Website design for life coaches, and what actually separates the good ones

If you're about to pay somebody to design your coaching website, read this first. It'll save you spending the money on the wrong half of the job.

We scored 10,954 live coaching websites out of 10, on ten things a stranger needs from a homepage. In this article I'm showing you which of those ten actually separate a site that works from one that doesn't.

Here's the bit that surprised me. Technical health, which covers whether the site loads, works on a phone and is secure, averaged 9 out of 10 across the whole market.

Nearly every coaching website is well built. The good ones score 9.91 on it. The poor ones score 8.60.

So a designer can hand you something faster, prettier and better built than what you've got, and it'll score about the same as the site you replaced.

What the numbers actually separate on

We split the 10,954 into tiers. 646 came out strong or decent, 6,820 came out poor. Then we looked at what the two groups score differently on.

Look at the two ends of that table.

The biggest gap is whether a stranger can tell what you do in five seconds. The smallest is whether there's a button to click, because everybody has a button.

Technical health is second from bottom. That's the thing you'd be paying a designer for.

So what do you actually need on the page?

Four things, in this order.

Who it's for and what you fix, in the first thing anybody reads. Good sites average 9.25 on the five-second read. Poor ones average 2.92. Nothing else on this list comes close to that gap.

If you're not sure who yours is for yet, that's a niche question rather than a website one.

A price, or something like one. 65% of the good sites show one. 7.3% of the poor ones do. I know why coaches hide it. A woman who can't tell whether you're £60 or £600 assumes the worst and closes the tab, and you never hear from her.

Proof a stranger could check. 89.5% of the good sites have some. 18.5% of the poor ones do. Across the whole market two thirds of coaching websites show none at all.

Something of you on the page. 90.7% of good sites tell a story. A third of the market has nothing human on it anywhere.

Those four have an order, and the order matters more than the list.

Should I not bother with a designer then?

Bother. A site that looks like it was built in 2011 costs you trust before anybody reads a word, and you can't fix that with copy.

Just don't expect the design to do the work of the words. The evidence says both groups are built fine, so if your enquiries are thin, the build is the least likely culprit.

Is a 1.3 point gap on technical health nothing? No, it's real, it's just small next to 6.33. Spend accordingly.

What this list won't tell you

It's ten criteria on one page, the homepage, and nothing else. Your about page, your booking flow and what happens in a first call are all outside it.

Is the sample fair? It's 10,954 live sites from a list of 12,294. Of the 1,340 missing, 1,156 wouldn't load at all and 184 loaded with nothing readable on them. We left those out rather than scoring them zero and flattering the average.

You can read the full scorecard and where every mark goes, see how health and nutrition coaches score against everybody else, or have your own homepage read the way a stranger reads it and find out which of the four you're missing.

Questions coaches ask about this

Read next

• What to put on a coaching homepage, in the order it should appear
• A niche and an audience are not the same thing
• The most profitable coaching niches, and why profitable is the wrong question