? Some platforms hand you all of that. Some hand you a template that looks like every other therapist on the same subscription, and Google has no reason to show it over the others. The ranking wins I've seen (a chosen-family page on page one, a refreshed site showing up for 43 new searches in its first month) all happened on platforms where we controlled those things.
Now the platforms.
| Platform | 1. Can you update it yourself? | 2. HIPAA-compliant forms | 3. Grows with a group practice? | 4. Can you be found on it? | Undo after you break it? | Platform cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Squarespace | Yes for basic edits. Real learning curve for anything more. | Not built in. Embed Hushmail, Google Forms (paid Workspace) or Jotform Gold. Acuity for booking. | Poorly. No content system; reused sections are copies, not linked. | Yes. Full control of titles, URLs, redirects. | No. No version history. | $19–49 | Solo practices and small groups |
| WordPress | Yes for content. Needs a maintenance plan for updates and security. | Depends on host and plugin. Easiest: embed the same tools as Squarespace. | Best. Custom content systems and global sections. | Yes. The most control of any platform here. | Yes. Page revisions plus host backups. | $12–30 hosting + $100–300 maintenance | Group practices, several clinicians or locations |
| Wix | Yes. Free-form editor; DIY sites tend to drift on phones. | Yes, built in. Premium or Studio plan, turn on PHI protection, sign the BAA. | Limited. | Yes. You have the controls. | Yes. Site History restores any saved version. | Premium plan required for HIPAA | Solo practices already on Wix |
| Webflow | Text and photos, yes. Structure needs your designer. | No BAA. Embed the same compliant tools as Squarespace. | Very well. CMS collections and components, no maintenance. | Excellent. | Yes. Automatic restore points. | $15–25 | Group practices without WordPress upkeep; design-first solos with a designer |
| SimplePractice | Yes, within the templates. | Yes, built in (their claim). | No. | No documented SEO controls. | Not documented. | Included with Essential ($79) or Plus ($99) EHR plans | A placeholder while a new practice finds its niche |
| Brighter Vision / TherapySites | They do it for you. | Not claimed for the site itself; HIPAA email sold as an add-on. | Limited. | Shared frameworks; nothing to make yours stand out. | Not documented. | About $59 + setup fee | Fully hands-off, paying monthly forever |
Squarespace: where I put most solo and small-group practices
What it's good for. This is the one most of my therapist clients end up on, and the reason is question one, with a caveat I'll get to. There's nothing to update or patch, the templates are clean, and a therapist can change their fees, swap a headshot or fix a typo without a developer. Aaron Martin, Sye Gratz, Elana Story, Collective Corazón and Inward Roots are all Squarespace sites, and every one of those therapists owns and edits their own site now.
Inward Roots Collective, on Squarespace.
Now the caveat, because I don't want to oversell this. Squarespace is easier than most platforms. It is not easy. It has quirks that bite people who assume it's a word processor: the phone layout is edited separately from the desktop layout, so a change that looks fine on your laptop can quietly break on your phone (this is the single most common thing I fix). Blocks snap to an invisible grid and don't always land where you put them. Settings live in four different places. There is a real learning curve, and it should be taken seriously.
And the one that surprises everybody: there is no undo once you've saved. Squarespace has no version history. Wix, Webflow and WordPress all let you roll the site back to yesterday; Squarespace does not. If you break a page and hit Save, somebody fixes it by hand. The workaround is to duplicate a page before you do anything ambitious to it, which is exactly the kind of habit nobody has until the first time they need it.
So here's my honest rule: if you're comfortable learning software, Squarespace is a great platform to own. If you're not, or you just don't want to, keep yourself to the very basic edits (text, photos, fees) and hand anything structural to someone who does this every day. That's not a knock on you. It's the same reason I don't do my own taxes.
Where it bites. Squarespace's own forms and booking blocks are not HIPAA compliant, and Squarespace won't sign a BAA for them. The only Squarespace product designed for HIPAA is Acuity Scheduling, which requires its Premium plan and has to be switched on and signed for separately. Squarespace's own help center is blunt about it: Acuity is the only Squarespace feature designed to offer services consistent with HIPAA obligations, and you shouldn't send PHI through any other part of the platform.
So a Squarespace therapist site needs a compliant form embedded in it. That's a known, solvable setup, and here are the tools I actually use for it:
Hushmail for Healthcare. Built for therapists, BAA included on every plan, and the Starter plan ($11.99 a month) gives you encrypted email plus two secure web forms. One subscription fixes your contact form, your consult-request form, and the inbox the replies land in, which is the part everyone forgets. This is my default for a solo practice.
Google Forms, if you're on paid Google Workspace. Google's BAA covers Forms (along with Gmail, Drive, Docs and Calendar) on any paid Workspace plan, including Business Starter at $7 a month. Your admin accepts the BAA once in the Admin console, you build the form, and it embeds in Squarespace with an Embed block. Cost: nothing extra. The catch: responses and notifications have to stay inside that Workspace account. The moment a submission gets forwarded to a personal Gmail or piped into a non-covered tool, you've left the compliant zone. A personal @gmail.com address can't sign a BAA at all.
Jotform on the Gold plan ($99 a month billed annually). The most flexible of the three, with logic, file uploads and e-signatures, and HIPAA is included on Gold at no extra charge. Priced for group practices, not solos.
Acuity Premium ($61 a month) if you want HIPAA-compliant booking on the page itself rather than a form.
Or skip the embed. If you already pay for SimplePractice, TherapyNotes or another EHR, link your "book a consult" button straight to its client portal. The EHR's BAA already covers it, and the data lands where you'll use it.
One thing to check before you build around any of these: how the form embeds. A simple embed code through Squarespace's Embed block works on every plan. Embeds that rely on JavaScript in a code block (Jotform's default embed is one) need the Core plan or higher. Most form tools offer both, so it's usually a matter of picking the right embed option, not upgrading.
The other limit is question three. Squarespace has no real "content system." If you run a group practice and want a clinician's bio, photo and specialties to update everywhere from one place, Squarespace can't do that. You'll be editing six pages by hand. The same goes for repeated sections and buttons: Squarespace lets you save a section and reuse it, but the reuse is a copy, so changing the original doesn't change the copies. (Synced sections are the most-requested feature on Squarespace's own feedback board, with hundreds of votes and no delivery date.) On a five-page site that's a minor annoyance. Past fifteen pages it's the reason your booking link is wrong on three of them.
Findability. Full marks. You control every title and description, every page gets its own URL, redirects are built in, and the blog is solid. Elana Story's and Aaron Martin's sites are both Squarespace, and both of the ranking results I mentioned above happened there.
Cost. As of July 2026, Squarespace's plans run $19 (Basic), $29 (Core) and $49 (Plus) a month on annual billing, after a price increase that summer. Most therapist sites need Core.
Who I'd put on it: solo practitioners and small groups, which is most of you, with the understanding that "I can edit it myself" means basic edits unless you're the type who likes figuring software out.
WordPress: for group practices and anyone with real content to manage
What it's good for. Question three. WordPress is the platform where the site can have a brain. When I rebuilt Unfold Psychology, a four-office group practice, we built a custom content system: clinicians, groups, offices, testimonials and FAQs are entered once, in one place, and show up everywhere they belong. When a new clinician joins, the office team adds them once and they appear on their profile, the team page, the menu and every service page they offer. On Squarespace that's an afternoon of manual edits every single time.
Unfold Psychology, a four-office group practice, on WordPress.
It does the same for repeated elements. Unfold's "book a free consultation" section appears on nearly every page, but it exists once: change the link or the wording in one place and every page updates. Build a section or a button once, use it everywhere, fix it everywhere. On a five-page site that's a convenience. On a fifteen-page site it's the difference between a site that stays consistent and one where the booking link is wrong on four pages and nobody knows which four.
WordPress also has the deepest bench of plugins, including form tools that will sign a BAA, and it's not owned by any one company. It's the one platform here where the whole site, design included, can be picked up and moved to a different host. Whether a therapist ever needs that is another matter.
When you break something. Every page and post keeps its own revision history, so you can step back to the version from before you touched it, and the managed hosts keep daily backups of the whole site on top of that. If something goes wrong on WordPress, it's usually recoverable in minutes.
Where it bites. Everything about WordPress costs more and needs more care. The software, the theme and the plugins all need updating, and an un-updated WordPress site is a security problem. Hosting is an extra bill on top of the build. And the build itself takes longer: a WordPress site from me costs more than the same site on Squarespace because the development hours roughly double. After launch, most group practices on WordPress end up on a maintenance plan, which typically runs $100–300 a month for updates, backups and security.
HIPAA. WordPress is software, not a vendor, so there's no one to sign a BAA with. Compliance comes down to your host and your form plugin, each of which has to be chosen for it. The simplest route is the same one I use on Squarespace: embed Hushmail, Google Forms (on a paid Workspace with the BAA accepted) or Jotform Gold instead of a WordPress form plugin, so the health information never touches your WordPress database or your host at all. Doable, and commonly done, but it's on you (or your developer) to get right.
Findability. The most control of any platform here: titles, descriptions, URL structure, redirects, structured data, location pages, all of it. Unfold's four location pages and the Google Business Profile work that now sends them five times the traffic were built on it.
Cost. Managed WordPress hosting starts around $12 a month at budget hosts and $27–30 at the well-known ones like WP Engine, Kinsta and Flywheel (prices as of August 2026), before the maintenance plan.
Who I'd put on it: group practices with several clinicians or locations, practices that publish a lot, and anyone who needs the site to do something a template can't.
Wix: better than its reputation, and recently a real option for HIPAA
What it's good for. Wix is easy to use, question one is a yes, and it got a feature in April 2026 that changes the HIPAA conversation: a built-in HIPAA compliance mode. On a Premium or Studio plan you can turn on "PHI protection," sign a Business Associate Agreement inside your account, and Wix will encrypt what comes through its forms and booking, flag non-compliant apps, and keep PHI out of your notification emails. That's more than Squarespace offers for its own forms.
Where it bites. Honestly, most of the Wix sites I've worked on were old ones. Two of the practices I've written about, Elana Story and Inward Roots Collective, came to me on Wix sites from years ago that no longer matched their practices, and we moved both to Squarespace. That's not Wix's fault; it was the sites' age. But the Wix editor, which lets you put anything anywhere, is also why DIY Wix sites tend to fall apart on phones, and why they get harder to maintain as they grow. And the HIPAA mode has its own fine print: it only covers Wix's own features, you're responsible for any third-party app, and some features and analytics get restricted once it's on. Read the whole help article before you rely on it.
When you break something. Wix has Site History: every save and publish is kept as a version, and you can restore the whole site to any of them. That's a real advantage over Squarespace for a therapist editing their own site.
Findability. You have the controls (titles, descriptions, your own URLs, redirects). Wix's reputation for bad SEO is a decade old; today it's about what you do with the controls, same as anywhere.
Who I'd put on it: a solo practice that already has a Wix site it likes, especially if HIPAA-compliant booking inside the platform matters more than design flexibility.
Webflow: WordPress's power without WordPress's chores, if you have a designer
What it's good for. Webflow is a designer's platform. It makes the most custom, fastest sites of anything on this list, and on the Premium plan it has a real content system: collections for clinicians, services and locations that you enter once and that show up everywhere, which is the thing I built custom for Unfold on WordPress. It also has components, Webflow's name for global elements: build a "book a consult" section or a button once, place it on every page, and editing the original updates all of them. If one page needs a different link or headline, component properties let that one instance differ without breaking the link to the master. That's the WordPress global-element setup, built in, and like WordPress it matters most once a site passes ten or fifteen pages. And Webflow hosts it, patches it and backs it up, so there's no maintenance plan, no plugin updates and no security scare at 2am. For a group practice that wants the WordPress structure without the WordPress upkeep, it's the strongest alternative here.
Where it bites. Three things. First, Webflow does not sign Business Associate Agreements, so its forms can't collect health information. Every Webflow therapist site needs an embedded compliant form instead, the same Hushmail, Google Forms or Jotform options as Squarespace. Second, it's a designer's tool. You can edit text and swap photos yourself in its Editor mode, but anything structural means calling your designer, and far fewer designers work in Webflow than in Squarespace or WordPress, so you're more dependent on whoever built it. Third, it costs more to build on than Squarespace, for the same reason WordPress does: the hours.
When you break something. Webflow saves restore points automatically as you work, plus any you make yourself, and keeps all of them on paid plans. Restoring is a couple of clicks, and it saves the current version first in case you change your mind.
Findability. Excellent. Clean, fast code, every control you'd want, and a CMS that makes a page per clinician or per location easy to generate and keep consistent.
Cost. Site Basic $15 a month on annual billing, or Site Premium $25 if you need the CMS (as of October 2026). No hosting or maintenance on top.
Who I'd put on it: a group practice that wants the structure of WordPress without maintaining WordPress, or a solo practice that cares about design above everything and has a designer it trusts.
SimplePractice's website builder: fine as a starting point, with one big catch
What it's good for. If you already use SimplePractice as your EHR, the website builder is right there, on the Essential ($79/month) and Plus ($99/month) plans. It gives you therapist-specific templates, built-in appointment requests, a waitlist and intake forms, and the company calls it HIPAA compliant. For a brand-new practice that needs something live this week, it's the fastest path.
Where it bites. Question four. Their marketing page lists templates, appointment requests and intake forms, and says nothing about page titles, descriptions, custom URLs or redirects, the controls that get a site found. A site you can't tune for search is a site that works for people who already have your name. The design control is also limited to what the templates allow, which is why I've never been hired to build on it. I've been hired to replace it.
One more thing specific to this option: your website is a module inside your EHR subscription. If you ever switch to TherapyNotes or Jane or anything else, your site goes with it, on their timeline, not yours. (Confirm the specifics with them before you build on it; their documentation doesn't spell it out.)
The custom domain works, but SimplePractice doesn't host domains, so you still buy and manage the domain elsewhere.
Who I'd put on it: a new practice that needs a placeholder while it figures out its niche. Just know it's a placeholder.
Brighter Vision and TherapySites: the rent-a-site model
You'll see these two on every "best website builder for therapists" list, usually near the top, because they are built entirely for therapists and they'll build the site for you. I don't build on either, so I'll stick to what their own pages say and what I see when their former customers come to me.
What they're good for. Hands-off. Brighter Vision's FAQ lists $59 a month plus a one-time $100 setup fee (waived if you pay a year up front), and a designer builds the site from their templates. TherapySites works the same way at a similar monthly price. For a therapist who wants to never think about the website, that's the appeal, and the sites are perfectly presentable.
Where it bites. Control and cost, more than anything. At $59 a month you're paying twice what Squarespace Core costs, forever, for a site you can't restructure, re-niche or rewrite without going through them. (Brighter Vision does say you fully own your domain, so leaving is possible; it's just a rebuild, like leaving anywhere else.) Over five years that's more than $3,500 for a template site that you'll replace the first time your practice changes direction.
The other thing I notice is that the sites look like each other, and that's a question-four problem, not just a taste problem. They're built from the same handful of frameworks, so you end up in the same beige lineup the person at 11pm is scrolling through, and Google has no particular reason to show yours over the other subscribers'. The practices I've seen rank did it by being specific; a shared framework pulls the other way. And neither FAQ claims the websites themselves are HIPAA compliant; Brighter Vision sells HIPAA email (Hushmail, as it happens) as a separate add-on, which tells you the forms question is still yours to solve.
Who I'd put on it: a therapist who genuinely wants to pay monthly forever for someone else to handle everything and doesn't mind looking like the other subscribers.
The ones I'm leaving out
(Showit, Framer, GoDaddy and Weebly exist too. I've never had a therapist arrive on one, so I'm leaving them out rather than guessing. I've had exactly one practice on Pixpa, and I wouldn't put another one there.)
The short version
Solo practice, you're willing to learn the editor: Squarespace, with a Hushmail form embedded (or a Google Form, if you're already on paid Workspace).
Solo practice, you'd rather not learn anything: still Squarespace, but plan on doing only basic edits yourself and having a website person for the rest.
Group practice, several clinicians or offices: WordPress, with a maintenance plan and Jotform Gold or your EHR's portal for forms.
You're already on Wix and want HIPAA-compliant booking inside the platform: stay on Wix, turn on PHI protection, read the fine print.
Brand new, need something live now, already pay for SimplePractice: use their builder as a placeholder, and plan to own your site within a year.
Want it fully handled and don't mind paying monthly forever: Brighter Vision or TherapySites, knowing you'll rebuild the day your practice changes direction.
Group practice that wants WordPress's structure without WordPress's upkeep, or design matters most and you have a designer: Webflow, with a compliant form embedded.
And whichever one you pick, the platform matters less than the three things every therapist site has to do: tell the right person it's for them in a few seconds, make booking obvious, and work on a phone. I've seen bad sites on every platform above and good ones on every platform above. The builder is the easel. It's still the painting that matters.
Not sure which one you're on, or whether you should be?
If your site is on the wrong platform for where your practice is going, that's a conversation worth having before you spend money on a redesign. And if it's on the right platform and just isn't working, that's usually an afternoon's audit, not a migration.
Book a free 15-minute call and we'll look at your site together. I'll tell you which platform it should be on, and whether you need to move at all.
