Running and maintaining a coaching website is a huge facet of your coaching business - along with client meetings, coaching sessions, and marketing, it can add to your overall brand. Websites allow for complete personalization of who you are and what your business is about, and websites are completely customizable. 

Designing websites and customizing them to fit your needs may seem confusing. But if you’ve been using the same web templates for a while, you may want to change the visual look of your website. 

Go Beyond the Template By Making Your Own Design

The templates available on website hosts, like WordPress and Squarespace, are beautifully designed and provide a great look to your coaching business. But if you want to go beyond the template, consider making your own webpage designs. This can be done through changing the coding or starting from scratch. 

If you’re familiar with HTML coding, consider customizing your website. Go beyond the themes that are available to you through personalized HTML coding. 

If you don’t know how to write code but feel confident in playing around with personalized themes, you can find specialized templates that other web users have created online. Some are free so long as you credit the creator, and some come at a low cost. 

Everage, a Salesforce company, says creating your own personal coaching website look is important: 

“Website templates are a one-size-fits-all. For example, they may not be equipped and ready with all ecommerce functionalities. That means they may have some limitations which cannot be removed. Custom web design on the other hand won’t have such limitations. Custom web design allows you to choose what you want and how you like it.”

Set Up Automatic Updates and Back Up Your Website

Website hosts are constantly updating their software to make sure your coaching websites are running smoothly and without any major bugs. To make sure your website is regularly updated, you can turn on automatic updates through your website account settings. 

Automatic updates are a great way to maintain your coaching website without having to worry about any time-consuming work. Another tip is to backup your website by keeping a copy on your computer or a harddrive, or through online storage. A tried and true way is by exporting your website as an FTP file, and saving it onto your computer. Most website hosts also offer options to backup your website to online cloud storage like Google Drive. 

ThemeIsle provides this list on what to check and maintain at a regular schedule:

“[Conduct] a thorough audit of your site – going through each page if possible – and checking for issues such as:

Plugins or themes that need to be updated.

Missing and/or poor-quality images.

Incorrect and/or outdated user information.

Broken links (you can address this using a plugin).

Broken features and/or plugins.

Formatting and/or style issues.

Missing and/or out-of-date content."

Hire Professional Help from Web Designers

If you’ve tried to change your design up and nothing seems to be working for you, or you can’t come up with new designs, consider hiring professional help from a web design company. Their top skill is in web design and coding, and they can work with you to figure out what layouts and designs will work best with your branding. 

They can customize your website and add graphics and animation you may have not thought of. An added bonus is that if you have a logo for your business, they can incorporate that into the design. 

Web design company X Design explains why opting for professional help can make your website a stand-out: 

“Choosing a company that specializes in web design offers a control that is lost with pre-made templates. With experts, there is an ability to understand the client’s vision and strategize as a team to bring those ideas to life. That process is simply impossible with a predetermined theme. When someone asks why you should use a web design agency instead of a website builder, the answer is simple: You get what you pay for.”

If you’re interested in learning about more tips from us, sign up for a plan on our website and see what works for you.