Coaching Websites: The DIY Beginner’s Guide for Coaches

Ever wonder how some smaller coaches have beautiful coaching websites that look like they spent a fortune? In this guide, I’m going to show you how to build one from scratch. 

I remember when we first decided to launch Lovely Impact. Cass and I were building these complicated coaching websites for 7-figure coaching clients. Their businesses had evolved to the point where they needed all the bells and whistles. 

The problem? All their fans would come to us wanting the same thing. When we told them the price, you could see the disappointment in their faces. We knew there had to be another way, that’s when we launched Lovely Impact.

In this no-fluff guide, I’m gonna cut all the noise and show you exactly how to start building the coaching website of your dreams. 

How are coaching websites different from regular websites?

Unlike other businesses, coaches have a unique set of services that are special to our industry. Instead of just one or two features, coaching websites need multiple features, including: 

1. Unique sales pages that sell visitors into monthly or year coaching programs and memberships. 
2. Booking pages so that visitors and clients can schedule coaching calls. 
3. Shop pages to sell coaching products like journals, books and workbooks. 
4. Podcast and media pages to showcase visual and audio content.
5. Video pages that feature masterclasses, trainings, and courses.
6. Login pages for clients to access coaching portals, purchased classes, memberships and more. 

Plus, the standard web pages that all other businesses need too.

For example, let’s say you are a weight loss coach and you have a podcast to help stay at home moms, you offer free discovery calls, you sell meal planning guides and recipe books, and you have a health and wellness course. 

Without a proper coaching website, you could be paying up to $1500 per month or more just for the software and tools to handle all those things. 

Now that you know why coaching websites are different, let’s get into building your own. 

How to build coaching websites.

Step One – Create A Cohesive Coaching Brand

Your first step to building a coaching website is to create a cohesive coaching brand. This part of the process is fun, exciting and inspiring because you get to choose your colors, fonts, logo, illustrations and more before you dive into the actual build of the website. 

Although you could hire a brand designer for coaches to do this for you, you could also do it yourself using a design app like Canva.  

A well-styled coaching brand should include: 

• Your Logo: Coaching logos should be instantly recognizable and distinctive, but not overwhelming.
• Your Color Palette: Brand colors should evoke emotions in your ideal clients and represent who you are as a coach.
• Brand Typography: These will be different from your coaching logo and used for headers, sub headers and accents.
• Brand Photography: Professionally shot brand photos or stock photos that bring your coaching brand to life and pairs well with photos and fonts.
• Brand Patterns: Put these on your website, inside ebooks, or on packaging if you’re selling a physical coaching product.
• Custom Illustrations & Icons: Illustrations and icons give your coaching brand some visual texture, interest, and personality.

Remember, If you want to stand out and build a gorgeous website, branding your coaching business is not just about colors and fonts. Consistency, depth and personality matter too!

Step Two – Write Your Website Copy

At this point you have a beautiful brand in place and you are feeling inspired! Now it’s time to write your website copy. 

But a warning though… this is the hardest part of creating a coaching website. So much so that we created a website copy guide just for coaches. Make sure you respect the time and energy it takes to do this right. No matter how pretty your website is, if your copy is horrible, it won’t convert your website visitors into coaching clients. 

First, you want to plan your website strategy. The purpose of your coaching website is to get people to take action. That means we need to guide people through your site, step by step, all the way to the final place we want them to land.

And that means we have to know what pages you’ll use on your site, and how people will move through them.

The best way to do this is to create a site map. The easiest way to keep track of your website strategy is to create a sitemap.

What’s a sitemap? A site map is a chart that you create to help you visually map out the journey visitors will take on your website.

Here’s an example:

Finally, you’ll want to write the copy for all your pages. 

Alright, it’s finally time to talk about your website content. Your copy is the most important piece of the website puzzle.

Yes, design and good imagery are super important and make people stick around longer and get a good vibe from you, but the copy is what tells people whether you can give them what they need.

That’s why it’s important to spend some energy writing your copy instead of throwing random words on the page and hoping it works. This isn’t spaghetti…you can’t throw it against the wall and hope it sticks.

Here are some tips to help you writing amazing copy for your coaching website: 

1. Focus on solving problems. People don’t care about your coaching methodology, they only care about how you can solve their problems.
2. Talk like your customers. Content on your website should reflect your customers’ voice across all pages, so tone and style are crucial. Your visitors need to feel like you understand them like no one else does. 
3. Write from your user’s point of view. When a visitor visits coaching websites, they may have different intentions. For example, they may intend to hire you immediately, compare you to other coaches, learn more about your offer, or to understand your coaching niche. Although it’s impossible to read your visitors mind, just put yourself in their shoes on every page. 

Still stuck? We have some awesome resources to help:

• 3 Things Every Coach Needs on Their Website
• 5 Places You Need Testimonials On Your Coaching Website
• What’s the most important page on my coaching website?
• Write Your Coaching Website About Page
• Website Copy Guide for Coaches

Step Three – Choose A Coaching Website Template

Okay, now it’s time for the fun part! You’ve got your copy, you’ve got your website plan, and you’ve got your copy. Now it’s time to choose a coaching website template. 

First, decide what coaching website builder you want to work with. There are so many out there (Wix, Squarespace, Showit, WordPress, etc.) and there are pros and cons to each. 

At Lovely Impact, we strongly recommend Showit for building coaching websites. With Showit, you can build and manage your website by dragging and dropping pieces and features without ever touching any code. Basically, no hiring a coder and you get a website you can be as creative with as you like.

Click play on the video below to see how easy it is to customize Showit.

Plus, the Showit blog is built on WordPress. 60 million blogs trust WordPress for its simplicity and speed. It is also search engine friendly, which means that it’s blessed by the Google gods. 

Next, you need to choose your coaching website template. You want to choose a website template that has plenty of page templates, fits your design style, and that’s made for coaches so there are no surprises. 

Lucky for you, that’s kind of our jam. We’ve got templates for just about every coach with a new template dropping every month. Our coaching websites include 16 page templates, and VIP support, plus a ton of goodies including our Website Building Checklist, Website Copywriting Guide, Website Imagery Guide, and our Showit Video Tutorial Library

Here are our top 3 best selling coaching websites: 

Plus we have many more. Choose the template you love, purchase it, and then get ready to build the coaching website of your dreams.

Step Four – Add Copy, Colors And Images to Coaching Websites

You’re almost there. We are sooo close to launching your new coaching website. Next, you need to add your branding, colors, images, and website copy to your new website. 

First, Create your website builder account account and install your new website template.

Second, Purchase your domain + setup your website. If you are using Showit, it takes a few days for them to get your domain hooked up and actually get your site live, and you don’t want to wait to do that until you’re done building. 

Third, invest in learning how to use your website editor. Building your website will be a challenge if you don’t understand how to use the website editor, so you’ll want to tackle that training right away. You want you to be able to dive into editing your site asap, so getting the basic education stuff out of the way today!

P.S. There are over 70 video tutorials in our template library that will help you learn. And they’re not long videos. They’re short and to the point. Because editing your coaching website should be easy.

Here’s a sneak peak:

Lastly, swap out all the images, colors, and fonts, and copy. Here’s here’s the best strategy to focus your energy: 

1. Start by adding your branding, color palette, and fonts, into your website builder and  then dive into building your header and footers.
2. Focus on the buying process first and work your way backwards. For example, if you are a 1-on-1 coach, that means that you want to start by building out your booking process first and work your way backwards.
3. Focus on your main pages last. Tackle your home page, about page, services, page etc. 

Of course, you can design the pages in any order you want! But, if you need help getting your website live, customizing it for your business and developing clarity around your brand, join our signature Website in a Week Challenge!

Step Six – Launch Your Coaching Website

This step is the biggest and the easiest. You only have to do 3 things!

First, publish your website and submit your website to Google. 

The Google bots typically need to find your coaching website before committing it to the Google index, but that can take a long time.

The simple act of registering your website with Google Analytics informs it of your existence and could speed up the process of “finding” you. The only thing you need is a Google Analytics account. 

From there, you’ll receive a code called a “tracking ID” formatted like this: UA-000000-01. As soon as you have your tracking ID, add it to the header of your coaching website.

Next, announce your website to everyone you know! Because it’s time, friend, to tell people about all the hard work you’ve done over the last week. Show it off!

Finally, Celebrate a job so well done. It takes commitment to launch a website the right way, and you’ve clearly done incredible work. You should be so proud.

Conclusion

Thanks to ‘Coaching Websites: The DIY Beginner’s Guide for Coaches’, you don’t need to Google a million things to figure out how to create your coaching website. You have everything you need to get started all in one place. 

As you saw in the guide, coaching websites are special, and choosing the right template can save you a lot of stress. Without a coaching website, your chances of getting clients organically and standing out in your industry online are almost zero. 

Before you start building your website, make sure to leave a quick comment to let me know what you think of ‘Coaching Websites: The DIY Beginner’s Guide for Coaches’.