Grow Therapy Website
As Grow Therapy scales access to mental healthcare, we act as their digital partner, building systems that are flexible for marketers, stable under traffic, and respectful of privacy boundaries.
Grow Therapy: “A Better Way to Care”
As a growing company in an increasingly visible sector, Grow Therapy is helping to change the face of mental healthcare. With nearly 20,000 active providers in its network, Grow Therapy supports both in-person and virtual appointment scheduling and accepts most major insurance plans. Their care model spans everything from assessments to outpatient medication management, delivered at scale.
Grow Therapy’s mission is to make therapy easy to understand and truly accessible, so fewer people encounter barriers when they need care. Their extensive network of highly qualified providers, accessed via an intuitive and user-friendly online platform, makes that support available almost anywhere in the US.
Highlights & key features
Project takeover
Grow Therapy’s primary point of contact came to us for help managing a relatively new website. A previous agency built the site using a reliable, secure headless WordPress content management system (CMS) that aligned with the company’s branding and design system. While this implementation looked great and was technically sound, the experience of maintaining and updating the website wasn’t ideal for Grow Therapy’s marketing team.
TL;DR: We took over a reliable, high-performing marketing site, with the intention of reworking the CMS so that Grow Therapy’s marketing team could operate at the speed and flexibility they needed.
WordPress “Recapitation”
Given Grow Therapy’s service level and privacy requirements as a healthcare business, the original headless WordPress approach was a sensible way to maximize uptime and reduce vulnerabilities. The site was built with Astro and deployed through a static-site-generated (SSG) pipeline hosted on Vercel. But it wasn’t designed for editorial flexibility or day-to-day ease of use, so even minor edits triggered a rebuild and redeploy. And for a tech-savvy marketing team trying to move quickly, that workflow simply didn’t work.
After some deliberation, Grow Therapy decided to revert to a traditional (non-headless) WordPress CMS, hosted on Kinsta, with our help.
Choosing a WordPress Page Builder
Once Grow Therapy decided to both store and render via WordPress, they needed a page builder. We knew from the beginning that any solution would have to match the way their marketing team actually works: move fast, publish without interruptions, and stay consistent with their design system. At the same time, we couldn’t abandon the fundamentals (performance, accessibility, or long-term stability, to name a few).
To help decide on a page builder, we built a checklist of about 20 criteria, balancing Grow Therapy’s needs with what we knew would hold up from a development standpoint. Clean, semantic HTML was a priority for a healthcare site where structure and accessibility are non-negotiable. Using these criteria, we spent about a month testing and comparing different WordPress page builders, from Gutenberg to Divi to Elementor and back again, to determine the best available fit.
Why we chose Bricks Builder
We ultimately chose Bricks Builder for two main reasons:
- It outputs clean, lightweight HTML without the bloat of older visual builders, while emphasizing performance and SEO.
- And most importantly, it provides Grow Therapy’s marketing team with the CMS experience they need, enabling them to make updates, create landing pages, and run promotions without waiting on developers.
That said, the shift came with a trade-off. Moving away from an SSG rebuild pipeline means giving up some of the built-in safety that guaranteed uptime. But with Bricks, we were able to add guardrails through structured components and permissions, including the Admin Columns Pro plugin, while still providing the speed and flexibility the Grow Therapy team needed.
Protecting Privacy & Data
Our primary role at Grow Therapy is to support the marketing website, while their internal engineering team owns the patient and provider platform. In a HIPAA-regulated environment, that boundary is intentional: we stay on the public-facing side, and anything involving protected health information (PHI) or care workflows lives entirely under Grow Therapy’s purview on the platform side. This distinction matters, especially in healthcare, where privacy and trust are vital.
As such, the marketing site is intentionally scoped to avoid PHI or platform-level data, focusing instead on informing and guiding people into the platform. We do not touch appointment data, session details, provider records, insurance information, or any other part of someone’s care: In other words, we support the front door but stay out of the exam room itself.
That same threshold shapes how we would show up in a platform outage. If Grow Therapy ever went down, we wouldn’t step into platform engineering; instead, we would support their team by quickly publishing website updates so users and patients know what to expect.
Team Augmentation
Although Grow Therapy employs a full web team, most of its development resources are allocated to the Grow Therapy platform, a complex, highly regulated mental healthcare product that falls under multiple regulatory bodies.
Since the website is separate from the platform, we help the Grow Therapy team make changes without interfering with the platform or diverting development resources. During the transition from headless to traditional WordPress, we maintained both instances in parallel to guarantee a seamless switch. And as part of our ongoing partnership and team augmentation, we have an SLA in place to provide around-the-clock website support. Our flexibility and commitment enable their teams to stay nimble and focused on their platform mission.
Project management
One of the less visible but critical aspects of team augmentation is a shared project management approach. Thanks to our expert PM team, we’re able to provide client-tailored processes that work with them instead of slowing them down. A fast-moving, technical client like Grow Therapy has very distinct needs, so we ultimately integrated them directly into our project management environment (ClickUp) for better visibility and a shared source of truth.
During the migration process, we used it to plan the scope, track progress, and share status updates with Grow Therapy’s many stakeholders and contributors in real time. With everyone working from the same timeline and task board, we were able to move and coordinate efficiently.
Real-time collaboration & communication
Although ClickUp is excellent for tracking and asynchronous communication, it’s less efficient for direct, in-the-moment communication. When the Grow Therapy launch deadline was shortened from a three-month effort to about one month, we turned to Slack for fast turnarounds, direct feedback, and day-to-day decision-making.
The same Slack-first approach also supports our ongoing email marketing work, where tight turnarounds and close coordination between our team and Grow Therapy’s marketers are essential.
Lead tracking & integrations
From day one, the website needed to support a wide set of tools used across Grow Therapy’s teams. Integrations range from Google Analytics (GA), Google Tag Manager (GTM), Osano, Segment (which loads FullStory), and FullStory to VWO for A/B testing, Datadog, Trustpilot, and Freshpaint (which also loads a GA script).
Getting all of those scripts to work together meant deciphering many dependencies and edge cases, requiring deep technical know-how and attention to detail to pull off. Although metrics usually dip after launch while tools recalibrate and baselines reset, we still verified that every script loaded in the right order, fired correctly, and captured data as expected, so Grow Therapy’s team had numbers they could count on.
Version control
Another challenge we overcame after moving to Bricks Builder was tracking changes over time in a way that felt as dependable as a traditional code workflow. With Bricks, updates happen inside the builder and are stored in WordPress, so you don’t get the same clear revision trail you’d expect from a theme tracked in GitHub.
After trying a few different things, we settled on an environment-gated workflow on Kinsta. We enforced a single “authoritative” environment for creating or modifying Bricks content. The other environments are now pull-only, a process that keeps IDs consistent, reduces merge-style conflicts, and provides a predictable promotion path from authoring to release, even when multiple contributors make changes simultaneously. We also added the Revision Press Pro plugin to support an internal approval/revision workflow for updates.
Caching & traffic scaling
Right after launch, we ran into a scaling issue that we couldn’t fully predict from staging. Grow Therapy’s social campaigns drove more traffic than the host’s (Kinsta) initial assumptions, with each request forcing a full, uncached server-side render. The result was an elevated server load and degraded performance under burst promo traffic.
The root cause was more architectural than we first realized. The marketing site sits behind the same reverse-proxy layer as the Grow Therapy platform, sharing a single apex domain. Since the web app and marketing site share a domain but not infrastructure, requests are directed by CloudFront and the reverse proxy to either the platform origin or the Kinsta IP, depending on the URL.
That bifurcated, path-based routing introduced cache fragmentation, especially around “create” query parameters. Our fix was to normalize caching so pages were cached identically with or without those parameters. Serving cached responses instead of re-rendering on every hit removed the origin bottleneck and stabilized the site during high-traffic pushes, allowing Grow Therapy’s marketing team to continue promos uninterrupted.
Performance insights & iteration
After the Bricks cutover, we kept a close eye on site speed and focused on quick, high-impact improvements. Using Perfmatters, a WordPress plugin designed to optimize performance, we saw an immediate boost, reducing the main mobile load delay by approximately 70%.
Next, we’re working to reduce the files that slow down the first screen people see, remove excess icon and design weight, standardize how graphic assets load to avoid page choppiness, and continue streamlining third-party tracking so everything loads in a cleaner, faster order.
These improvements help us preserve Bricks Builder’s editorial speed while maintaining the flexible, reliable CMS experience Grow Therapy needs. The site has always performed well, but as technology partners, our job is to iterate continually, re-evaluate what’s best available, and proactively deliver enhancements as the site and business evolve.
Email marketing support
In addition to the website, we provide ongoing support for Grow Therapy’s email marketing objectives, from content creation to email styling and development.
Content creation
We created polished, friendly written content that helps Grow Therapy connect with current and potential patients via email. Our team is uniquely qualified for this work, as one of our writers, a registered nurse, was able to blend real clinical expertise with Grow Therapy’s welcoming, professional, and nonjudgmental brand voice.
Design, development, & testing
With a focus on keeping emails aligned with Grow Therapy’s evolving brand presence, we incorporate design updates on a regular cadence in response to performance and direction needs from their team.
On the development side, emails are built with Maizzle, which allows us to work directly in HTML to preserve Grow Therapy’s styling and tracking requirements. Using Maizzle and Liquid, Shopify’s templating language for injecting personalized fields before delivery, we can expedite email templates for client review and approval.
Because email rendering varies widely across clients, we subject every build to Email on Acid testing and extensive hands-on device checks to catch styling and layout issues early. Our design and development team works in tight coordination with Grow Therapy’s marketing team to update quickly, troubleshoot edge cases, and maintain trust through consistent delivery.
Impact
- Grow Therapy can now publish landing pages independently as needed ✅
- Reduced mobile LCP render delay by about 70%
- Maintained privacy-first boundary between the HIPAA-compliant platform and the marketing site
- Built and maintained email templates through rebrand with a consistent QA pipeline