What a Therapist's Website Actually Costs Over 5 Years

If you’re paying a monthly fee for your website and wondering whether you’re overpaying, you’re not alone. It’s one of the most common questions I hear from therapists: “I’m spending $25 a month on Squarespace. Is that normal? Should I switch to WordPress? Is there something better?”

The answer depends on more than the monthly bill. It depends on what you’ll spend over the next five years once you factor in hosting, maintenance, plugin fees, and the occasional “my site broke” emergency. And the total might be lower than you think.

I’ve built therapy practice websites on Squarespace, WordPress, and as fully custom sites. I’ve seen what works, what breaks, and what quietly drains your budget year after year. Here’s what I’d tell a friend who asked me which one to pick.

Why a custom website costs less than you’d expect

Most therapists I talk to assume a custom website costs $15,000 or more. From larger agencies, that’s often true. But the full picture looks different once you break it down.

Hosting can be free. Services like Cloudflare Pages and Netlify host websites at no cost, with enough bandwidth to handle tens of thousands of visitors per month. Squarespace’s monthly fee covers hosting along with its editor, templates, and customer support. WordPress requires separate hosting at $10-18 per month. With a custom website, hosting itself can be zero.

Content management tools have matured. The old knock against custom websites was that you’d need a developer for every change. Tools like Sanity solve that. You get a simple dashboard where you update your blog, your bio, and your contact information without touching code. Sanity’s free tier covers 10,000 documents and 20 user seats, more than enough for any therapy practice.

Specialization keeps prices competitive. Developers who focus on a specific industry have built systems and reusable components that bring costs down significantly compared to agency rates. For therapy practices, I typically charge $3,500–6,500 for a custom build depending on scope, which is competitive with what you’d pay for a professionally designed Squarespace site (typically $2,000-5,000).

Put those together: a custom website with no monthly platform fees and free hosting can land in a similar range as Squarespace over five years. Here’s the full breakdown.

What your website actually costs over 5 years

Most platform comparisons focus on the monthly price. But monthly fees are only one piece of the picture. Here’s a side-by-side breakdown of what each option costs a therapy practice over five years, including the initial build, hosting, and ongoing maintenance.

Build costs depend on who you hire. Professional Squarespace builds generally run $2,000-5,000 for semi-custom work. Custom-built sites typically fall in the $3,000-8,000 range when working with a freelancer or small studio. WordPress spans the widest range: a freelancer typically charges $2,000-5,000 for a small business site, while agencies run $5,000-10,000 or more.

Squarespace pricing is based on annual billing. Most therapy practices land on the Basic plan ($16/month) or Core plan ($23/month). You handle your own content updates, so there’s no separate maintenance cost.

WordPress looks affordable at first, but hosting renewals (typically $10-18/month after the introductory rate expires) are just the start. WordPress core, your theme, and every plugin need regular patching, and a missed update can break your site or create security issues. If you’re comfortable handling updates yourself, free plugins cover backups (UpdraftPlus), security (Wordfence), and SEO (Yoast). That keeps maintenance costs near zero, though it takes 15-30 minutes of your time each month. If you’d rather pay someone, basic maintenance plans start around $50-150 per month, with costs climbing for more complex setups (Webyking estimates $1,000-5,000 per year depending on complexity). The wide range in the table reflects that difference.

Custom Website costs here reflect what I build for therapy practices: a site built with a tool called Astro, paired with Sanity for content management. More on both of those below. The key cost driver is that Sanity’s free tier covers all the content management a therapy practice needs, and hosting on Cloudflare Pages or Netlify can genuinely be zero dollars per month. *The “minimal” maintenance estimate assumes Sanity’s free tier stays available at current levels and that the site doesn’t need structural changes. Over five years, you may need occasional developer time for updates, which would add to the cost.

The big takeaway: if you handle your own WordPress maintenance, all three options can land in a similar range. But if you pay someone to manage WordPress updates and security, the cost can climb to two or three times what you’d spend on Squarespace or a custom site.

What a custom website actually looks like

Here’s the simplest way I can explain the three options.

Squarespace is a furnished apartment. You move in, everything works, and it looks nice. But you can’t knock down a wall or add a room. You live within the layout someone else designed.

There are also limits under the surface. Every Squarespace page loads the platform’s own scripts, styling, and tracking whether your page uses them or not — and you can’t remove them. You can edit meta titles and image descriptions, but you don’t have full control over how search engines read your pages or how your site works for visitors using screen readers.

WordPress is a fixer-upper. The potential is endless, and you can renovate anything. But maintenance comes with the territory. Plugins need updates. Themes need patching. Fall behind on upkeep and things start to break.

A custom website is a house built from scratch to your exact specifications. Every room is where you want it. Nothing is wasted. There’s less to go wrong because there are fewer moving parts. The catch: you need a builder to construct it. You’re not moving in and rearranging furniture yourself.

When I build a custom website for a therapist, I use a tool called Astro. You don’t need to remember that name, but here’s what it means for your site in practice:

• Your pages are built to load fast. There’s nothing extra weighing the page down. No bloat, no unnecessary features running behind the scenes.
• No monthly platform fees. Your site can be hosted for free on services like Netlify or Cloudflare Pages.
• You own everything. Your content, your code, your design. Switching developers or hosting providers is straightforward because everything belongs to you.
• It’s built specifically for your practice. Not adapted from a generic template. Not a theme with 500 features you’ll never use. Just what you need, and nothing you don’t.

The trade-off is real: you need a developer to build it and to make structural changes down the road. But for day-to-day content updates (new blog posts, changing your phone number, updating your bio), that’s where your content management system comes in.

The editing experience: Sanity

I pair every custom website with a content management system called Sanity. This is where you log in to make changes to your site without touching any code.

Here’s what that looks like day to day:

You open a web address, log in, and see a clean dashboard. On the left is a short list of things you can edit: “Blog Posts,” “Team Bios,” and “Practice Info.” That’s it. No cluttered menu with 47 options. No settings panels you’re afraid to touch. Just the pieces of your site that actually change.

Writing a blog post works like a simple word processor. You type a title, write your content, add an image, and hit publish. Updating your office phone number means clicking “Practice Info,” changing the number, and saving. Neither of those requires a developer.

The key difference from Squarespace: your developer decides what shows up in your dashboard. If you only need to edit five things about your site, you only see five things. That simplicity is a feature, not a limitation.

But I want to be honest about the trade-offs. Squarespace’s editor is easier out of the box. You can drag blocks around a page, rearrange sections, and preview changes visually. Sanity doesn’t do that. It’s a structured dashboard, not a visual page builder. If you want to add a new section to your homepage or rearrange your layout, you’ll need your developer for that.

For most therapists, though, “editing” means writing blog posts and updating practice details, not redesigning pages. And for that kind of work, Sanity is straightforward once you’ve spent ten minutes learning the dashboard.

Other content management options worth knowing about

Sanity is what I use and recommend, but it’s not the only option in this category.

Storyblok is probably the most user-friendly alternative. It has a visual editor that lets you see your changes on the actual page as you make them, closer to the Squarespace experience. It also has a free tier that works for small sites. If drag-and-drop editing is a priority for you, it’s worth asking your developer about.

Decap CMS (formerly Netlify CMS) is completely free and open-source. It’s more bare-bones than Sanity or Storyblok, and development on it has slowed down in recent years. It works fine for simple blogs, but I wouldn’t recommend it for a site you plan to grow over time.

Who should consider a custom website

Not every therapist needs a developer-built website. But some practices hit a ceiling that Squarespace and WordPress can’t solve without workarounds on top of workarounds. If any of the following sound familiar, a custom website is worth a serious look.

You rarely redesign your site, but you blog regularly. Your site layout has been fine for two years. You just need to publish articles. A custom site paired with Sanity makes blogging straightforward while keeping your pages fast. You’re not paying for a platform full of design tools you never open.

You want to stop paying monthly platform fees. Squarespace charges $16-23 a month. Over five years, that’s $960-1,380 in platform fees. A custom website hosted on Netlify or Cloudflare can cost literally nothing per month. That money goes back into your practice.

Your group practice is growing. You’re adding clinicians, opening a second location, or launching new service pages every quarter. A custom site scales cleanly because each page is built to do exactly one thing. There’s no theme straining under the weight of features it wasn’t designed for. Your developer adds what you need, and nothing else changes.

Your current site is slow or stuck on page two of Google. Page speed is a ranking factor. WordPress sites often carry extra weight from plugins and themes. Squarespace sites carry platform overhead you can’t remove. A custom site ships only what each page needs. That difference is measurable: custom sites typically score higher on Google’s PageSpeed Insights because there’s less code between the visitor and your content.

You don’t want a site that looks like every other therapist’s website. Squarespace templates are well-designed, but they’re shared by thousands of practices. When a potential client visits three therapist websites in a row and they all have the same layout with different stock photos, none of them stand out. A custom website is built from the ground up for your practice. Your design doesn’t come from a catalog.

Who should NOT choose a custom website

This section matters more than the one above. Choosing the wrong option wastes time and money, even if that option is technically “better.”

You want full control over your site with no developer involved. This is the biggest one. If you want to log in on a Saturday morning and rearrange your homepage yourself, without emailing a developer, a custom website is not for you. Squarespace was built for exactly that. There’s no shame in wanting independence over your own website. It’s a completely reasonable priority, and Squarespace handles it well.

You need to launch in two weeks on a tight budget. A custom website takes longer to build than picking a Squarespace template and filling in your content. If you’re opening a practice next month and need something live fast, Squarespace will get you there for a few hundred dollars and a weekend of work. You can always migrate later. Starting with “good enough right now” beats waiting for “perfect in three months.”

Your current site is already working for you. If your Squarespace or WordPress site ranks well, loads reasonably fast, and brings in the inquiries you need, don’t switch. I mean that. Rebuilding a website that’s already doing its job is one of the most common ways practices waste money. If it isn’t broken, leave it alone and invest that budget somewhere else. Better photos. More blog content. A Google Ads campaign. Anything with a clearer return.

You need frequent design changes, not just content updates. Some practices like to refresh their homepage seasonally, rotate promotional banners, or test different page layouts every few weeks. That workflow needs a visual editor and drag-and-drop flexibility. Sanity handles content changes beautifully, but layout changes require a developer. If you’re making structural tweaks more than once or twice a year, the back-and-forth with a developer will slow you down and add cost.

You’re not sure you’ll still be blogging in six months. A custom website’s biggest advantage is performance and long-term cost savings. But those advantages compound over time. If you’re uncertain whether you’ll actually publish content regularly, the upfront investment may not pay off. Start with Squarespace, prove to yourself that you’ll stick with content marketing, and then consider migrating when the platform starts holding you back.

Hosting: where the long-term savings live

Hosting costs are worth breaking out separately, because they’re where the three options differ most.

With Squarespace, hosting is baked into your monthly fee. That’s $192-276 per year, depending on your plan. With WordPress, you’re paying a separate hosting company $10-18 per month after the introductory rate expires, and that’s before plugins and maintenance. Either way, you’re paying a recurring fee.

Custom websites work differently. Your site’s files are lightweight. Really lightweight. That means hosting them costs almost nothing. In most cases, literally nothing.

Cloudflare Pages is free. Unlimited bandwidth. No credit card required. There are limits on builds and file counts, but a therapy practice site won’t come close to them.

Netlify’s free tier gives you 100GB of bandwidth per month. For context, a therapy practice website could handle tens of thousands of visitors per month without coming close to that limit. You’d need to go viral to hit the ceiling.

Compare that to what you’d pay on other platforms over five years:

• Squarespace: $960-1,380
• WordPress: $600-1,080 for hosting alone (before plugins and maintenance)
• Custom website: $0-300

That’s several hundred to over a thousand dollars in savings over five years, depending on which Squarespace plan you’re comparing against.

The honest downsides of a custom website

I’ve spent most of this article explaining why a custom website works well for therapy practices. But no option is perfect, and you should know exactly what you’re giving up before you commit.

You need a developer for design changes. Content updates (blog posts, bios, phone numbers) are self-service through Sanity. But if you want to add a new section to your homepage, change your navigation layout, or redesign your services page, that requires a developer. You can’t do it yourself.

Sanity has a learning curve. It’s not hard, and most clients are comfortable with it after a single training session. But it’s not as immediately intuitive as clicking “Edit” on a Squarespace page. There’s a brief adjustment period.

There’s no plugin marketplace. WordPress has 60,000+ plugins. A custom website has none. If you need new functionality (an appointment booking widget, a client portal, a new form), a developer builds it or integrates a third-party service for you. You can’t browse a store and install something yourself.

Developer dependency is real. Your site is built by a developer, and if that developer moves on, retires, or gets too busy, you need to find another one. The pool is smaller than the WordPress community, though it’s growing. Your code is yours and any web developer familiar with modern frontend tools can pick it up, but it’s still a transition.

No visual drag-and-drop page builder. You can’t rearrange page sections, move blocks around, or preview layout changes in real time the way you can with Squarespace. The structure of your pages is set by your developer. You control the content inside that structure, not the structure itself.

Which option is right for your practice?

Here’s the short version.

Choose Squarespace if:

• You want to manage your own site with no developer involved
• You need a professional site live quickly on a moderate budget
• Your practice is stable and you don’t plan major growth

Choose WordPress if:

• You publish content very frequently (multiple posts per week)
• You need advanced features like membership portals, course platforms, or provider directories
• You have ongoing developer support available for updates and maintenance

Choose a custom website if:

• Performance and SEO are top priorities for your practice
• You want to eliminate monthly platform fees long-term
• You’re planning to grow with more clinicians, locations, or services
• You want a site that doesn’t look like a template

For the complete rundown on all five major website platforms, read the full comparison guide.

If you’re still not sure which direction makes sense for your practice, I’m happy to talk it through. No pressure, no pitch. Book a Free Consultation and we’ll figure out what fits.