The Code I Broke During a Therapist’s Redesign
77.6% of therapy websites carry schema markup in my audit, ahead of the 70.5% I find everywhere else. I once deleted a client’s without noticing, and it took me months to work out what I’d done.
The last time your therapy practice had its website redesigned, did anybody tell you what they were taking off it?
I can guess, because I’ve been the one who didn’t tell. Not out of cunning. I didn’t know I was doing it.
A few years ago I moved a counselling practice off the platform it had lived on since 2014 and onto something I’d built myself, and I was pleased with that job for about four months.
Everything the client could see got better. Everything she couldn’t see got quietly worse, and I invoiced her for the privilege.
The email that started it
She wrote to me the following spring, apologetically, the way clients do when they think they’re about to say something stupid.
Her listing in the search results looked smaller than the practice up the road. Thinner was her word.
I told her that search results move around, which is true, and which was also me not doing my job.
Then I opened the old version of her site, the one I’d replaced, and found a run of curly brackets sitting at the bottom of the page with her hours typed inside it. Wednesday evenings. Saturday mornings. The suite number.
None of it existed on the site I’d charged her for.
Hers was not a rare thing to own. 77.6% of the therapy websites I audited carry that block, and I had just deleted one of them for money.
What I’d thrown away
Google’s own documentation asks you to hand it explicit clues about what a page means, rather than leaving it to work everything out from your writing.
Schema markup is the clue. It’s a short list of facts about the practice, written into the code in a form Google takes as given instead of as prose to be interpreted, and no visitor ever lays eyes on it.
Google’s own name for it is structured data. Everyone who builds websites calls it schema, and the two words mean the same thing.
Her old platform had been writing that list for her, every page, every update, for six years. Nobody had asked it to and nobody had paid it extra.
My beautiful custom theme wrote nothing at all, because I hadn’t thought to ask whether it should.
Why it took me four months
Because nothing broke.
The site loaded, the photographs were considerably sharper than anything she had before, and the pages arrived faster than the old ones ever managed. Every person who visited had a nicer time than they used to.
You would have been delighted with it too, and so would your friends, and so was she until the spring.
Losing that block is not like losing a phone number off your contact page. There’s no error, no warning, no message from anyone, and the only symptom is that a machine which used to be able to quote you stops being able to.
Can I prove what those months cost her in clients? No. I’ve never been able to, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who told you they could.
Nothing on her site was counting either, which is ordinary in your trade, and word of mouth covers for that beautifully until it stops.
What I can tell you is that I put it back in an afternoon, for nothing, and I’ve never once left it to chance since.
The part your trade should sit up for
Therapists are unusually good at this, and I don’t think a single one of you did it on purpose.
The strange thing, given that the trade lands fifth of 47 industries on that check, is how few owners in it know the block exists.
70.5% of everything I audit has one, so your trade is sitting above the crowd on a check almost nobody in it can name.
Which is lovely, right up until the moment it becomes the thing you have the most to lose.
Most trades I write about are trying to get this onto their websites. You already have it, so your job is the opposite one, and it’s a job that only comes up on the day you change something.
Who actually put it there
Not you, and probably not the person you paid.
WordPress runs 34.3% of the therapy sites I checked, with Squarespace on 18.3% and Wix on 16.0%, and all three of them will write a block like that on your behalf while you’re choosing a photograph.
Your trade does well on this check because the builders are diligent, not because the therapists are. Fashion gets the same free ride, and then flies blind on everything the software won’t do on its own. Software is quietly behaving itself on behalf of thousands of people who never once asked it to, and never found out that it had.
So what happens on the day you leave that software? A friend’s nephew, a cheap custom build, a developer with taste and no checklist, and the thing nobody knew you had walks out of the building with the old design.
I watched the same disappearing act at a winery, where the heading on the page turned out to be nothing but a font size.
I was the developer with taste and no checklist. I charged well for it, too.
What I do differently now
Before I touch anything, I take a copy of what the current site is already handing over, and I save it somewhere I’ll find it again.
After launch, I check the new site against that copy. Not in a fortnight. The same week, while I still have the client’s attention and my own.
If something’s gone, I say so out loud, even when saying so means admitting I removed it. That comparison sits on the same list I work through before any site goes live, a few lines under the forms.
Every therapy website I build starts with that copy now, and it exists entirely because of one apologetic email about a listing that looked thinner than the practice up the road.
Do you know what your own site is handing over tonight? Does the person who built it?
Go and look before anyone quotes you
Take the address of your homepage and put it through Google’s Rich Results Test, which is free and takes about a minute.
Read what comes back. If it finds a block with your details in it, screenshot the thing and email it to yourself.
That screenshot is the only proof you will ever have of what your website could do before someone improved it for you.
And if the hours in it are wrong, or the address is an office you left in 2021, you’ve just found tonight’s job, and it’s a ten minute one for whoever holds your login.
Then keep the screenshot. The next time a person like me tells you your website needs rebuilding, you’ll have exactly one question to ask them, and it’s a question I couldn’t have answered at the time.
