Where families decide
Most families find an ABA clinic through a diagnostician, a Google search, or another parent, and nearly all of them check your website before they pick up the phone. The site's job is narrow: answer the questions that stop a parent from calling, and make the next step obvious.
We cover the parent side in detail in what parents look for on an ABA website. This page is the owner side: what to build, what to fix first, and what to measure.
What does an ABA clinic website actually need to do?
Three jobs, in this order. If the site does these well, design polish is a bonus. If it doesn't, no amount of polish saves it.
- Confirm you serve this child. Ages, settings (center-based, in-home, school, telehealth parent training), and the area you cover, stated plainly on the first screen.
- Confirm the family can afford it. Which insurance plans you accept, whether you handle authorization, and what happens if their plan isn't on the list.
- Make starting easy. One clear intake path, repeated on every page, with a phone number that dials on tap.
What should be on the site before anything else?
Start with the pages a family needs to say yes: a home page that answers the three jobs above, one page per service setting you offer, an insurance page, a getting-started page that walks through intake step by step, and a team page with real BCBA bios and credentials.
Add a careers page early. It does double duty as a recruiting tool, and parents read it too, because staff stability is a quality signal. Our guide to hiring and keeping RBTs covers what that page should show.
Only build location pages for places where you actually have a staffed clinic. Pages for towns you don't serve read as filler to parents and to Google.
How should the intake form work?
Keep the first step short: parent name, phone, email, child's age, insurance, zip code, and how they heard about you. That is enough to call back and check fit.
Don't collect diagnosis details, evaluations, or records through a plain website form. Gather protected health information later, through your practice management system or a form tool that signs a business associate agreement (BAA) with you.
Route every submission to a named person, not a shared inbox nobody owns, and call back the same business day. Families usually contact several clinics at once, and the first one to call back often wins the intake.
What technical basics cost you families?
- Mobile first. Most parents research on their phone, often in a waiting room. Check every page on a phone before you check it on a laptop.
- Speed. Large uncompressed photos are the usual culprit. A page that takes several seconds to load loses people before they read a word.
- Accessibility. Readable contrast, real text instead of text baked into images, alt text on photos, and forms that work with a keyboard. Some of your parents have disabilities too.
- Tracking pixels. In 2022 HHS warned that advertising and analytics pixels on healthcare sites can disclose protected health information. A federal court struck down part of that guidance in 2024, but the risk didn't go away. Keep ad pixels off intake and appointment pages unless your counsel has signed off.
Should you build it yourself or hire someone?
A site builder is fine for launching a single location, as long as you can follow the basics above. Bring in help when intake volume starts to matter, when you open a second location, or when you notice you're avoiding updates because the site is hard to change.
Whoever builds it, own the accounts in the clinic's name: the domain, the hosting or builder login, and analytics. Clinics lose their website surprisingly often because a former vendor or employee held the only login.
How do you know the website is working?
Track three numbers monthly: inquiries from the site, the share of inquiries that become intakes, and where those families came from. Ask "how did you hear about us?" on every intake call, because form analytics miss phone calls.
If plenty of people visit but few inquire, fix the content and the intake path. If few people visit at all, the problem is upstream, in local search or SEO and AI visibility.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a separate page for each service?
Yes, if you offer genuinely different settings like center-based and in-home ABA. Families search for the setting they want, and one page per setting lets you answer the questions specific to it, like service area for in-home or hours for center-based.
Can I put client photos or stories on my website?
Only with written HIPAA authorization from the parent or guardian, and only after reading the BACB Ethics Code standards on testimonials and public statements. Photos of your team and your space are the safer default.
How often should I update the site?
Whenever your insurance list, locations, services, or waitlist status changes. Outdated insurance or waitlist information costs you calls, and families who call about a plan you dropped rarely trust the rest of the site.
Should my website say we have a waitlist?
Yes, honestly and with a rough timeline if you can give one. Families would rather join a known waitlist than find out on the phone, and some will wait for a clinic they've already chosen.