İklim Akçağlayan

Context

İklim Akçağlayan is a psychotherapist working in cognitive behavioural therapy, seeing clients face to face in Nilüfer, Bursa, and online across Türkiye. The site has one job: to help someone looking for therapy for the first time feel confident enough to book a first session.

The site launched in 2024. The first version was a ready-made theme adapted onto the PHP content management platform we reuse across projects. In 2026 I first ran a thorough SEO and performance pass, then redesigned the interface from the ground up.

Approach

• Trust comes before the booking. Just below the first screen sit the METU psychology degree, 197 hours of certified training, the practice location and Google reviews, backed by a wall of 10 certificates and photos of the office.
• Three ways to book. Online booking, phone and a WhatsApp link with a ready-made message are on every page; on mobile they sit in a fixed bar at the bottom of the screen.
• Separate pages for local search. Four landing pages for people searching for a psychologist in Bursa, in Nilüfer, on FSM Bulvarı, or online.
• Design: the Bursa tile panel. Flat fields of cobalt, turquoise and İznik red taken from the tiles of the Green Mosque, sealed by fine dark lines, with no shadows or rounded corners. There are no carousels or scroll animations, so an anxious visitor has nothing extra to process.

Highlights

• Admin panel: Blog, therapy and condition pages, FAQ, interface copy, incoming messages, contact details and image slots. Uploaded images are converted to WebP and cropped to each slot's size.
• Google reviews: Pulled from the Places API and cached for 6 hours; reviewer names are masked and profile photos are not shown.
• Content: 6 therapy pages and 8 condition pages, an FAQ and a blog; 28 URLs in the sitemap.
• Contact form: CSRF-protected and sent without a reload; each enquiry is recorded in GA4 as a lead event.

Technical foundation

• Core: PHP and MySQL, with controllers and views kept apart, Blade templates and a query cache.
• SEO: Structured data per page type (Psychologist, MedicalTherapy, FAQPage, Article, ProfilePage and BreadcrumbList), plus a dynamic sitemap with real modification dates, an image sitemap and llms.txt.
• Performance: WebP images with explicit dimensions; the portrait loads with high priority and off-screen images load lazily. A 591 KB icon stylesheet and a 3.2 MB icon font were replaced with a 54-icon subset of the icons the site actually uses.
• Security headers: HSTS, X-Frame-Options, nosniff, Referrer-Policy and Permissions-Policy.
• Tooling: A Playwright script that measures Core Web Vitals in the lab, and a script that builds the OpenGraph image.

Outcome

Before the August 2026 SEO audit, page titles ran to 225–310 characters; across the 14 pages checked today they sit between 41 and 63, each page with a single H1. The September 2026 redesign then gave the site its current form, with trust signals and the ways to book up front on every screen.