The purpose of your coaching website is to act as your digital storefront. A shingle for where you call your, “home” on the internet. Consider you walk into a store (in real life) and you’re bombarded with signs, customer service agents getting in your way and a chaotic environment leaving you puzzled. Not helpful for the customer, right? Your digital storefront has to take the same factors into consideration.
Whether you’re launching a health coaching website, business coaching website or anything in between, here are seven key takeaways from the best coaching websites on the internet. If you’re working with a web design firm or building your own website (e.g. Wix or WordPress) then you can use this outline as a guiding format.
1. Simple formatting & headers are best
Arguably the most important part of building your website is to immediately introduce your audience to who you are and what you do. Ask yourself, “what does my audience want to know about my online coaching?”
What does it mean to be simple?
The simplest websites can have complexity under the hood but create an easy-to-understand format for consuming your content.
- Menus are clear and organized in the top navigation
- Footers & site maps allow for easy hierarchy
- Page design relies on single or double-column formatting
Here are a few great coaching website examples of simple & effective websites for coaches:
These examples of leadership and business coaching websites have an elegant simplicity and immediately tell a story within a matter of seconds!
2. Stick to a consistent brand and color scheme
If your website is hard to look at, it’s likely that your audience isn’t going to stick around much. According to HubSpot, the optimal bounce rate is between 26% and 40% with some times of websites creeping as high as 70%. That means you’re going to lose almost half of the traffic on your website no matter what. Ultimately, if your website feels like a rainbow was tossed in a blender, you’re not helping your case :)
So, how do you stay consistent with your brand within your coaching website?
Start by picking your primary and secondary colors. These colors should complement your brand identity and play nicely with each other. The color scheme should reflect the way your audience should perceive your brand. If you’re a business coach, don’t prioritize hot pink and lime green as your primary and secondary colors.
Once you have a color defined, consider how the color and font collectively work together. Most of the great coaching websites combine
Lean into the way that colors elicit feelings and apply the right feelings to your coaching practice. Calm recently shared The Feelings Wheel created by Dr. Gloria Wilcox – a tool for easily connecting color to emotion. Consider your clientele and prioritize the right colors against the emotional connection they should have with your brand.
3. Use a hub & spoke model
Because your website serves one purpose, everything on your site should be targeted at that purpose. The hub and spoke model isn’t novel to coaching websites. It’s used across all sorts of industries and verticals within marketing and sales.
Architecturally, your website will model a bike wheel. Your primary objective is to drive traffic to convert into a lead in your sales funnel. How you convert that traffic can change depending on the right format for your business; discovery calls, intake forms, or even downloadable lead magnets, but in building your funnel, each call to action should point to a similar conversion vehicle.
Visually with a hub and spoke model, you can see that each of the different topics or topic bubbles will point all toward the core. And, your core could be any form of lead conversion tactic.
4. Concisely tell your story
The best coaching websites don’t rely on some crazy functionality or any fancy website features or integrations. They’re incredible stories.
Assume that you have less than 30 seconds to tell your story to your audience. You must be concise, and intentional to deliver your message.
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5. Specify who you’re for and who you’re not for
Recently, we asked our community if it’s better to start niche or go broad. The consensus among our coaches
When building the positioning within your coaching website, be specific! Use statements that describe exactly who you serve and why you’re the best fit to serve those kinds of customers. Your positioning statement should exist as primary messaging within your website and
Brand & business coach, Hannah Waen:
“I help creative-minded entrepreneurs develop strategies that increase their impact, improve their lives, and help them achieve their life's purpose. I call this finding your brand integrity.”
Father & Divorce coach, Lukas Weichselbaum:
“I work with fathers after divorce or breakup to reclaim their power and step into a new life.”
Mindset & Empowerment coach, Melissa Ensink:
“I am a Mindset and Wellbeing Coach for high-performers who are ready to their well-being, step into the next level version of themselves”
“I work with adults who have (diagnosed or suspected) ADHD, who are struggling, not living up to their potential, who feel overwhelmed with the big stuff or the little stuff, and who don't just want to "survive" but want to THRIVE.”
These are real statements from real coaches & immediately, you know who these coaches serve and what these coaches do!
6. Use social proof, don’t overuse it though
Leveraging social proof can be one of the most valuable tools to drive conversion. The best coaching websites use social proof to effectively convert traffic into discovery calls. However, there’s absolutely a point of diminishing returns when pointing to social proof is overused.
It’s common for coaches to ask, “how many testimonials do I need on my website?” but rather than asking about the number of testimonials, ask yourself, “what does a testimonial need to include to be valuable?”
The best testimonials hit on three key elements of the message:
- The clients pre-coaching services state for context
- The description of the service that the client went through
- The outcome of your working relationship with the client
When building testimonials and leveraging social proof in your marketing efforts, consider using different formats. Images, text, video, podcast interviews and even using a downloadable case study (maybe as a lead magnet!) are all fantastic forms of communication and information delivery.
When it comes down to it, consider the quality of the testimonial rather than the quantity that you have. This is absolutely a case in website design where quality beats quantity almost every time.
7. Clearly describe your coaching services
To round out your website audit, ensure that you’re clearly outlining the services you intend to sell. Each service offering should include:
- A description of the program; is it a retainer, is a package, etc...
- The payment model, payment terms, and payment option(s) and outline the pricing for your services.
If you allow a client to purchase your services directly via your website, the path to enrolling in the service must also be clear! Make your call to action for each service via a button or link extremely obvious too. But, once you have the format for one service, use that as a template for all other services on your site.
Explore these coaching sites
Here’s a list of a few of our favorite coaching websites:
- Career coach: Yiorgos Boudouris
- Life coach: Phil Edwards
- Fitness coach: Camille Charbonneau
- Leadership coach: TD Smyers
- Wellness coach: Melissa Ensink
- Executive coach: Russel Jackson
As you decide on how to implement these takeaways, consider your potential clients first and foremost, they’re the priority. Considering how potential clients ingest your home page and other content on your site will make it easier to tell your story and create a successful coaching business website.
When you get rolling, consider a few more free resources you can use to build your coaching program. These work well within your business and coaching clients:
At Practice, we power all of the tools you need to capture leads, coordinate schedules and manage your client relationships! You can try Practice out free for 7-days.
