3 things to know from this article
- Coaching websites average 9.03 out of 10 on being well built. Good ones and poor ones differ by 1.3 points.
- On whether a stranger can tell what you do, the same two groups differ by 6.33 points.
- Proof averages 1.51 out of 10 across the market, and 66.5% show none at all.
If you're about to spend on a logo, a palette and a brand voice document, this is the number to see first.
We scored 10,954 live coaching websites out of 10 on ten things a stranger needs. Technical health, which covers whether the site loads, works on a phone and is secure, averages 9.03 across the entire market. Proof averages 1.51. It's the same split the counting finds everywhere else in coaching marketing.
Nearly every coaching website is well made. Almost none of them are believable.
Branding isn't useless. It's just the part of the job the market has already done.
What does branding actually change on the page?
Almost nothing the scoring can see, and the scoring is looking at what a stranger sees.
We split the 10,954 into tiers: 646 strong or decent, 6,820 poor. Then we looked at what the two groups differ on.
| What we scored | Good sites | Poor sites | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Five-second read | 9.25 | 2.92 | 6.33 |
| Pricing shown | 6.50 | 0.73 | 5.77 |
| Being specific | 8.26 | 3.23 | 5.03 |
| Proof | 4.56 | 0.78 | 3.78 |
| Story | 4.70 | 1.86 | 2.83 |
| Technical health | 9.91 | 8.60 | 1.30 |
| Clear next step | 5.90 | 5.39 | 0.51 |
Technical health is second from bottom. That's the row closest to what a designer or a brand studio delivers, and it separates the best coaching sites from the worst by 1.3 points out of 10.
The top row is a sentence. It separates them by 6.33.
Then why does a bad-looking site feel so obviously wrong?
Because it does cost you, just not where you'd spend to fix it.
A site that looks like 2011 loses trust before a word is read, and you can't write your way out of that. That's real. It's also why the market average is 9.03: coaches already fixed it, because templates got good and the problem was visible.
The trouble is that visible problems get fixed and invisible ones don't. Nobody looks at their own homepage and sees the missing proof, because they already know they're any good.
What is worth doing that looks like branding?
Two things, and both are words rather than design.
Your own face and your own story on the page. A third of coaching websites have nothing human on them anywhere. 90.7% of the sites that score well tell a story and 55.7% of the poor ones do. That reads as brand and behaves as proof.
Consistency of the sentence, not the palette. The line about who you help has to be the same on the homepage, the LinkedIn headline and your bio. It usually isn't: coaching websites average 4.49 out of 10 on clarity and coaching LinkedIn headlines average 2.56, which means the two are often saying different things about the same person.
So when should I hire a designer?
After the sentence exists, and then genuinely do it.
A designer can give the right words more weight, and can stop an old-looking site costing you trust. What they can't do is work out who you help, and if you hand them a brief that describes you rather than your buyer, they'll typeset that beautifully.
The order is in the marketing plan, and what belongs on the page is here.
What this doesn't measure
Ten criteria on one page, the homepage, scored by a program reading text. It can see whether a site is secure and fast. It can't see whether a palette is any good.
So this isn't evidence that design counts for nothing. It's evidence that design isn't what separates the coaching sites that work from the ones that don't, because both groups are designed to nearly the same standard.
Is 1.3 points nothing? No, it's real and it's small next to 6.33. Spend in that proportion.
Questions coaches ask about this
Does branding help a coaching business?
Less than the sentence at the top of the page. Technical health averages 9.03 out of 10 across 10,954 coaching websites and separates good sites from poor ones by 1.3 points. Clarity about who it's for separates them by 6.33.
What should a coaching brand include?
A face, a story and one sentence that stays the same everywhere you appear. A third of coaching websites have nothing human on them, and 90.7% of the ones that score well tell a story.
How much should a coach spend on branding?
Whatever you spend, spend the first hour on the sentence. The market already averages 9 out of 10 on the build, so that's the half of the job you'd be buying twice.
Do I need a logo to start coaching?
No. 66.5% of coaching websites show no proof at all, and that costs them far more than a plain logo ever would.
The figures here come from our own corpus of 10,954 scored coaching websites and 918 mapped coaching markets. How we built and scored it.